Get Ready to Fall in Love…
I’m Kendra Fanconi, a site-specific theatre maker, and through my work, I like to invite audiences to fall in love with the natural world. For 18 years I was the Artistic Director of The Only Animal, in xwesam/Roberts Creek, in British Columbia, Canada, the traditional lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and shíshálh people which made work with a deep engagement with place and for solutionary outcomes for the climate crisis. I love impossible things.
Favourite projects include Magic Hour, NiX and tinkers. Ongoing work includes 1000 Year Theatre and Treasure Trail. Upcoming projects include When Pigs Fly and bird in the hand, and Cloud 9.
I am a playwright, a director, a conceptual artist, and a designer, and usually work in some combination of these roles. Please see the credit lists of all of the artists who have contributed so much beauty and hilarity to the work.
I am a winner of the National Rewilding Art Prize from David Suzuki Foundation. My project 1000 Year Theatre was exhibted at the Canadian Museum of Nature in 2024/5.You can read a career retrospective of my work here. Please go to the About page to learn more about me, or to view my CV/resume.
Enjoy looking around and feel free to reach out to me at kendra@theonlyfanconi.com.
Dear Animal,
Dear Animal documents a year of falling in love with a new landscape and saying goodbye to The Only Animal, her creative muse and container for making impossible things for 18 years.
The One that Got Away
A play in a pool Original concept and written by Kendra Fanconi The One That Got Away tells the story of a girl with a fish where her heart should be, chasing her rapscallion grandfather into an afterlife reckoning with love and loss. This play-in-a-pool combines...
Other Freds
Other Freds was possibly the largest and most audacious site-specific theatre show Vancouver has ever seen. Other Freds is the story of a lonely fella named Fred and all of the Other Freds existing in nearby parallel worlds. It is about chance, fate and...
tinkers
tinkers is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Paul Harding. This new transcendentalist work features an intimate and dazzling relationship with the natural world, woven into a story of family karma. Through an intergenerational story we...
Slime
Welcome to the 3rd Annual Slime Conference. Join 100 animals, seven young translators, scientists and suits, and fellow humans and step just slightly in the future… Seated amongst the delegates, you might hear an otter swimming down an aisle, a dolphin whistling at...
CATastrophe!
If you just don’t have a Clue® about emergency prep…. If you think you have the Monopoly® on inertia… If you are aware of the Risk®…but don’t know what you can do… Then you are ready to play… CATastrophe! is an open-plan, human-scale board game to test your...
Museum of Rain
"The night became very dark, the rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous, virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumour. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody…What a thing it is to sit...
The Magic Hour
"The sun is about to go down. This is the Magic Hour.The term refers to the light that makes everything look more beautiful.” - The Magic Hour The Only Animal and friends welcome you to the VR version of last summer’s immersive show, The Magic Hour. The Magic Hour is...
Typing Pool
Welcome to Typing Pool, where we aim to change the world at seventy-five words a minute! Flex those fingers and get ready to dive in… Join The Only Animal on a journey of discovery. As new recruits to Typing Pool, you will be tasked with an important mission: to open...
Slime
Welcome to the 3rd Annual Slime Conference. Join 100 animals, seven young translators, scientists and suits, and fellow humans and step just slightly in the future... Seated amongst the delegates, you might hear an otter swimming down an aisle, a dolphin whistling at...
Year of the Typewriter
Year of the Typewriter responds to a challenge by ecology writer Paul Kingsnorth to cast landscape as the lead character in stories. The response of playwright Kendra Fanconi to this challenge was to rig up an old typewriter as a backpack and go out into wild places...
tinkers
tinkers is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Paul Harding. This new transcendentalist work features an intimate and dazzling relationship with the natural world, woven into a story of family karma. Through an intergenerational story we meet a young...
How to Build a Bird Nest
Get set for an interspecies collaboration that can happen in your own back yard. Inspired by text from Tinkers novelist, Paul Harding, as adapted by playwright, Kendra Fanconi, and created by animation artist, Cindy Mochizuki, and sound artist, Nancy Tam. Watch at...