courageous and often improbable executions of hair-brained ideas in order to make beauty for this brave new world

About Birdbone Theatre

Birdbone Theatre makes puppet shows from scratch and plays them live for the young and the old. We strive to make puppet theatre that might become a house for beauty, for remembering old songs and stories, for wild imaginings and for laughter in hard times. We keep in mind that theatre is a way by which we can know the times we live in, and a way by which the times might recognize us.

We craft our shows with materials at hand, layering techniques, and a vast musicality. We do not banish the unfinished and imperfect in our shows, instead we often play our work in its experimental stages to learn about it. We play music, sing and dance to keep it company. Birdbone theatre is Possibilitarian at heart because it was forged at the Bread and Puppet Theatre under the work of Peter Schumann, and also because it has no choice.

Birdbone Theatre is Aleksandra Bragoszewska (puppeteer, artistic director) and Alison Gowan (puppeteer, musical director). Alison Boyce works with us on a per-project basis. The theatre is based in Lyndhurst, Ontario.

Recent Collaborators

In 2024, we welcome the magnificent Ekaterina, talented and accomplished songstress whose breadth of work can be heard in her ensembles BLISK and Meden Glas, folk metal group Protokult, and Russian folk-rock band Katüsha. We will study Slavic traditional and composed music with her to braid into the musical landscape of Broom Dance.

As we tour Broom Dance this winter, we welcome also multi-faceted magician Haley Sarfeld, musician and writer, creator of the Lindworm’s Cabaret, who is enthusiastically rowing the little cardboard boat of our operation over the strange waters of ‘social media’, fashioning rickety little bridges for little old us to reach some of you across the topography of technological advancement.

History

Birdbone Theatre has toured original works nationally and internationally. We play theatres and festivals and also enjoy making theatre wherever we are invited. We have performed our work in kitchens, bike shops, schools, cafes, squatted hospitals, barns and driveways, as well as at Montreal’s Phenomena Festival, Cafe Concret, Chants de Vielles, the Picton Ice Box Festival, The Department of Illumination’s Lantern Festival, the Skeleton Park Arts Festival. We have toured our work across Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, the eastern states of the U.S.A., and in theatres in Athens, Ioanina and Patras, Greece.

When we can, we love to share and hone our craft by offering workshops to people of all ages and persuasions.

The company was founded by Alison Boyce and Aleksandra Bragoszewska in 2012 to apprentice courageous storytelling by way of puppet spectacle. Artist and puppeteer Kristine White, hurdy gurdy player and multi-instrumentalist Alison Gowan, and percussionist Christos Smirnios made and toured shows with us in 2015 and 2016. In 2017 the theatre underwent a structural reorganization.