Here Comes Halifax Fringe

The Halifax Fringe Festival is bringing a multitude of different types of performances: theatre, comedy, circus, magic, burlesque, drag, improv, and musical theatre, to venues in the downtown and North End of the city until September 7th. I sat down with bilingual playwright and actor Nancy Kenny about two shows she’s involved with, and Dan Bray and Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac, the Artistic Directors of The Villains Theatre about the five shows their company is involved with via Zoom, and I chatted a bit with visiting artists Nathania Bernabe and Jackie T. Hanlin about their show Multi-vs via email. 

Audiences in Halifax are lucky to have two shows this year that are performed either entirely or in part en français, and Nancy Kenny is involved with both of them. The second performance of the stage reading for her new play I Don’t Feel Cute/Chu Pas Cute at the Bus Stop Theatre is on September 6th at 9:30pm. “I call it a bilingual absurdist dark comedy set in the mind of an alcoholic on a bender,” she says and mentions that she pictures it eventually featuring a chorus of women playing the various voices inside of the protagonist’s head, but for Fringe she will be doing a solo reading of the work. 

Kenny is a familiar face to Halifax Fringe audiences for her plays Everybody Dies in December (2016 Best Drama Winner) and Roller Derby Saved My Soul (2013), but she says this one is “definitely [her] most personal work.” Kenny tells me that she actually suffers from “massive” stage fright before any performance, and this is compounded by the fact that she has also written the play. “It’s that dichotomy of feeling vulnerable, but also wanting to be seen,” she says. 

She has been working on this work on and off since about 2019, saying that when working on her earlier shows in the 2010s it was easier to balance working jobs outside the theatre with writing and touring her shows. Now, given how much the cost of living has increased this show has taken longer to develop, which is why Kenny is so grateful to the Fringe “because it’s still a fairly economical way of being able to develop new work.” Kenny says that having an audience coming in at this stage of the development is really helpful, especially because “the writing for this piece is more spoken word poetry stream of consciousness, and… I feel like I need an outside eye to know if what I’m doing is resonating, because eventually what you want is your story to resonate, and so you need an audience to know how it’s being received. I don’t even mean that they love it, but is it eliciting a reaction? Is it making [the audience] feel something? In that case I think that’s well received.” Even as an often “solo” creator and solo performer, Kenny says that the creation process still feels collaborative as she has in the past also hired actors and a director to help her get that outside perspective on the piece. She stresses that you don’t have to speak French to understand her show. “I actually do want people who don’t speak French to come and see it so I can get a sense of what’s being understood… of course if you speak French, please come- it’ll be a different experience.” 

Then she is also acting in Théâtre Desassimilés’ production of Olivier Blais’ play Copyright, which Kenny says is the only fully French production in the Fringe, but there will be surtitles in English so [audiences] can understand what’s happening, regardless of how much French they know. “Copyright is about a local theatre troupe that’s trying to put on a show, and I play the Artistic Director… the jokes happen fast and furious, and things go wrong and my character is desperately trying to hold it all together. It has many [local theatre] Easter eggs. We do have a character named Ban Dray in the production, so if you know, you know. If you’re a local theatre aficionado there’s definitely going to be a lot for you in this show.” 

One of the reasons that Kenny auditioned for this show is because she is Acadian and French is her first language. “I grew up in New Brunswick and I went away and studied theatre in English for the most part and I definitely felt that there was something missing in my practice and my artistry.” She has been based in Halifax for the past four years and being able to have opportunities here in French has really “healed something [she didn’t quite know was missing].” Kenny has been performing at Fringe Festivals across the country since 2002, so she says that “getting to [do work in French] at Fringe, which is a place that has meant a lot to me is incredibly special… One of the things that I’ve wanted to do being in Nova Scotia is continue to build and promote the Acadian and Francophone communities that we have here. It’s one of the reasons that my play is a bilingual play because growing up that’s how we would talk, we would switch easily from English to French, mid-sentence sometimes- sometimes I still do, but it’s not something that I would see on stages a lot.” Kenny mentions that now that most theatres have projectors its easier to invest in the surtitles, which opens up the possibility to present theatre in a multitude of different languages to audiences. “I think that really helps open up our perspective and open us up to a bigger world out there, and to other ways of storytelling that we may not be familiar with because theatre is a very colonial institution… it can sometimes feel like there’s one right way of doing theatre.” Kenny mentions that even within the francophone community more broadly there is a “hierarchy of language” at play, where she can feel like, as an Acadian, the way she speaks French isn’t “good” enough. “It can be difficult to find connection when we’re already feeling diminished amongst ourselves.”

Kenny says that the theme of this type of code switching exists in Copyright as well, as her character speaks with a specific francophone accent, “it’s something that maybe someone who isn’t francophone might not pick up in the nuances of the show,” she says, “the different ways the characters speak, the different accents, or the choice of words they use. Olivier was very deliberate in a lot of the word choices that my character uses, and there’s a switch midway through that if you’re a francophone you will notice.” 

Kenny is such a veteran of the Canadian Fringe circuit that she actually has a documentary, On the Fringe, which you can watch on demand on Vimeo. The way the Fringe circuit works in Canada is that if you bring your show to one of the Fringe festivals in either Quebec or Ontario you can continue working your way west throughout the summer hitting Fringe festivals in subsequent provinces until you arrive in Victoria and Vancouver at the end of August. The way Fringe works is that for each one artists apply for a lottery and are chosen at random for a spot in the festival, but there is also a Canadian lottery where you can win entrance into the fringes in all the cities that you have preselected. When Kenny won this lottery folks started suggesting that she should make a documentary about her experience during those four months on the road. “It took me almost ten years to [finish],” she says, “… we could have made twenty movies from the amount of footage that we had.” 

With this much Fringe experience Kenny is an ideal person to give advice on how to really maximize your enjoyment during the festival this year. She recommends being open to talking to Fringe artists, especially those from out of town, about their shows. “Take a risk, go see something that you know nothing about, you don’t know anyone in the cast, you have no idea what the show is about, it may be a brilliant show that stays with you for the rest of your life- worst case scenario you may have an interesting story to tell… the great thing about Fringe is you never really know what you’re going to get… just go along for the ride, and go and see some shows from people from out of town. Speaking as someone who has toured for a very long time, it’s hard when you come to a new city where you maybe don’t know anyone and, especially nowadays when there isn’t really much media coverage, it’s hard to get your name out there.”

Two such touring performers are Jackie T. Hanlin and Nathania Bernabe, the co-founders of Affair of Honor, a Jessie nominated fight and movement-based theatre and performance company “focused on continuous training in the art of performance combat, ensemble building, and multiple mediums of physical theatre. [They are] committed to creating visually stunning fight and movement-based productions, as well as providing a platform for emerging and professional artists, showcasing [their] diverse BIPOC & LGBTQIA+ communities and cultivating stories with women at the forefront.” The show that they are bringing to Halifax Fringe this year is Multi-Vs, which they describe as being “Trapped in the multiverse with no way out, two strangers (us) must fight for their survival. Hard hitting brawls, clashing steel, and a non stop whirlwind journey through different worlds, Multi – Vs is a funny yet heart wrenching ride that explores our relationship with technology and each other. This action packed show was built to make you feel the whiplash of doom scrolling. We had an audience member say, ‘It was like seeing a live episode of Black Mirror.“

Affair of Honor’s first Fringe Festival was in Vancouver in 2017, and then they toured to the Edmonton Fringe Festival the next two years with their first new work Playthings. In 2023 Multi-Vs debuted at the Edmonton Fringe after a thirty day creation period. It was further developed for the rEvolver Festival in Vancouver in 2024. The version that they are bringing to the East Coast has new choreography and further story development. Like Kenny, Bernabe’s experiences with Fringe goes back quite a ways- to 2008, and they have performed in festivals in Winnipeg and Saskatoon with various other companies. Hanlin hails from Dartmouth, and this is the first time she will be performing in Halifax in fifteen years. “This is a very special trip,” they say, “as it is Affair of Honor’s first time bringing a production to the East Coast, and the first time Jackie’s family gets to see one of our shows live. She has a nine year old nephew that we are excited to share our weird and wacky show with. As a company we have the desire to make lasting connections with the East Coast so that we can tour out here more often, not only to bring Jackie home, but to share more of our work with the Maritimes.” They are arriving in Halifax on the heels of a successful run at the Fundy Fringe where they received the Festival Pick: Outstanding Production Award.  

They encourage folks to “make a night of it! Grab your friends, hit an early happy hour, walk down to the theatre, catch a show or two, then hit the late night specials down the road! See as much as you can!” They note that Halifax Fringe strives to keep ticket prices accessible, and that there are a number of shows that have Pay What You Can pricing. 

Two of Halifax Fringe’s most familiar faces are Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac and Dan Bray, the co-Artistic Directors of The Villains Theatre and this year The Villains Theatre has five shows in festival.

Jessie Walker, playwright of last year’s hit show Horse Girls, had written a new show, Gwenyth Kills Her Husband (in a God Honouring Way), as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival’s 24 Hour Playwriting Contest (which was also the origins of Horse Girls). Arcturus MacIsaac says that it’s “a very funny, queer, dark, dark (so very Villains aligned) send up of the trad wife phenomenon on social media.” Arcturus MacIsaac and Bray are co-directing the piece, with what they call a “really fantastic cast:” Geneviève Steele, Jessie Walker, Kyle Gillis, and Sophie Schade. “[It’s] very dark, absurdist,”- begins Arcturus MacIsaac, “blasphemous,” adds Bray, helpfully, and then after quite a beat he says, “and odd.” “Yeah, odd,” says Arcturus MacIsaac, “and also romantic.” 

In 2018 Bray and Kevin Hartford teamed up to write Herbie Dragons, and Bray says that around that same time Bray and Arcturus MacIsaac mentioned to him that they wanted to do an X-Files parody “maybe as sort of a joke,” says Bray, “and then [Kevin] just started writing it, and then Covid happened, and I think it sort of vanished into the cracks there for a bit, but then this year he returned with a script more or less finished and told me to put some jokes in it, so I did, but it was already pretty funny.” Tara Thorne directs this piece and Arcturus MacIsaac plays Agent Fulder and Bray plays Agent Dully. “[Tara] is a long term X-Files fan, [and also] wrote X-Files fan fiction at some point, which is really what you want in the director of this piece… it’s the sort of odd deadpan humour that really only Kevin Hartford can write…. And a deep but not-precious knowledge of the source material. … It’s going to be very strange, and going to be performed mostly in the dark at the Bus Stop Theatre, which is Tara’s homage to how poorly lit the old X-Files episodes are.” Lara Lewis and Kirsten Bruce are also in the cast. 

Last Fall Villains produced Playhouse of Horrors, which was made up of a series of short plays that Bray had written that were send ups of a horror movie or genre with a Shakespearean play, and they wanted to remount one of these shows: Tragedy, a send up of Stephen King’s Misery, which stars August Van Meekeren and Jessica Oliver. “There’s was especially a lot of laughs in the Misery one,” says Bray, “which made us want to revisit it.” It was also the shortest play of that evening. “I expanded it very slightly [for Fringe],” says Bray, “maybe [by] four minutes.” 

They encountered Ali Joy Richardson’s play The Great After at the Bus Stop Theatre’s annual 24 Hour Theatre Thing, which Garry Williams directed. “It was so funny, it played on these tropes of the sword and sorcery kind of world, and had this beautiful queer romance, and these fantastic characters, and managed to do it in this really tight 20 minute package.” They thought it would be nice to have an opportunity for that show to be remounted as well and asked if Joy might like them to produce the show for her. 

Finally, Flowerbed, is Noella Murphy’s play that she collaborated on with Lou Campbell and Laura Stinson, which premiered this year at Mayworks. “It’s been a long time in development [as] sort of a way of using clown and puppetry to address the experience of living with chronic pain and dealing with a healthcare system that doesn’t know what to do with you because you’re not as cis man,” says Arcturus MacIsaac. “It’s very funny, very sweet…. All the shows that we’re doing are comedies but I don’t think any of them are really remotely similar,” says Bray, “… I think it’s just sort of a cool little spectrum of laughs.” “A little tasting flight of comedy,” says Arcturus MacIsaac with a laugh.

“We really love making things happen, and have always been a very prolific company in terms of Dan writing 50,000 plays a year (approximately),” they say, adding that Halifax Fringe allows them to also do the kind of work that they may not be able to get funding for…. When we began [the company together] I had moved to the province not knowing anyone, and [I found it] really hard to make inroads, and I think that shaped an interest in making sure that we have a certain number of open calls, and that we’re allowing opportunities for people to get involved.” Bray agrees, “Starting out it felt very much like if you didn’t have connection, basically, it was just really hard to do anything. We are lucky because we… had ideas for things to do, and the drive to stage them. But if I hadn’t been a director and if we were playwrights now, we still wouldn’t be doing anything. It’s nice to know that especially the emerging folks don’t have to look quite as far to get started at least.” Arcturus MacIsaac says that it’s important for them at Villains to make sure that both emerging and established artists work on an “equal playing field, where they’re being treated in the same way, and able to work on projects together and learn from each other.” They mention that they and Bray both came at theatre from “oblique angles,” and therefore they always remain cognizant of the fact that not every promising young theatre artist is going to come from the most established and mainstream track. 

Like Kenny Arcturus MacIsaac reiterates to folks attending Fringe Shows over the next ten days, “I hope people see things at Fringe that they didn’t expect to see, that they didn’t plan on seeing, and that they haven’t hard of before.” “And that they don’t know any of the actors who are in it.,” adds Bray, “Something that is a surprise- especially the shows from away. I always want them to have good audiences, because I think we all like to think of Nova Scotians as good hosts, I know those shows can be a little lonely sometimes, so it’s nice to find people from away [to support].” “I would say just choose a venue and go there. See what’s on that night and go,” says Arcturus MacIsaac. “Pick a random venue with love in your heart,” says Bray… “because it’s always the thing you never expected to see that sticks with you the longest.”     

Halifax Fringe runs in a multitude of different venues from now until September 7th, 2025. For more information or to book your tickets to any of these shows please visit this website. All official Fringe venues are wheelchair accessible and have all gender washrooms. For Fort Massey Church, if you are a wheelchair user, please contact the Box Office ahead of the show. Each show has at least one mask mandatory performance. Grab a Fringe Guide at any of the venues for a handy way to follow along with all the events at the festival. See ya there!