Biography

Lib Spry has worked in theatre for over fifty years as a director, writer, producer, educator, performer, popular theatre work, dramaturg, and translator. She chooses to work in an equal mix of professional theatre, community arts and as a teacher as she believes they are mutually inclusive. She is a specialist in non-traditional theatre forms: popular theatre, community arts, site-specific theatre, theatre for young audiences, clown, bouffon, commedia dell’ arte, and other forms of physical theatre. She is a recognized teacher of Theatre of the Oppressed and trained with clown master Philippe Gaulier. She has founded and run three theatre companies: Theatre Agile (2011- present), Passionate Balance (1989-96) for which she wrote twenty plus Forum Theatre plays, and with playwright Shirley Barrie co-founded the award-winning Straight Stitching Productions (1986-96). She has worked with Odyssey Theatre as the writer and/or translator on Turandot, The Miser, The Raven, and Bungsu and the Big Snake and as an instructor.

 

Selected work includes: dramaturg for Teesri Duniya’s Fireworks Playwrighting Unit; director of the Theatre Kingston production of Daniel David Moses’ Almighty Voice and His Wife and of the world premiere of the same play at GCTC in 1991; director and dramaturg of Ambigüité with Ottawa artist Guy Marsan; director of Anusree Roy’s Letters to My Grandma for Teesri Duniya Theatre; writing and performing her solo show Trance For Matron – a one-woman show for old woman, objects, memories, desires, anger and walker - at the Montreal Fringe; she devised and directed a vaudeville entitled We Are Old! We are Wonderful! as artist-in-residence with Ressources Ethnoculturelles Contre l’Abus envers les Aîné(e)s, Respecting Elders Communities against Abuse (RECAA), an organization for seniors dedicated to using theatre to educate communities to recognize the mistreatment and abuse of seniors; director of Teesri Duniya’s production of Where the Blood Mixes by Kevin Loring; director and dramaturg of Luna Allison’s prize-winning Falling Open.

 

She has taught theatre as an adjunct professor at Concordia University, McGill, Queens, and the University of Ottawa, as well as working as an artist-in-residence at Concordia and the University of Ottawa. She has just completed a research-creation PhD in Cultural Studies at Queens University entitled Unsettling Settlers’ Colonial Privilege Through Performance: Movement, Sound, Participation, Play and Laughter. Using her performance skills and experience she built and tested a life-sized board game to confront the truths about the invisible structures of power that support Canadian settler colonists’ entitlement to mastery. She is presently a Horizons post doctoral fellow in Studio Arts at Concordia University under the guidance of Nadia Myre, Algonquin visual artist and Canada Chair in Indigenous Arts Practice (https://www.nadiamyre.net), working with potatoCakes_digital (https://www.potatocakesdigital.ca/) on an live online version of the game.