New Phoenix season announced

by | Apr 14, 2025 | Events, Graduate, Theatre, Undergraduate

While the 2024/25 academic season is coming to a close, it’s the ideal time to pick up a subscription to the 2025/26 mainstage season at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre. This year, we saw a remarkable season highlighted by productions of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The Killing Game and Twelfth Night, plus bonus shows like Eyes of the Beast and im:print 2024 — let’s see what’s coming up next year!

The season kicks off with The Salty Scent of Home (October 9-18). Directed and created by Theatre chair Yasmine Kandil, this powerful and celebratory theatre performance brings to life the stories of six newcomer immigrants and refugees, capturing their journeys as they navigate the challenges and embrace the rewards of immigration and settlement.

Interwoven with these personal stories are poignant and lyrical poems inspired by the migratory patterns of birds — symbolizing freedom, resilience and tenacity. This production is a moving tribute to the strength found in community and the universal desire to find a place to call home.*

Following that is the American classic Our Town (November 6-22). Led by guest director Soheil Parsa, this timeless Pulitzer Prize-winning classic by Thornton Wilder still captures the beauty and fragility of everyday life. Set in the small town of Grover’s Corners, the play follows the lives of its residents — ordinary people experiencing love, loss and the passage of time. Guided by the omniscient Stage Manager, audiences witness the joys and sorrows of the Gibbs and Webb families as they navigate childhood, marriage and mortality.

Despite being first performed in 1938, Our Town remains a poignant, heartwarming and deeply moving exploration of human awareness and the often-overlooked beauty of everyday moments.

 

Spring 2026 sees the staging of Sami Ibrahim’s A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain (February 12-21), directed by MFA candidate Sophia Treanor. In a land where myth and reality intertwine, we follow Elif, a young immigrant whose days are spent shearing sheep—each tuft of wool rising into the sky, forming clouds that bring rain to a distant, wealthy city. But when she becomes a mother, her priorities become clear.

Determined to secure citizenship for her child, she travels to the capital, only to encounter an unforgiving bureaucracy and an immigration system designed to keep her out. A hauntingly beautiful fable of perseverance and sacrifice.

Finally, the season rounds out with Rick Waines’ In My Day * (March 12-21), as directed by former Belfry Theatre artistic director Roy Surette. This  powerful and deeply moving play sheds light on a pivotal chapter in our history: set during the HIV/AIDS crisis, this poignant production celebrates the resilience of diverse communities who came together in extraordinary ways. Through vivid storytelling, richly drawn characters and moments of humour and joy, Victoria-based playwright Rick Waines honours the voices of those who lived, loved and endured during an era marked by loss, fear and stigma.

Actually inspired by a UVic community-based research project, In My Day brings to life the true stories of long-term survivors living with HIV and their caregivers from the first 15 years of the HIV pandemic in British Columbia. Highlighting the experiences of diverse communities — including women, people of colour, Indigenous peoples, trans individuals, and more — it gives voice to those whose perspectives have often been overlooked. “My aim with In My Day was to accurately, without losing meaning, tell the story of the first 15 years of the AIDS pandemic using the testimonies of the participants in a theatrically exciting way,” says Waines.

* The Salty Scent of Home is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded performance, while In My Day is partially supported by SSHRC funding. 

Subscriptions to the 2025-26 Phoenix Theatre season are now on sale for just $51-$68, which lets you choose 3 or 4 plays from our season and save up to 50% off single ticket prices. For more subscription benefits, please see the Phoenix Tickets site. 

Annual Visual Arts BFA exhibit opens April 11

by | Apr 2, 2025 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Visual Arts

Once a year — and for one week only — UVic’s entire Visual Arts building gets transformed into Vancouver Island’s largest pop-up gallery of emerging artists! Don’t miss your chance to see If Traces Remain, an exciting exhibit of contemporary art by 35 graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts students: expect an inspiring mix of work ranging from painting, sculpture and photography to digital, installations and more.

Please join us for the opening reception from 7-10pm Friday, April 11, where you can meet the student artists, view their work, chat with faculty members and celebrate the creative accomplishments of this year’s graduating Visual Arts class. The free exhibit then runs 10am-6pm daily to April 20 throughout the Visual Arts building.

We’re also thrilled that UVic’s Alumni Association is hosting a special reception and viewing for the exhibit from 7-9pm Saturday, April 12, which is open to all UVic alumni!

Distinguished Alumni Awards: Tania Willard

by | Mar 31, 2025 | Alumni, Award, donor, Graduate, indigenous, News, Visual Arts

We congratulate 2025 Presidents’ Alumni Award recipient Tania Willard, a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. A graduate of the Department of Visual Arts (BFA, 1998), the work of Kamloops-born Willard activates connection to land, culture and family, centring art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. 

“I learned a lot about myself in [UVic’s] art program,” she says. “Four years is enough time to decide whether you are dedicated to art or you aren’t. I made it through that program, and knew it was still something I was passionate about. I also knew I wanted it to serve not only art for art’s sake but to widen it out to think about social engagement, think about activism, think about community—and that was through my Indigenous heritage as a Secwépemc person. In those days, there was a lot of activity on campus in music and art, in activism and in Indigenous rights, and I found my voice through those spaces.”

Currently based on the Neskonlith Indian Reserve, Willard’s artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Her work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project NY, Kamloops Art Gallery, Belkin gallery and the Anchorage Museum, among others.

Her suggestion for current students and emerging artists? “Seek out Indigenous professors and students to support you,” she says. “I took Christine Welsh’s class—she was a Métis professor in Women’s Studies—and that was the first time in my life I had had an Indigenous teacher and that was a significant moment for me. And now it’s not as uncommon to have that experience. We have Indigenous faculty, I am Indigenous faculty, but at the time in my high school, my career and everything, I had never had that opportunity and that was important. I would encourage all students to seek out belonging and community and connection.”

An acclaimed career

In 2016, Willard received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Willard is a 2024 fellow with the Doris and Jack Shadbolt fellowship at Simon Fraser University. She is also an assistant professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan in syilx territories. 

“Art can reach people in a way that’s different—it speaks a language that tries to connect with us in our hearts,” she says. “That’s been important for me. I don’t think it’s the only effective means. I think it can work alongside many other methods and practices, but for me it’s been the way that I can commit to because it nourishes, it communicates and it’s relational and it can deal with difficult subjects… [Art] helps me vision different outcomes. It’s a universal problem-solving technique. People use it in the sciences, in the humanities. We need that creativity no matter who we are to help us solve problems and nourish ourselves and grow.”

Speed round!

What I’d do with an extra hour of free time: 

“I would continue to work on basketry, which is also something I do that is relaxing and balances everything out.”

One food I can’t resist: 

“Smoked salmon.”

My go-to karaoke song: 

“I don’t do karaoke very often. However, I recently did karaoke for my friend Peter Morin’s art project, Love Songs to End Colonization. And I did a version of the Violent Femmes’ ‘Blister in the Sun.’ In the past I’ve also done the Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’.”

My secret talent: 

“I won some dance contests when I was much younger.”

Skill I wish I possessed: 

“I wish I could do more construction, build more things… like lovely library-style bookshelves.”

Something great I’ve read recently: 

Let’s Become Fungal!: Mycelium Teachings and the Arts: Based on Conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, Artists, Curators, Feminists and Mycologists.

One cool thing about where I live: 

“I live on reserve, and I live near the forest edge. I love how the forest takes care of everything. Life, death, food, ecology. I have great respect and continue to learn every day of my life from how the forest takes care of things in a way that contrasts the ways we have to have systems for food, for garbage, for waste, and we build up these separate systems to take care of all that. But the forest innately does that.”

Read more about UVic’s 2025 Alumni Awards here

Sean Holman presents at My Climate Story summit

by | Mar 28, 2025 | climate, donor, Writing

When 20 of the best climate storytellers from around the world present their ideas at the international My Climate Story project on April 10, UVic will be in the room as well: Writing professor Sean Holman was selected out of nearly 100 submissions to share a lightning talk about the ongoing impact of his Climate Disaster Project. Hosted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media and the Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute, My Climate Story is a live, online, two-hour climate storytellers’ summit which you can watch for free.

About the Climate Disaster Project

Founded at UVic in 2021, the Climate Disaster Project is an international teaching newsroom that has trained hundreds of students at 13 post-secondary institutions to work on the frontlines of this ongoing humanitarian crisis by creating an extensive archive of eyewitness accounts.

“Educators at post-secondary institutions across Canada and around the world have spent hundreds of hours teaching students how to compassionately help survivors share their stories,” says Holman, UVic’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental & Climate Journalism. “Our students then take that knowledge into the community to co-create a people’s history of climate change that honours the human dignity of their experiences.”

To date, over 300 testimonies have been collected from disaster survivors and shared in local, national and international publications, as well as national radio and television broadcasts. 

About the Climate Storytellers Summit 

Over 20 speakers will present at the Climate Storytellers’ Summit on April 10. Join them live online to hear from people harnessing the power of climate storytelling across ages and stages, topics and time zones. The diverse lineup of speakers includes a journalist, poet, data analyst, healthcare executive, dancer, author, anthropologist, photographer, professor, oral historian, indigenous rights advocate, high school and college students, retired park rangers, and documentary filmmakers, among others.

Each will share a lively five-minute presentation about the ways that climate stories can disrupt business as usual, grapple with history and inspire hope. The summit and its companion documentation and resource hub will offer a platform to present climate storytelling work and to learn and connect with others working in this important space.

Stream the Climate Storytellers’ Summit live on Thursday, April 10. Full details and free registration here.

New exhibit & partnership

In other Climate Disaster Project news, Kamloops-based independent community news outlet The Wren has  published a series of testimonies from climate disaster survivors around the city and as far away as Bolivia, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka.

Thompson Rivers University journalism professor Jennifer Chrumka has led the co-creation of these 24 testimonies with her students, and also arranged for short text excerpts to be presented as an art exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery in April: Fragments from the Frontlines: Voices and Portraits of Survival, featuring photographs from Jess Beaudin.

This is just the latest effort by the Climate Disaster Project to raise the voices of climate impacted communities to make sure their experiences aren’t forgotten and their knowledge is shared locally, regionally, and globally. 

“I don’t think that this is something that anybody can prepare for”, says TRU student Reagan Wilkinson, who shares her experience of 2024 hurricanes Helene and Milton with Climate Disaster Project contributor Hamida Marufu.

 

Distinguished Alumni Award winner: Chari Arespacochaga

by | Mar 27, 2025 | Alumni, Award, donor, Graduate, News, Theatre

Chari Arespacochaga is an acclaimed theatre director and educator at the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University (FSU) where she is the Director of the MFA Directing Program. Her theatrical direction credits include Rent, Kinky Boots (Short North Stage), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (University of California), Amadeus and Stupid Kids (Phoenix Theatre, Victoria), 9 Minutes (for PopUP Theatrics NYC), Rock of Ages, The Full Monty, Disney’s Tarzan, Spring Awakening, Legally Blonde, Altar Boyz and Into the Woods, among others. At FSU, she initiated and designed Performing Climate Change, a course that provides students from different colleges and departments critical and creative ways of approaching the climate crises; and recently directed an acclaimed production of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.

The recipient of a 2025 Emerging Alumni Award, Chari graduated with an MFA from the Department of Theatre (2015), and her scholarship, artistic work and teaching is centred on theatre as necessary cultural work for social transformation and providing her audience and students new ways of engaging with theatre through the lens and lived experiences of an immigrant BIPOC artist-scholar. 

“My experiences at UVic solidified for me how making theatre coincides with making community,” she says. “It made me realize in concrete, palpable ways how we cultivate our life gets reflected in the work that I do as a theatre director and affects how I set up workplaces for people in making theatre. It also made me think about new ways we need to be creating stories and who else should we be inviting to the table to tell those stories.”

Born in the Philippines (Manila) but currently based in Tallahassee, Florida, Chari is in the process of adapting a series of stories about a culturally diverse group of princesses/superheroines called the Guardian Princesses into musicals for young audiences as part of her commitment to developing new works. Other developmental collaborations include a new musical called Missing and a feminist retelling of Macbeth entitled Em.

A scene from Amadeus, which Chari directed at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre in 2015

Unlearning process

Early influences include Sesame Street, Electric Company, movie musicals and Saturday morning cartoons. “I remember clearly those vignettes in Electric Company where Rita Moreno was running a film set and everything would be falling apart,” she recalls. “She was shooting something about a pirate on a ship and the mast would fall on them. And I thought that was great. Maybe, even then, I could recognize that’s probably stress I can deal with and thrive on.”

One of the key things she’s learned, however, is the ability to unlearn that there’s only one way of doing something. “That there’s only one way to rehearse, that there’s only one way to tell a story . . . I try to unlearn whatever I thought were those absolutes all the time. Some are easier to unlearn than others.”

“You’re teaching in a classroom, and you can prep and prep and you should have a plan, but it’s not about you. It needs to become about the students. I am running a rehearsal, but it’s not about me, it’s about the show. It’s about making the actors feel their best possible selves. It’s about making my creative collaborators, whether they’re designers or stage managers, feel like they have ownership of the show and the story that we’re telling.”

Power of story

Chari has long believed in the power of story to affect an audience. “I was always emotionally available to believing a story and letting it move me,” she says. “I remember crying the first time I watched Dumbo as a toddler. There was always a connection to how stories can move you and make you think about things… Story is a good way to change people’s minds. Even if you don’t change their mind in a moment, there’s enough power in the seed that it might plant so if even three or four people can ask a new question of themselves about how we deal with the world or how we live, I think that’s worth the telling of the story.”

Speed round!

Something that brings me joy: 

“A really good rehearsal. A moment when you recognize, ‘Oh, my students have grown up.’”

One food I can’t resist: 

“Some days it would be Japanese food, some days it would be something Spanish like Jamón or cheese. It’s very hard to resist cheese.”

A sport that I follow: 

“Does shopping count as a sport? Most recently, I was following women’s soccer because the MFA directing candidate I am mentoring was directing The Wolves, and that’s about a young female soccer team, so we were watching a lot of women’s soccer.”

My go-to karaoke song: 

“I’m Filipino and my absolute act of resistance is to not believe in karaoke. When we’re at a karaoke joint, I just say ‘It’s my day off, sorry.’”

Something great that I’ve watched or read recently: 

“I thought Wicked was pretty great. I am right now reading a lot about Sweeney Todd, which I think is a fantastic script and all the research accompanying it.”

Favourite place to travel: 

“New York City always feels like home to me. London is becoming a nice second home, and I have to say wherever the next show takes me becomes a favourite place to travel.”

 Read more about UVic’s 2025 Alumni Awards here