My name is Jack Paterson (he/him).  I am Vancouver based/ launched director, devisor, dramaturg, translator, actor and creative producer whose practice has taken me across Canada, the UK, EU,  and around the world. My work has ranged from cross-cultural and trans-sensory devised creations, multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual projects to new texts, translations, and classical theatre in contemporary form.

I’m not sure how I got into theatre.  Growing up it was always around me. My parent were avid theatre goers.  I was that baby crying during act 1.  Perhaps due to being a bit of a troublemaker as a teenager, my parents enrolled me in the Carousel Theatre Teen Summer Shakespeare program.  That would be it.  Between volunteering for United Players (a company I still return to as a director) and Carousel I was hooked.  I began making my own teen angsty shows at Kitsilano Secondary , full of smoking and swearing and questionable poetry.

Through my training in New York (Circle in the Square Theatre Conservatory), we made theatre on rooftops and in the back of bars and wherever we could.  I spent my rent money on The Pelican Theatre, a 50 seat black box just off theatre row,  and slept under the risers for three months to direct my first show.  Some of it was pretty good.  Some of it wasn’t.

An empty theatre is a place of dreams.  A rehearsal hall can be a beach, a park, an abandoned building, someone’s sister’s kitchen.  A theatre can be anywhere under the sun or stars.  Whatever it is and wherever it is, it’s home.

As a theatre maker, I have been fortunate to travel extensively in my practice. I’ve worked in languages I don’t speak, with artists I didn’t know, and in cultures with practices, traditions, and world views very different from my own.

Although I believe the same to be true here at home, nowhere is it more readily evident that “your way” is only one of many than international exchange.  It forces us to engage with the unknown,  daring us to look beyond individual comfort zones and echo chambers, and compels us to set aside personal beliefs, expectations, and assumptions to engage with the often dramatically different perspectives of others.

These creative journeys are the most enriching and the ones that keep me going.  We learn about ourselves through others and that is at the heart of theatre from the actor and character, artists and audience, or two artists in collaboration.  The greater the road between these two the greater the conversation.