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…
turn the earth
Dear Animal, If my voice seems a bit muffled this month, it’s because I am buried deep here. Still, the design is fantastic, I marvel at that white sky. In the mountain hamlet of Sunshine, I’m told by the locals that this fall, 3 feet, is manageable; it’s 4 or 5 where...
A Sign
Dear Animal, I imagine there are snowdrops now back home. Signs of spring. And daffodil trumpets. When my kids were toddlers, we would stop before a ‘daffy’ and listen hard. We thought we could hear them shouting—wake up, get moving, spring up—and since then, I think...
Starter
Dear Animal, I got my kid some sourdough starter for Christmas. He does pie crust and is ready to level up. The starter comes with instructions, and he is into it, does the flour thing and the top of the fridge thing and the discard thing. This goes on for days. At...
Every Sentence Begins with the Wind
Dear Animal, A few years back, you and I, Animal, worked with a local blacksmith to build a typewriter backpack. I wanted to hike and write. Typewriters were originally invented by gun manufacturers, as it turns out, and there was a war in the woods where we lived. I...
23 Hamsters
Dear Animal, When you were a young Animal, every February, I used to give away show ideas on our socials. One per day for the month. I did it to prepare a blank slate for new ideas to arrive. I remember once that my old friend, the playwright Kevin Kerr,...
A Story that’s Never Been Told
Dear Animal, “I had a boyfriend once who said that all Hostess products contained nuclear waste and it was every American’s patriotic duty to eat her share.” This is a quote from a NY Times article from the 90s that I cut out and stuck in my journal, which later...
Standby Sky
Hi again there, hi hi. Kendra, here, the co-founder and past Artistic Director of The Only Animal, and you might know that I left the company and Canada in July of this year. For me, The Only Animal was about making theatre in deep relationship with place and the...