Playing Fields is a youth driven, outdoor, participatory sound performance that takes place on your local field.
Created using interviews with youth ages 13-17 about ownership and belonging, this aural performance comes from communities around the world (Dublin, Hong Kong, Whitehorse, Richmond, BC) that have experienced some form of colonization. Playing Fields uses sport as an entry point, but the focus is on where the game takes place: the field itself. The recorded audio interviews are interspersed with live prompts from a local Halifax teenager- who directs the audience on the field - each wearing individual headsets - leading them through a series of movements that accumulate into some sort of group choreography that resembles a field game.
RUNTIME
50 Minutes
VENUE
(Behind Bicentennial Jr. High School on the baseball diamonds. Entrance on Thistle Street, near Victoria Road.)
PRICE
Pay-What-You-Can-Afford
($20 / $30 / $40)
SEATING
This is an active performance. Audiences will be led through a series of movements on a soccer field. There will be limited bench seating for anyone wishing to observe as a spectator only.
AUDIENCE NOTES
This performance is outdoors and involves moving on an uneven field; dress accordingly.
To request personal ASL interpretation, please click here.
In the case of inclement weather, tickets will be honoured at a later performance.
CAST + CREW
Billy Marchenski
PERFORMER
Billy Marchenski graduated from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. He has been working in the fields of Independent Theatre and Contemporary dance since 2000. Billy enjoyed playing all sports as a young man. He joined his local baseball team, and played community basketball till he discovered his high school drama club, and now here he is.
Nancy Tam
DEVISOR + SOUND DESIGNER
Nancy Tam (she/they) was born and raised in Hong Kong. She now lives and works on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary. She is spirited by experimentation with form and dramaturgy to create immersive sonic designs and environmental performances for on-stage and on-screen media. Her current research triangulates between sound, space, and body to examine the uncanny valley of haptics. Nancy has a penchant toward listening to quiet sounds and observing quotidian performances. Nancy is a founding member of the performance collective A Wake of Vultures, the theatre collective Five Blessings, and the visual art collective Fathom Sounds. Her compositions, performances, and collaborations have toured Europe, Asia, and North America. Under Nancy’s leadership, A Wake of Vultures’ Walking at Night by Myself played throughout Vancouver most notably at Modulus Festival 2019 before touring to Sound Forms Festival 2019 in Hong Kong, and Open Ears Festival in 2022. In 2023, Nancy concluded a 11-year run of ‘…wreckage upon wreckage…’ a durational performance installation of producing and shedding of plastic skins from dawn to dusk over two days. Nancy was a featured artist at Prague Quadrennial 2023 for the Canadian exhibition.
Emelia Symington Fedy
PRODUCER
EMELIA SYMINGTON FEDY (she/her) is a theatre creator, broadcaster and author. She is the co-founding artistic director of The Chop, and has toured their works globally. A co-writer on over thirty new Canadian theatre productions, Emelia has also been a contributing essayist to CBC radio for twenty years, telling personal stories- about motherhood, addiction, grief, and other forbidden topics- in public. Emelia’s first novel 'Skid Dogs’ was on the BC Bestseller list for 16 weeks and was nominated for a BC and Yukon Book Prize in 2024.
Emelia is a graduate of Studio 58, The SFU Writer’s Studio, and SFU’s Creative Writing Graduate Program. She lives in the woods with her family.
FESTIVAL FUNDERS
FESTIVAL SUPPORTERS
