Kat McCormack
Eastern Front Theatre’s is developing a national reputation for bringing experimental, tactile, interactive, and technologically innovative work from across the country to Dartmouth every June for the Stages Festival, which runs at Alderney Landing Theatre until June 7th, 2026. I sat down to chat with Artistic Director Kat McCormack to chat about all the exciting work coming to the festival this year.
Manual, created by Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes, is a free one on one experience happening at various times at the NSCAD University Library throughout the festival. McCormack tells me that it was recommended to her by Jacinte Armstrong. “It’s an hour long, in a library, redefining sensory awareness in a public space,” McCormack says.“Someone takes you on a little journey to experience the library, and the coolest bit is there’s a choreographed reveal of gorgeous coffee table books that the performer has prepared while you are listening to an audio score…. It’s really beautiful. It was my favourite experience last year.” McCormack says that they thought a lot about where to host this show- whether to have it at the Alderney Gate Library in Dartmouth, but that Kinner created the show while he was at NSCAD so “this is kind of a homecoming. This show has been all around the world, [and] it just touches your little heart. It’s so exciting to have someone care for you in a way, to have a personalized experience, and I know that can seem scary or like, I don’t want to do this, but nothing is asked of you… I saw it at the Halifax Public Library last year, and that place is so busy, it’s so huge, so it’s kind of fun to be secretly paying attention to other people while you’re getting a secret performance in amongst people living their daily lives.”
2021, created by Cole Lewis, Patrick Blenkarn, and Sam Ferguson, is coming to the Stages Main Stage. Audiences may remember Blenkarn who brought Asses Masses to Stages back in 2023. “Similarly, this is a show where they have created a video game, like a 90s style PC click-through, and each night someone from the audience is invited up and they play through the whole game. That’s why the show length can vary, it’s not like Asses Masses, it’s not eight hours, but it should be about an hour and a half to two hours max. Cole Lewis narrates it based on how the player is moving through the game, but in the game you play as her father waking up in the hospital, and she has created an AI model of her dead father, and she has a conversation with him at the end. The show is really about the digital legacy and the digital footprint of people… it’s a really incredible innovative piece, and her dad was a MAGA guy as well. There are just so many layers to the story, and it’s told in such an interesting way. We tried to have it here last year as a work in progress, and since then it has premiered and has been all around the world. It’s really kind of special that we’re able to bring it here. … It’s going to sit with [audiences] for a long time.”
Also on the Main Stage is Epidermis Circus by SNAFU, a live cinema piece. “[Puppeteer Ingrid Hansen] is being filmed, and you can see her up close doing tiny puppetry, but then you’re also watching the film she’s creating on the big screen…. It’s mostly a wordless show, and I’ve never seen such incredible acting as this tiny baby head and hand take a bath and flirt with you getting into the bath… it’s a laugh riot. People love this show, and it’s been sort of everywhere… She has show and tells after on the table, and, most famously,… the costumes were created by Jimbo the Drag Clown (James Insell).” McCormack says that the most interesting part for her is watching how Hansen is doing the puppetry. “I want to see the strings, I want to understand how [she’s] doing it, and still be impressed with what [she] is doing. I think people are really going to love this one. I think this one is going to appeal to the non-theatregoers of the world. Whereas, I think 2021 is for the theatregoers, or for people who think they know what theatre is and have been left wanting. I think Stages is the place to come see something that is definitely a non-traditional performance, which is what makes it so exciting to me.”
McCormack says that a theme that is running through all the shows is the idea of creating something that is handmade in performance. She says even 2021, which uses AI, is so personal in the way it has been created.
Another Main Stage show is Tanya Davis’ Mass for Shut-Outs, which plays June 6th at Saint James United Church. “Tanya is an East Coast icon,” says McCormack, “this show has got so much heart. It’s so beautiful- a Catholic mass, but for the shut-outs. You’ve got your hymns, you’re singing along, and you’re listening to her sermon, which is so full of wit and so gorgeous. She’s got a poet’s voice, so it just comes out so clear, and it’s so funny, and so touching, and then it ends with little finger foods- we have a little church reception.”
Shortcuts is at the Stages Family Stage, created by Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac, which was previously programmed during one of the virtual Stages Festivals during the pandemic. “It’s a gorgeous piece,” McCormack says, “where in an ironic, overly bureaucratic experience, Colleen creates a compendium of shortcuts that people describe from their own lives. You get to watch the creation of that, so Colleen is live drawing as people are explaining it. It takes a hilariously ironic amount of steps to get to your shortcut… it involves Dan Bray walking up an amazing amount of stairs, so we’re looking forward to that. We will have an ambulance on site.” She laughs.
Mocean Dance and Jacinte Armstrong are bringing Play as a Work in Progress to the Festival. McCormack describes Armstrong as an “incredible artist who is always coming to [her] with… inexplicable things that she’s creating.” She says Play harkens back to Eastern Front’s Creation Unit, and that Armstrong was working with some of these pieces then. “It’s exploring day-to-day with huge movement pieces and these props. This is participatory work,” she says.
Halifax Theatre for Young People and Charles Taylor Theatre & Media Arts are bringing their Next Stage Voices reading series to Alderney Landing on June 5th with readings from four new short pieces by Andre Fenton, Tasha Thomas, Guyleigh Johnson, and Andre Anderson. Club Inclusion is also coming to the Family Stage. They have a Super Hero theme this year and their performance is on June 7th.
McCormack also highlights the Industry Series, produced by Dustin Harvey and Richie Wilcox, saying, “Every year I’m hearing more and more from artists across the country and internationally that are hearing about Stages, and I think it’s due to the Industry Series, which is really cool. We have our six creative cohort members, [iara Solano Arana (Spain), Gillian Jane Lees (Scotland), Robin Deacon (UK), Sean Guist (BC), Liam Karry (Ontario), and Nicolette Kretz (Switzerland)], so it’s been really great to make those connections with local artists and presenters from elsewhere. People are starting to tour a bit more, and they’re also starting to understand a bit more who we are here, and what kind of work we make. This year that’s new we’re doing Hot Takes and Hot Cakes: A Breakfast of Complaints. Everyone is welcome to come and give us your hottest takes, and see if they can be rebutted by someone else in the community.” McCormack says that in past years the annual Pitch Room has had a quite ‘low stakes’ ambiance, but that this year they’re “diving all the way in,” so folks will be pitching their show ideas in the theatre with all the lights off like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire style.” They’re also going on a field trip to a secret location.
“I’m invested in the audience experience,” says McCormack about the festival as a whole, “and what kind of a leap [folks] are making as artists to tell a story in a new way. I’m really leaning into non-traditional work, and work that’s gently participatory, and work that is playful or challenging in some way- leaning beyond a traditional theatre piece. I’m really excited by things that are high tech or handmade, but lean into another genre. With Shortcuts, Manual, and Epidermis Circus, you are literally in most cases seeing the handmade happen right in front of you, but through a lens of a larger scale. Then 2021 is so exceptionally experimental, and the story is so interesting; it’s deeply personal through this kind of larger than life scale that brings you into it. I’m really curious about seeing work that is affected by the audience… [where] truly the experience is different every night based on the people of our community who were here and how they’re reacting to it… I’ve been really proud of the programming… and this year especially feels really soft… we all need something a little soft. These shows are caring for you, and also asking the questions of how do we care for ourselves and for people we love, even when we deeply disagree with them.”
McCormack says that she was very fortunate to have the opportunity to tour both nationally and internationally with both Mermaid Theatre and ZUPPA early in her career, which allowed her to experience work that was happening in cities and festivals in disparate cities around the world, which she credits with shaping not only who she has become as an artist, but also her tastes as a theatregoer. “I was seeing so much, and I saw some really incredible things in Europe and Asia. Asses Masses, Foreign Radical, these were [shows] that I’d seen elsewhere and was desperate to bring here [and I] finally made it happen. Eastern Front is devoted to Atlantic Canadian theatre artists, and I think that one of the things we need here is to be able to see the work of others that inspires us.” She says that she is passionate about bringing work to Dartmouth, for the community of Dartmouth, that runs the gamut of what theatre can be citing Foreign Radical, which played at Alderney Landing in 2024, to Frenchy’s: the Thrift Musical coming up this Fall. “I’m told all the time that you can’t please everybody,” says McCormack, “but I’m like… couldn’t we?”
“For Stages I want to have a platform and a place to be inspired. People here that are also interested in the non-traditional theatre- I want to make sure that we’re not just left behind on the edge of the earth.” She says that because Nova Scotia is more isolated from the large theatre centres of Montréal and Toronto, not to mention New York and London, artists here, in a way, have had more freedom to follow their creativity uninhibited. “We’re truly just making what we want. We don’t know what the rules are, so how could we possibly follow them or disobey them? I think we’re really great storytellers on the East Coast, so it’s been such an honour to meet people who I think are excited to come here and meet the local artists. I definitely haven’t been able to jet set around, but I have been trying to go to one theatre festival a year, from one of the people who has come as part of the creative cohort at the Industry Series. So, the first year I went to High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, and then Hold On, Let Go and PuSH in Vancouver, and I was so surprised how, you know, Push is humungous, but Hold On Let Go is more on par with Stages. I was so inspired by the the community that I felt there, and how exciting the work was, and I made a lot of connections there that- there’s still shows from that trip that I’m trying to bring in because I see the similarities [between Halifax and Vancouver]- I don’t know if it’s just being on the edge of the world, but there’s something there that feels really similar, but also different enough to be really exciting, and either inspiring or antagonizing to your own personal creation. Like Secret Ingredients last year… like it’s not even a play… but it’s the best experience of my life.”
McCormack cites a local performer like Lou Campbell, who is also working in the creation of nontraditional works, and asks, “Where are Lou’s collaborators?” suggesting that, despite its immense size, connecting folks who are interested in the same kinds of work from different parts of the country can end up creating really innovative collaborations that can foster exciting new work, work that inherently lives beyond the borders of one single province.
“I’m so heartened by the reactions of [audiences here] that are genuinely so invested in the work- we often hear from people who are like, ‘We had no idea you were here. We didn’t know theatre could be like this-’ I feel buoyed by the sense of community, and especially being in Dartmouth, you know, I’m from Dartmouth, so it feels right to be here. … We insist on doing [Stages] the first week in June, because that’s when it feels like [you] want to go outside, life is worth living again- there’s people who want actual experiences these days, and I do think that Stages… is providing [that].”
“We also have popcorn and a hot dog machine from Coal Bowl Queen,” she adds with a big grin, “so, we’re going to be putting that to good use.”
Eastern Front Theatre’s Stages Festival runs June 3-7th, 2026 with the Main Stage shows happening at Alderney Landing Theatre (2 Ochterloney Street, Dartmouth), and other shows popping up in venues on both sides of the harbour. Festival Passes are $60.00 and provide access to all the productions. Industry Series Passes range in price between $40.00 to $60.00 on a PWYC scale. Both are available here, along with more information. Prices for individual performances vary from free to $26.00.
There is a very thorough Accessibility Guide Available Here (Scroll Down). Alderney Landing Theatre is accessible for wheelchair users, there are two all gender washrooms, Phonak Roger FM/DM System available at Alderney Landing Theatre. Automatically connect via Wall Pilots or borrow a Telecoil device to sync with hearing aids and cochlear implants. Devices with headphones are also available. Please see the Box Office for assistance onsite. ACCESSIBLE TICKET PRICES: All performances have pay-what-you-can-afford pricing. If cost is still a barrier, please email info@EasternFrontTheatre.com. Volunteers see shows free of charge! Sign up here!
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