When Annette Loiselle co-founded the SkirtsAfire Festival in 2012, it was to help close the gender gap between theatre performers and the audience that paid to see them. “When I started looking at the statistics, they were brutal. The best statistics said there was less than 35 per cent representation of women working in theatre, in spite of the fact that our audiences are made up of 60 per cent women. At that point in my career, I was like, we have to do something about this.”
Today, Loiselle and her team have done plenty, turning the original four-day fest on Alberta Ave into a 11-day event in venues all around Strathcona and into the French Quarter, featuring over 150 performers, visual artists, singer-songwriters, poets and comedians.
But this will be Loiselle’s last festival as artistic director. For the past year, she’s mentored Montreal-born Amanda Goldberg, who first saw SkirtsAFire while working on her MFA in directing at the University of Alberta in 2019. The two had actually met back when Goldberg was an eager newcomer connecting with the local scene.
“I kind of made an effort to meet a lot of the artistic directors in the city, just so I could get a sense of whether that community is the right place for me,” says Goldberg, who came from Montreal’s feminist theatre world. “I met [Loiselle] for coffee, and we talked about SkirtsAFire. I didn’t know she was going to be stepping down, but we had like a two hour meeting and just talked about how we’re trying to elevate the voices of women in the arts, and I remember walking away from that meeting being like, I really hope I can work for that company in the future.”
Loiselle says she knew Amanda was right for the job even before she officially applied, because of the “insightful, clever questions” she asked about the role. And says she’ll “never forget reading her interview proposal for the mainstage play she would do if she was chosen for the job. It was an inspiring project that excited me and I suddenly felt a great weight lifting from my shoulders, because I recognized immediately she could carry on the legacy, and had ideas and skills that were beyond my own capacity to take SkirtsAfire into fresh and exciting directions.”
It all starts the way it’s always started, with the A-Line Variety Show that gives audiences a taste of what’s to come. “It’s really an explosive kickoff to the festival. It’s all five-minute performances from a bunch of different artists all in one night, and it gives you a real feel for the festival because you see little snippets of shows that you can see later in the week,” Loiselle says.
This year, the comedy is on the second-last night of the festival, and the music takes a more intimate turn, with singer-songwriter performances instead of full-blown bands, including a song circle, in the festival’s second week.
The festival’s main stage play, Mermaid Legs, directed by Loiselle, marks the first time SkirtsAFire has commissioned a play for its main stage production. It’s a process that was over two years in the making, initially inspired by a Ballet Edmonton online performance during the lockdowns.
“It was probably one of the only online performances during that time that actually came through the screen, grabbed my heart, and made me think about how powerful dance is in telling a story,” Loiselle says. Like many people, she struggled during the height of the lockdowns (not only with COVID itself), and that collective struggle inspired Loiselle to deal with mental-health issues in the work.
But in her struggle to create this work, Loiselle thankfully wasn’t alone. She reached out to Beth Graham to write the piece and Ainsley Hillyard to choreograph it. “It was really exciting to put the team together,” she says. “I knew that [Graham] was the writer for this. And when the two of us talked about a choreographer, we knew [Hillyard] was the best choice. It’s been an incredible process and I’m very lucky to be able to create a piece from scratch with these two very brilliant creators.”
Brilliant creators fill the festival, which itself will fill new spaces this year, including La Cité Francophone and the Walterdale Theatre (which will host the festival’s Indigenous programming). And there’s The Shoe Project, which shares stories of refugee and immigrant women through the lens of a shoe.
The 12-year-old festival’s expansion further cements it as an institution in a city full of institutional festivals, and its ability to change is a big reason why. Goldberg says it’s been a great year of mentorship and learning, “but also of reevaluating the organization and seeing what direction we want to go in, in the future. This year is really an amalgamation of the curation of [Loiselle], and my own work, and that overlap will happen for kind of the first and last time, before hopefully stepping into a bit of a new chapter for SkirtsAFire.”
Working with Goldberg over the last year, Loiselle knows she’s more than capable of carrying the torch, and can’t wait to see the new artistic lands she’ll discover with it. “It’s time to step back because I know I can only take SkirtsAfire so far,” she says. “It still feels like a miracle how we were able to grow it to where it is today, but I always knew I wanted to make space for another visionary, hard working woman — someone whose experience, passion and vision could take SkirtsAfire further and continue to develop and grow a whole new set of artists and audiences for the festival.”
Watch the artistic fire burn, February 29 to March 10.
