Playing Around

One Trunk Theatre Club Keeping Kids Creative and Engaged

At a time of year when attention spans are shrinking and excitement about summer is growing, the Grade 1 students at École Provencher received some very special visitors.

Last June, local performing arts company One Trunk Theatre (OTT) brought its Future Adventure Club to the school, located in Winnipeg’s St. Boniface neighbourhood. Winnipeg Foundation provided $15,000 to OTT through its Community Grant program to make the theatrical workshop series possible.

Part drama education, part immersive performance and imaginative play, the Future Adventure Club asked students, “What do you want your future world to look like?”

Once a week, a trio of OTT actors visited the school in character as time travellers from a settlement on Mars in the year 3,000. Their time machine broke down, they said, and until they could get it fixed and return home, the trio needed the students to teach them about 2025 and their visions for the future.

Each session began with a 10-minute sketch to set up that day’s activity. One of the goals was to gather source material for future OTT projects, but another key goal was to create a show each session with the students’ participation.

“Our practice when we work with kids is to make them the experts and full collaborators right away,” says Andraea Sartison, founder and co-artistic producer at OTT. “Anything you could imagine, anything you could wish to see, anything that would blow your mind in school, we tried to do it.”

OTT did a one-month Future Adventure Club residency in three Grade 1 classrooms and led shorter versions of the workshop during the summer with community organizations such as Art City, the non-profit that provides free art programming in West Broadway.

If the feedback OTT received is any indication, the Future Adventure Club was a success.

“It was really fun and exciting,” one student said. “I hope they come back!”

“They brought so much fun, joy, and wonder to the classroom,” added a teacher. “Everyone was engaged. (But) ‘engaged’ isn’t a strong enough word. Everyone was completely spellbound and hanging on their every move, every word, every note. It was the absolute highlight of our school year.”

Sartison and her colleagues couldn’t have been happier.

“We’re always trying to find a balance where we’re making something that’s just as fun for them as it is for us,” she says.

The Future Adventure Club is a prime example of OTT’s work. The company’s mandate is to present new interdisciplinary theatrical work that is created collaboratively; innovation and community are among its core values. The company is committed to advancing theatre as an art form while engaging diverse artists and audiences across Manitoba.

Originally from Calgary, Sartison earned a degree in theatre and Scandinavian studies at the University of Alberta’s Camrose campus. She started OTT in 2012, not long after moving to Winnipeg to be with her partner.

“We ask the question: What else can theatre be?” Sartison says of the company. “I think we’re asking that through some pretty massive projects, even though One Trunk isn’t full-time for us.”

Throughout the last 14 years, OTT has created or produced more than 50 new works. That includes 25 “micro-productions” the company produced during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of “Knock Knock Ginger” — a socially distant, outdoor, live theatre series.

OTT commissioned more than two dozen new 10- to 15-minute plays over the course of 18 months. They were created and performed by people from the same household, with performances taking place on the audience’s front lawn while they watched through their window.

Winnipeggers could book a free show through OTT’s website. Each soundless, family-friendly play was performed at 30 houses throughout the city.

More recently, OTT staged The Martian and the Mound, which the company described as a time-bending, prairie-rooted theatrical romp that follows Dr. Phoenix Albright, an archaeologist from Mars, as they investigate a mysterious “pull” beneath a Manitoba mound.

Albright travels through pivotal moments in the region’s past in a play that asks: In the eyes of history, what makes a moment worth remembering?

OTT hosted a series of workshops in schools and community centres throughout southern Manitoba over the course of two years, doing theatre with — and interviewing — approximately 100 community members. OTT members spoke with participants about their region, collected the material, and Sartison wrote The Martian and the Mound using those contributions.

A creative team of 20 people, including community actors between the ages 11 and 60, staged the play in Neubergthal, Morden, and Winnipeg last fall. Each performance included live instrumentation from two musicians, who developed the score specifically for the production.

The play included a message conveyed by workshop participants time and time again.

“(Dr. Phoenix Albright) learns that Manitoba is beautiful, even if it’s simple,” Sartison says. “That’s the theme our collaborators in southern Manitoba wanted to share.”

OTT currently has a number of projects in development and hopes to bring the Future Adventure Club to more schools. Sartison is grateful for the grant from The Winnipeg Foundation that made the Future Adventure Club’s pilot year possible.

“Winnipeg Foundation has been a great partner of ours over the years because I think they understand the value of that community-based programming,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like when we work with The Foundation that we have to lie about who we are or what we’re doing. They’re a well-aligned partner with a similar goal, and they give us the freedom to play.”

Sartison invokes her favourite quote, from the short story “Babette’s Feast” by Danish author Karen Blixen: “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.”

“I think about that a lot,” Sartison says. “All we want to do is make the work. We just want to be trusted to do our job, and I feel with that funding for the Future Adventure Club project, we could do that.”