'Moving Forward: a conversation with Zorana Kydd

Over the years, I had heard of the BirdLand Theatre Company, but never had the opportunity to attend any of their productions.  I was very pleased when the company reached out to me when it heard my column would conclude shortly as BirdLand wanted to share their thoughts about the theatre in a post Covid world.

Thank you, Zorana Kydd, Artistic Producer for BirdLand, as your responses encourage me to want to attend productions when it’s safe for us to return. Dr. Kydd’s professional theatrical credentials are highly impressive. She founded the company following the completion of her Ph.D. studies in Theatre at The University of Toronto. Her producing work with BirdLand Theatre received 6 Dora Mavor Moore Awards, 5 for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, including the Outstanding Production and for the Outstanding Production of a Musical for Assassins by Stephen Sondheim.

She produced Off-Broadway championing the work of Canadian playwrights such as Brendan Gall. Her productions have been seen in Canada, Europe, and the United States. Over her career Dr. Kydd produced and presented over 75 live theatrical productions. During her career she collaborated with Diego Matamoros, Philip Akin, Louise Pitre, Adam Brazier, Reza Jacobs, David Ferry and Graham Abbey. Some of her producing credits include: Assassins, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, The Birds, Wide Awake Hearts, Gruesome Playground Injuries, The Pillowman, Frankie and Johnny, Ride Down Mt. Morgan, just to name a few.

Ms. Kydd holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Theatre from the University of Toronto and has trained at Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, England, New Actors Workshop in New York City with director Mike Nicholls and with Anne Bogart’s Siti Company in New York City.

Dr. Kydd is included in Who’s Who in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press. The Office of the Premier of Ontario also recognized her work as she was nominated for the Premier’s Award for the Arts.

We conducted our conversation via email:

It has been an exceptionally long eight months since the pandemic began, and now the numbers are edging upward again. How are you feeling about this? Will we ever emerge to some new way of living in your opinion?

If the numbers are here to scare us and we look at them from the perspective of fear - we have learned nothing. To come out of this period and not learned anything about ourselves as individuals, communities and societies, then all this will be just a painful memory.

The new way of living has already started, and we are in the prep-week of rehearsal for a production that will become our life. There are many feelings and strange motions within one’s emotions and psyche. I was trying to acknowledge all of them. To become more aware of who am I becoming entering the ninth month of the pandemic.

As a producer now I am learning something that might seem counter intuitive. I am learning to look at each day as an individual project. The accumulation of days will give the sense in a longer run of a bigger picture that is evolving in front of us. This pandemic has awakened us to a realization that we are all active participants in life and that we cannot afford anymore to play a bear-witness.

Yes, we will emerge from this period hopefully more aware and conscious about decisions we are making everyday. What we must not accept is fear as a mind frame that will define our decisions and the structure of society.

How have you been faring? How has your immediate family been doing during these last eight months?

During this time, my eight-year-old daughter Zoe has become the pillar around which we structure our daily life. Giving her space to laugh and grow and learn without the direct contact for most of the time with other children is the focus of our attention.

There have been many moments where I could almost sense the smell of an empty theatre stage, and then that tickle you feel at the Opening Night suddenly appears. But there is no stage to inhabit, and there is nowhere to go. Also, this forced pause in our lives has given me the opportunity to look back at the work I have done and to (re)envision the future of my company BirdLand Theatre.

During the difficult situations such as this my husband has a little mantra that he repeats: Where the light is coming from. In thinking about that mantra, I saw the opportunities that BirdLand Theatre can create and inspire for others. So, there is a lot of planning, connecting, reconnecting on my end. These times are not easy for producers or anyone on the creative side of life. I needed to relearn how I build and execute the structure of my professional life.

My husband has turned more into his old love of writing and some of his writings have appeared on-line. He also has a little movie project and a Digital Theatre project in development. What we as a family have discovered during this time is that we connected and bonded even more. There is a stress in navigating daily needs with so many outside restrictions and we should all not downplay the affect they have on us. We have our bubble and we learned to love this narrow space and view life is offering at the moment.

What I would avoid calling it is new normal. There is nothing normal in situation that psychologically imposes the patterns of survival. This is a moment in time that will pass and we all should learn from it. For us as a family the key for moving forward was the acceptance of limitations as temporary elements that will remove itself with the time. That way we have allowed ourselves to plan future projects and build forward.

As an artist within the performing arts community, what has been the most difficult and challenging for you professionally and personally?

Like everyone else within the performing arts community our personal and professional lives are deeply intervened. It is the nature of our existence. The pandemic reality has revealed the fragility of it. We are relying on each other. Our personal lives rely on our professional lives.

First what was taken from us was the necessity of direct physical, visceral exchange that we have in our process. Human connection - human voice - is what is lost. Framed now by the reality of Zoom we must find the ways to transcend our creativity and redefine the notion of liveness and immediacy. We used to do that in rehearsal halls, during the breaks between projects. This very general sense of loss was at first challenging to articulate. With the time that has passed and due to adaptability, we all in the arts have the new ways of creating and communicating have emerged. That gives the hope and sense of possibilities to be discovered.

Professionally I miss the opportunity to gather a group of great creative minds in one room and witness the brilliance of their creativity. The personal journey of shifting the sense of loss into the source of creation was positively challenging one. I wish that I had journaled every day on that journey. It is truth that through obstacles we find our ways. This heightened sense of necessity and urgency to provide a platform for creation to artists has inspired me to venture into (re)envisioning BirdLand Theatre.

All this is a process and in times like this where actually certainty might be the enemy looking for a fixed goal could be damaging to the process. It is difficult to not be able to connect with colleagues on the way we used to. Challenge is in overcoming that obstacle. As I said before personal and professional in the performing arts are so intervened.

Were you in preparation, rehearsals, or any planning stages of productions before everything was shut down? What has become of those projects? Will they see the light of day anytime soon?

Yes, we were in the preparations for the project ARCHDUKE by American Pulitzer Prize

nominated playwright Rajiv Joseph. The Toronto audience was introduced to the work of Rajiv Jospeh through our critically acclaimed production of his early work GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES at Theatre Centre. ARCHDUKE was supposed to be our new Toronto based production after two successful Off-Broadway productions in New York City.

Encouraged and inspired by incredible creative experience in New York we decided to share our new theatrical vision with Toronto audiences. ARCHDUKE is about the young Serbian man Gavrilo Princip who assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, and that event started the First World War. The project was in pre-production phase with some intriguing set and video and projection design already in the making. It supposed to include some never before seen archival photographs and film recordings from that period.

The pandemic stopped the further development of this project in a traditional setting. We are continuing with the development of this project with a new vision and form adapted for the realm of Digital Theatre.

What have you been doing to keep yourself busy during this time?

BirdLand was always about collaboration and international cooperation. Pushed into the online realm we established few interesting and young connections with the creators from Serbia. We have been working with a creative start-up @plots.plays from Belgrade. One of the highlights of that collaboration was presented and promoted at Social Distancing Festival founded by Nick Green. The project “Hopscotch” was presented to a beautiful success on that platform.

Also in collaboration with @plots.plays we initiated a course on creative meditation ‘The Seven Cycles of You’. We have run the course on-line for seven weeks. The course was really nicely received here in Canada but also in Serbia. So, we are thinking now about offering further installments of this course.

There is a little movie project in development and hybrid digital theatre project in collaboration with colleagues from Great Britain, Germany, and Serbia. I have also produced documentary “Pictures of Judas” about making of our production of THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT and we will be soon making it available for our audiences to view it online.

Any words of wisdom or advice you might /could give to fellow performers and colleagues? What message would you deliver to recent theatre school graduates who have now been set free into this unknown and uncertainty?

The system of how we used to develop and present work has collapsed. The theatre has collapsed. Instead of lamenting on what has been lost we can take all the broken pieces and put them back together into the new structure that will work for everyone. Black Lives Matters movement has shaken the theatre world as well for the better. Now it is not enough just to learn from it but to act and create from it is imperative.

Physical theatre venues are closed but the internet venues are wide open. The radical action is needed. Theaters and studios will be closed for 3 years. So many commercial spaces are already empty due to many people working from home. How about having those spaces being offered to artists free of charge to develop and create their work?

Ravi Jain is already advocating this and making some concrete steps in this direction. Artists must not be silenced. We will go through this and evolve in our own understating of our place and role in society. That is how I feel. Within the timeframe of three years creating with

unknown and uncertainty as reference points will be the major task. The pandemic has leveled the playing field.

Theatre school graduates have the opportunity of a lifetime to create something new from ground zero laying down foundations for the future of the theater. This moment seems as an impossible obstacle, but only going through it we can move forward.

I am not sure that I have any words of wisdom for particularly young theatre creators since they already have knowledge and tools at their disposal that I am still learning about.

Do you see anything positive stemming from Covid 19?

Yes, I do. Otherwise everything will be just too painful. It is how limitations and obstacles pushed us to think differently and mobilize all our creative powers to respond quickly in creating work that helps people.

What was shown in all these months is that art is truly an antidote to despair. In doing so artists have shown incredible strength and vision. Through the dark artists are finding the way. An artist might not know what or where is the way, but an artist knows there is a way.

An artist always see the way. That ability and adaptability to change quickly and continue creating had an interesting impact on people. In the artists’ way of thinking, people started finally recognizing the incredible skill and strength in dealing with liminal situations. So, segments of our creative processes become interesting to the wider communities and people want to learn how to think like an artist. I had someone telling me that he thought creativity was just a buzz word, but during the pandemic he realized it is a life-saving skill.

Do you think Covid 19 will have some lasting impact on the Toronto/ Canadian/North American performing arts scene?

We are already living the consequences of Covid 19 impact. To me it is not about will Covid 19 have the lasting impact, it is about what we are actively doing in this radically changed situation for the performing arts scene. The big Broadway industrial complex has collapsed and the effects just like a ripple on water are felt on all levels of performing arts in North America.

We need to look more closely and deeply into our local communities and build that sense of belonging and uniqueness. This is the moment that can redefine, reshape, and restructure the Toronto theatre scene.

Some performing arts organizations in Toronto and across Canada are closing their doors for good. It is not any more just about who is making theatre and who is witnessing it. This moment is questioning the old patterns of who gets the right to make it and who gets the right to take it. What this moment can bring to us is that reinvigorated feeling of a simple offering: what can I do to make you create and develop work better.

The moments of crisis are defining moments that set the tone for the future. For a very long-time the performing arts sector was forced to justify its existence in society through fulfilling various metrics imposed on it by the structures of society. We were explaining our economical impact, cultural and community contribution to get the approval that performing arts are needed. Now, it is clear more than ever that our work is needed.

Covid 19 has opened the opportunity for not just Toronto but for all North American theatre to build the new on the foundations of global localism. What do I mean by global localism? It is building the strong, recognizable, and unique local core that will absolutely open globally. We must empower first and foremost the local artist who will connect and create globally with the strong reference and feedback to Toronto.

If a city becomes a treat to the existence of the artist how it can expect from that same artist to create and proudly say I live and create in Toronto. We are at the beginning of a new theatre’s future. For that future to happen we must rethink the way we fund, create, and present theatre. This situation has already challenged the idea of who gets to make theatre and who gets to see it.

Some artists have turned to You Tube and online streaming to showcase their work. What are your comments and thoughts about streaming? Is this something that the actor/theatre may have to utilize going forward into the unknown?

I wonder why that move has not been done sooner. The same platforms were there before Covid 19. Theatre creators must embrace this moment as one of those moments when the new form is being born. We are at the very beginning of a Digital Theatre that embraces on-line and live presence.

If theatre creators have not yet started experimenting with various segments of digital technology just in a year from now, they might start feeling left out. When we talk about Digital Theatre we talk about live streaming, broadcasting, and hybrid creation. This is the moment just like when the first movies appeared. They were filmed theatre. Some disregarded them but soon technology evolved and allowed film creators to experiment and create a form that has not existed before.

Now we have technology quite capable of transcending our creativity. There is great work done among some Canadian designers within the frame of Virtual and Augmented reality. What Beth Kates is doing with her explorations of Virtual Reality is truly fascinating. Those designers will influence writers and directors to start creating a new and different work. Getting not just familiar but acquiring certain level of digital literacy is a must for every theatre creator.

Going back to the fact that for three years there will be no theatre in the context and form we used to know - on-line world will be the only readily available rehearsing and performing space.

So, the unknown is how this situation will affect the structures of funding systems.

Despite all this fraught tension and confusion, what is it about performing that Covid will never destroy for you?

There is this moment just before the final piece of production is added and I, as a producer, standing in the dark looking at the stage witnessing something new coming to life. Looking at all the people gathered there for the purpose of creating a new world. That belief that the new worlds are possible and that we can make them happen is something I strongly believe in.

Nothing will ever be able to destroy that.

Zorana Kydd’s headshot by Guntar Kravis

To learn more about Birdland please visit Twitter: @BirdlandToronto Instagram: @birdlandproducer