Dear Animal,
Dear Animal is a series of letters between an artist and her muse. Written by Kendra Fanconi, an award-winning eco-artist, to The Only Animal, a theatre company that she co-founded and led for 17 years. In her time, The Only Animal was known across Canada for it’s impossible site-specific and elemental work that aimed to make its audience fall in love with the natural world. When a personal upheaval caused Kendra to leave the company, and her beloved west-coast rainforest for the arid Rocky Mountains of Colorado, she found a challenge–to fall in love herself with a new landscape. Dear Animal documents a year of that work. The letters are posted most recent to oldest, so go back to the beginning for the whole story and take your cue, Standby Sky…
Cloud Nine
an experiment in Cloud Theatre created by Kendra Fanconi Cloud Nine is an imaginative, site-specific performance venue, starring the theatricality of flying water. Walk up hill, take a seat, and gaze through a proscenium arch mounted there. When a cloud enters...
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...
Season
Dear Animal, This is my last letter to you, and it begins where I left off, Animal-on the far left coast of Canada, at that time of year when summer starts to turn and a new season is in the wings. After time in Vancouver and on the Sunshine Coast, I crossed the...
Pass With Care
Dear Animal, I’m thumbing through a red notebook the size of a folded bandana. It is on my seat, between my legs, as I drive. Using my teeth, I pull off the pen cap. I usually text notes to myself, but it’s crowded in the car as we drive 1500 miles, and I fear...
Parade
Dear Animal, Before I was a director or a playwright, I was an actor. I started in kindergarten and kept going, including seven years of higher education. I never did much professionally, but I’m shaped by those years of acting study. An acting teacher once told...
rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb
Dear Animal, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb’ is what you might ask an actor to silently mouth as an extra in a scene. Rhubarb creates a believable background, as it simulates conversation, and because the word rhubarb doesn’t have any recognizable consonant clusters, it...
Welcome to Terrible’s
Dear Animal, As you may recall, I work in a lot of different media– snow and ice, water, moss – but my new medium is road. Moving to the foothills of Colorado has upped my driving game considerably, I have a 16-year-old, so I am a driving instructor and my youngest...