Chelsea Dickie
On May 22nd, 2025 the Theatre Nova Scotia Board of Directors announced that Chelsea Dickie would succeed Mark Ferraro-Hauck as Executive Director of the organization. Once she returned from Matchstick Theatre’s production of Leaving Home at the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto the two of us had the opportunity to sit down and chat about her new role at the TNS office on the Halifax waterfront.
Theatre Nova Scotia (TNS) is a provincial organization that serves both individual theatre artists who join as members, and both professional and community theatres, who also join as members. They offer programs and services that help support both the sustainability and the growth of theatre arts in the province.
Chelsea Dickie grew up in South Maitland, a small town in the middle of the woods near Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, which is where, she notes, all the river rafting happens on the Bay of Fundy. She went to Hants North Rural High School in Kennetcook where there were limited opportunities to learn about theatre and to experience it first hand. “Our drama teacher was also the wood shop teacher,” she says; “she’s a very multi-talented woman, but she had a lot of hats and not a ton of time, so I ended up muscling my way into writing plays, and directing, and leading our drama club in a way that felt really [like] ‘we have to do this because it’s so fun!’” But one opportunity that Dickie did get to experience was the joy of Theatre Nova Scotia’s DramaFest, a three day theatre festival open to students and teachers from across Nova Scotia, which offers them the opportunity to come to Dalhousie University in Halifax and participate in workshops, master classes, and other creative opportunities for students. This opportunity was life changing for Dickie, who says that the opportunities she did have at her school were more improv based, where the focus in drama was mostly on being funny. “DramaFest was really the first place where I saw people taking things seriously.” She says that even though the students from other schools were “kicking their ass” in the competitive aspects of the festival, she was impressed with the calibre of their work. They also got to see a professional show at DramaFest, and in her graduating year she got to see the viral sketch comedy troupe Picnicface.
“I was so in love with drama and theatre in High School, but I didn’t have any outlets. We didn’t do school plays, we didn’t do anything like that,” she says. She ended up going to Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick where she met Jake Planinc, and this is where she learned about the role of a stage manager in the theatre. “I had no idea that was a thing before,” she says. With her Type A personality, the idea of being able to organize spreadsheets and care for others within the context of a theatre production really appealed to her. Through her experiences in university she found that there was actually an entire subset of jobs in the industry that were more administrative and “tied into care for people.”
When she moved to Halifax ten years ago she found Theatre Nova Scotia quite quickly. “At the time Chris Shore was just leaving [ending his time as Executive Director] and Nancy [Morgan] was just coming in. So I think I actually took Nancy out for a coffee shortly after moving to the city”… she was also working as 2b Theatre’s summer student. “So then I started talking to Nancy and getting to know and understand what Theatre Nova Scotia was,” Dickie says.
Around the same time she was stage managing at Theatre Arts Guild, and she did a community theatre tour of Godspell with her best friend and her family who put on this production with members of their church and other friends and folks in their community. Ambitiously, they took this production all over the province, which gave Dickie a very quick lesson in how expansive the province can be, and the challenges involved in self-producing theatre in a variety of different markets. This is also where Dickie met her friend Nick Cox, and her future husband Alex Mills, so clearly, this was a life altering experience for her. With 2b theatre she worked on their then annual Lobsterpalooza garden party fundraiser with Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac and Karen Gross, two people who were really rooted in the bourgeoning indie theatre scene in Halifax at that time. “I really hit the jackpot,” she says. As soon as she knew she was moving to Halifax Dickie went on the Theatre Nova Scotia website and pulled up the list of all its members, the professional theatre companies in the city, and emailed every single one asking if they might have any summer employment opportunities, and that’s how she got involved with 2b theatre. “I immediately met Colleen and Karen, which was just delightful. You can’t meet better people.”
Dickie is most well known in Halifax as one of the founding members, with Jake Planinc and Alex Mills, of Matchstick Theatre, which burst on the scene in Halifax in 2017 with a production of Daniel MacIvor’s In on It. Dickie continues to be the Managing Director of Matchstick, who have since gone on to produce a whopping seventeen productions.
As a Managing Director of a small independent theatre company and someone who has been in the heart of the community here for the last decade Dickie is well aware of the challenges that Theatre Nova Scotia has faced, especially since Executive Director Nancy Morgan moved on to become the Executive Director of the Playwrights Guild of Canada just before the first Covid lockdowns. Dickie says that the biggest and most well known piece of programming that Theatre Nova Scotia is responsible for are the annual Robert Merritt Awards, but she says that it is the smaller, lesser known initiatives where Theatre Nova Scotia can really build a strong rapport with its member companies that she is most excited about investing her time and energy into.
She stresses that Theatre Nova Scotia is a service organization intended to provide tangible, helpful services to the theatre companies in the province, like their theatre partnership program where small or mid-level theatre companies who do not have charitable status can use Theatre Nova Scotia’s charitable registration number to allow big corporations or private donors that need a tax receipt to donate to the smaller companies through them so they receive that tax receipt. Theatre Nova Scotia also has a script library onsite at their office on Marginal Road where community members can borrow plays. There are also discounted printing services available for Theatre Nova Scotia members that theatre companies make use of for printing their theatre programmes and other publicity materials. There is also an opportunity for member organizations to purchase group insurance in association with CFNS. “The function [of TNS] is meant to connect with the general public and spread the news of how vital theatre is in our province and what a public good it is,” Dickie says, “so along with that, I think there’s a lot of advocacy that comes with the job.” She mentions that this aspect makes her nervous because she is so impressed by the work of folks like former Executive Director of the Bus Stop Theatre Sébastien LaBelle, and current TNS Board Member and Executive Director of Ross Creek Centre for the Arts Chris O’Neill, who she says are both “champions” who have contributed so much to the growth of the theatre industry in Nova Scotia. Dickie cites how inspiring it was to work with LaBelle on The Bus Stop Theatre’s recent capital campaign, which saw the co-op succeed in buying and renovating their building, a former pharmacy on Gottingen Street, which has been a hub of the performing arts community in Halifax since 2003.
“I think we are headed into a place, unfortunately, where a lot of arts funding, and so many different facets of arts, like arts criticism, need so much support and advocacy,” Dickie says, “I’m nervous, but very excited to grow [TNS] in that regard.”
The educational branches of TNS include the Perform! program, which has been in place since 1999 and connects schools with professional artists. Through the Perform! program students have the opportunity to both see professional productions at school, and also to have professional theatre artists come and work with students in a workshop setting, or on a specific theatre project. Dickie cites the drawback to this model is that it is currently dependant on schools buying in and having the financial means to access these programs. Yet, she says, Paula Danyluk-MacDonald, Theatre Nova Scotia’s contact within the Department of Education, is “such a champion for us, and she’s been a great resource as schools have been tightening up and making it harder for drama and arts teachers specifically to access funding for extracurricular activities.” Dickie also mentions the aforementioned DramaFest, which is TNS’ other initiative that is specifically outreach for High School students.
Dickie says that because there has been a lot of turnover within the past five years her first order of business is really to get “their house in order and to get connected back to everyone [in the community].” She is very interested in hearing from folks what services they are hoping to see from Theatre Nova Scotia, and what type of help they are finding that they need with the current challenges as we continue to come out of Covid, adjust to a more sinister international political climate, and adapt to climate change, among other things. She and I, for example, had a conversation about the practical needs concerning keeping theatre criticism and arts coverage more broadly afloat in a country where very few newspapers have even one single full-time arts reporter on staff. “I think our members know what they need pretty clearly,” she says, “and they are really generous in communicating that. So, I think it’s going to be a year of hearing and listening before making decisions.” She notes that with all the great work happening at three different theatres in Cape Breton, and brand new TNS member the Osprey Arts Centre in Shelburne, Theatre Nova Scotia needs to be able to provide as equal service as possible to folks working all over the province, from the South Shore all the way up to Glace Bay.
Dickie keeps reiterating to me that she doesn’t want to come in and dictate to folks what she wants Theatre Nova Scotia to be, the areas where she wants to expand, or the ideas that she has for what she wants to change, she is much more interested in having these important conversations herself with as many different theatre markers as possible to hear from them what their ideas, ideals, goals, and dreams for the organization are- and then working on building Theatre Nova Scotia up from there, as an organization that really works as a central hub for the entire community.
