We take a next step forward in the creation of Isolation Suite with a late-October workshop at Progress Lab. This one focuses on the musical aspects of the show and we invite you to have a look and listen to an excerpt at Sawdust Collector on Nov. 19. Sawdust Collector's weekly series showcases exciting experimental work – in a wide variety of forms – from around Vancouver. It's always a great night out!

Playwright/songwriter Tim Carlson and drummer/vocalist Christie Watson began playing together in June 2020 under the name Cold Calculi, writing and performing instinct-driven tunes for both Isolation Suite as well as future gigs and recording. Irregardless is part of a musical suite embedded in the show, a poetic exploration of social isolation playing the notes between sombre hush, indie irony and cathartic noise.

Conspiracy aims to premiere Isolation Suite in spring 2021 in co-production with Rumble Theatre, where Christie also serves as managing producer. And, to make it cozier still, Conspiracy will be sharing office space with Rumble as of November 1.

The Sawdust Collector date is the first in a series of excerpts leading to full public in-progress performances of Isolation Suite at PL 1422 next June, Toronto in August, presentation in Rumble Theatre’s Tremors event in fall 2020, and then premiere in spring 2021.

NOV. 19, 2019
Sawdust Collector
Gold Saucer Studio in The Dominion Building
#211 - 207 W. Hastings, Vancouver

Stray: Memoir of a Runaway
Reading and Performance
June 6, 2019 @ 10PM in The Cultch Founder’s Lounge

While in the process of writing her acclaimed book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway (Little A, 2018), Tanya Marquardt also collaborated with musician Tim Carlson and director Mallory Catlett to create a punk version, which has since toured to New York, Toronto and Vancouver. 

Come to The Cultch bar, where you’ll get a taste of both works in this MNTF event with Tanya reading excerpts from the memoir as well as performing a few songs from the show with Tim on guitar. Songs and stories will reference notable NY artists like Patti Smith and David Wojnarowitz, and begin on the day Tanya ran away to careen you through her first attraction to a girl and witnessing her self-cutting, being in a BDSM bar as an underage kid, and, how art sustained her throughout. 

Frank Theatre AD Fay Nass will lead a post-show Q&A with Tanya, Tim and Mallory, as well as Pi Theatre's Richard Wolfe, who programmed Theatre Conspiracy's Stray in the Pi Provocateurs series, running June 13-15. Stay on after the reading, where Tanya will sign books and you can meet all the artists involved.

PRAISE 

Best Queer History & Bios Pick of 2018, The Advocate:
Marquardt’s "compelling voice could become a path of fulfillment and escape. Stray is the story of how one young woman has to embrace her own vulnerabilities and heal the wounds of the past as she forges ahead into adulthood.”

Theatre is Easy, Adrienne Urbanski, New York:
“This compelling combination of memoir and music creates a truly one-of-a-kind theatrical experience...A work of dazzling ingenuity and raw self expression that hasn’t been edited and refined and dulled...Marquardt’s genuine passion for her art, and her admiration for the creativity of others, comes across strongly.” 

Stray was created on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Watuth), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples (Vancouver, BC), and on the Lenape island of Manhahtaan (Mannahatta) in Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland (Manhattan, New York).