THIS IS AN ARCHIVE OF AN EVENT THAT ALREADY HAPPENED.

UNDER PRESSURE: A CABARET

Wednesday, March 23, 7:30 PM - 8529 Gateway Blvd.

About THE CABARET:

This cabaret evening showcases 4 short dramatic works about courage, resilience, and how pressure inevitability creates diamonds. The evening begins with excerpts from the work of four up-and-coming playwrights’ Marina Mair-Sanchez, Amanda Samuelson, Amena Shehab & Joanna Blundell Part 2 features a short one-act play by Leslea Kroll The Light Fishers that asks us to consider what it means to care for the most vulnerable among us.

About The Light Fishers By Leslea Kroll:

The Light Fishers is a meditation on compassion and compassion fatigue. The play asks us to consider what it means to care for the most vulnerable among us.

About The Funeral By Marina Mair-Sanchez:

The Funeral is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, site-specific play which celebrates life, and the memories and stories we all have to tell. It is an exploration of what it means to be away from those you love, and how people stay together against unimaginable odds kilometres away from everything they know.

About No Women’s Land By Amena Shehab & Joanna Blundell

Two women from different worlds take flight, one heading north, the other heading south, and their lives collide in an unexpected place. Running from war and heartbreak, for one night, they seek peace in this no man’s land.

About Pressure By Amanda Samuelson

Grace lives alone, feels alone, and finds it utterly impossible to leave or clean the dirty, unkempt apartment in which she’s trapped herself. Through conversations with her therapist and interactions with her (ex) partner and mother, Grace tries to come to terms with the ways she has been hurt and the ways she has hurt others, all while she battles the voice in her head that constantly puts her down.

Leslea Kroll (she/her) is an Edmonton based playwright and poet.  An excerpt of her first play Domesticatrix was featured in The Martha Stewart Projects at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Leslea’s play Zed BC: Genus Lemus won the Alberta Playwrights’ Network annual Playwrighitng Competition. Her play White Count Up aired nationally on CBC’s Radio One’s Ten First Acts.  Her plays Swallow, Wellspring and Stains address the impacts of fossil fuel extraction on individuals and the environment. Ride the Red Thread is a collection of poems inspired by trips on Edmonton public transit.  Leslea is delighted to be diving into The Light Fishers with the amazing Workshop West team at Springboards.

Marina Mair-Sánchez (she/her) is an immigrant performer/creator originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, currently residing in amiskwaciwâskahikan (ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ) colonially known as Edmonton. Growing up her main mode of artistic expression was dance, she trained in ballet for many years, achieving Grades II-VII in the British Royal Academy of Dance system, and competed in national festivals in contemporary dance and jazz across Mexico.

She immigrated to Edmonton when she was 19 years-old to pursue her BFA in Acting degree from the University of Alberta. Since graduating, she has had the pleasure of being a part of the Edmonton theatre community, mostly as a performer, for many companies including The Fox Den Collective, Grindstone Theatre, Catch the Keys Productions, Theatre Yes, and the Alberta Workers’ Health Centre among others.

More recently, she has been exploring her artistic expression through creation and writing. She’s interested in theatre that crosses boundaries and blurs the lines between different art forms, while also incorporating multiple languages. An example of her work includes “Frida y Su Reflejo” (“Frida Through the Looking Glass”), a bilingual movement-based show about the life and death of Frida Kahlo, which was staged at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts with the support of the Edmonton Arts Council.

She has also written a number of short plays including “Rooftop Murmurs,'' which was recently selected as a winner of the inaugural EdmonTEN festival and performed at the Grindstone Theatre in September of 2020.

Amena Shehab (she/her) is an Arab writer and actor. She studied at the High Institute of Theater in Damascus, Syria and worked with Al Jazeera Children’s Channel and theater companies in Syria and Qatar. Her first acting role in Edmonton was Nine Parts of Desire with The Maggie Tree Theater Company in 2017. She performed the one-woman show Hagar, about a woman escaping the war in Syria, with Alma Theater Company. Other roles have included the Nurse in Medea, the mother in Harun, Samar in FOB, Amena in E-Day, Kumar in All That Binds Us, devised and co-written with five other artists for Azimuth Theater and Here There Be Night, with Workshop West. She co-wrote Honey and Nuts for the Sprouts Festival in 2016. She values the opportunity presented by this work to share her experiences as an immigrant with other Canadians. Most recently, she played Antiope, a devoted warrior, in The Amazonamachy. In 2022, she is honored to be coordinating the second cohort of The Shoe Project, delivered by Workshop West in Edmonton, to help female immigrants tell their own stories. Writing projects in development include After the Trojan Women and No Women’s Land. Amena works full-time as team lead and facilitator on the Civic Engagement by Newcomer Youth program at EMCN.

Joanna Blundell (she/her) is a British-Irish playwright, writing for theater since 2016, when she moved back to the UK from eight years in Qatar covering the Arab Spring uprisings. She worked at Al Jazeera’s global news headquarters as a TV news producer and editor and has also worked in the UK for the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 News.  She has co-written two plays with Arab writer Amena Shehab. After the Trojan Women (working title) will be workshopped and have a public reading in the UK in spring 2022. No Woman’s Land is currently being updated for a public reading in Edmonton in spring 2022. In 2021, she wrote her first solo full-length play,Twice Born, about a woman living alone in the woods, with an opinionated crow for company. She’s interested in how humans communicate with the natural world, especially at times of crisis and has studied at the UK’s Schumacher College and The West Country School of Myth. She recently completed the Poetics of Imagination MA at Dartington Arts School with distinction, developing her artistic practice including embodied movement. 

Amanda Samuelson (she/her) is a writer, actor, and producer currently based out of Edmonton, Alberta. She was born and raised in Grande Prairie, Alberta, where her passion for theatre began. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts BFA program, with a major in Theatre and a minor in Creative Writing. She spent the majority of her time at NYU in the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, where she first discovered her love of playwriting. In her work as a playwright, Amanda loves to explore all that makes us human, especially our own shortcomings, imperfections, and ugliest moments. Amanda’s plays have received recognition in festivals and competitions locally, nationally, and internationally. Select writing credits include Rekindle (Stagestruck Festival 2019), Gate D98 (EDMONten 2020; PEP Productions’ 10-Minute Play Festival 2020; Fusion Theatre’s “The Seven” Festival of 10-Minute Plays 2020), My First Greek Sunset (EDMONten 2021; Thousand Faces Festival 2021), A Visit (Little Lion Theatre Company’s New Play Series 2021), and her full-length play Pressure (Peep Show! Unproduced Play Runner-Up 2019; Fire Exit Theatre’s Scripts on Fire New Play Competition Honourable Mention 2020). Amanda has been writing Pressure since 2018. It started as a 2-page scene for a playwriting class at university and has kept expanding ever since. It explores one person’s experience with anxiety and depression, and highlights the difficult but necessary journey to recovery. Amanda is very grateful for the opportunity to showcase an excerpt of this play at Springboards along with other talented local playwrights!