From Future Poems, a zine (and a new show) by Theatre Replacement

“I want to believe that an artist's job is to dream the culture forward – to look at the things that aren't working in society and think about how they could be better.”
-Taylor Mac

We’ve reached a turning point at Theatre Replacement. As I mark the end of our 20th Anniversary year, I really feel it. To my continuing surprise, TR has found itself anew inside of its incredible works and projects. Artistic, eclectic and singular microcosms of creative activity that accumulate to reveal a company that is rooted in some key ideas: creation, collaboration, connection, and capacity – not just rebuilding it for ourselves, but for the eco-ecosystem here that we know and love. I’ve spent the last while examining and unpacking everything TR does, getting into all the corners – whether it be with a project I know intimately like Best Life, or in continuing to grow HOLD ON LET GO into a vital space for local experimentalists, or a big old (and beloved) East Van Panto. I’ve held each of the collaborators we’ve worked with in my heart and my brain like a sprawling family tree; it’s a matrix of incredible artists and humans. And I really try not to take anything for granted. Because as much as I am an artist, I am also a body on these lands, a citizen of this world, and a mother.

Looking outward, here’s what I do know, turning 21:

We still need art.

We need it to “dream the culture forward,” like Taylor Mac says.

We need live performance. We need live theatre.

We need audiences. We need people to fill the seats.

We need to sit in rooms with other people in the audience, to feel the way we listen and receive together. To breathe together. To feel each other respond.

We need to see work from other places.

We need to see work with all kinds of bodies on stage. We need to hear all kinds of stories.

We need more spaces where art can be shared. We need more theatre spaces and public spaces where theatre and art can happen.

We need these spaces to be open to all kinds of bodies.

We need to see work that is crafted.

We need to make more work so that we can learn our craft better, so that our work can reach more people.

We need to keep learning, stop failing and apply our learning because we know things. We know what we know.

We need to know we know what we know.

We need to come out from under rocks.

We need to leave the house.

We need to dream this place new.

We need artists.

We need to believe in our artists.

We need to value what they do and how they make us imagine and think and change and dream.

We need dreams.

We need artists to make art so we can dream our way forward.

xo Maiko