In this bonus episode of PuSh Play, PuSh's Artistic Director, Gabrielle Martin, speaks with Jessie Mill, co-artistic director of Festival TransAmériques (FTA) and founder of the Cliniques dramaturgiques or "dramaturgy clinics" at FTA.
PuSh Play Season 5 is coming this fall, with all new episodes featuring audacious artists from around the globe who will be showing their works at the 2027 PuSh Festival, January 20 to February 7! To get a sneak peek of this winter's program, sign up for our newsletter and subscribe for more episodes.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Jessie discuss:
- The impulse behind creating a space that prioritizes process
- How to embrace failure as a part of the artistic process
- Centring artistic workers who are normally in the background
- What it means to be a dramaturg within and beyond the festival
- Going back to old conversations during the pandemic, and becoming a living archive
- What a compressed format makes possible or disrupts
- How the clinic process itself works, step by step—and how the matchmaking is like, and unlike, speed dating
- How the dramaturg can move forward with the same vulnerability as the artist
- The culture around dramaturgy in Montreal vs. other places like Vancouver
- How local artistic ecologies reshape the clinic each time they visit
- How to make dramaturgy more visible, and to preserve its experimental nature
- Weaving together the many perspectives of people in FTA's network
About FTA
Festival TransAmériques (FTA) is an international performing arts festival dedicated to the most contemporary expressions of dance and theatre. Since its first edition in 1985, it has sought out bold, distinctive artistic work and fresh perspectives
Located in Montreal/Tio'tia:ke/Mooniyang, FTA pursues an ongoing dialogue with the city and its history, theatres, and neighbourhoods. It attracts and engages with diverse audiences, which it aims to expand and draw closer.
As a coproducing festival, FTA supports the development and circulation of new work by Quebec, Canadian, and Indigenous artists, striving to establish the best possible conditions for it to flourish. The Festival aims to strengthen local artistic communities by offering spaces for sharing and mutual inspiration.
Through presenting shows from home and abroad, FTA fosters the growth of our imagination and honours the complexity of the world. The Festival initiates memorable discoveries and powerful experiences that connect emotion with knowledge. FTA is a celebration of the performing arts taking place at springtime each year.
About Jessie Mill
As a dramaturge and artistic advisor for Festival TransAmériques from 2014 to 2021, Jessie Mill has developed a sophisticated understanding of Quebec's dance and theatre practises as well as their ties to the global performing arts scene, which she has followed closely over the past fifteen years. In June 2021, driven by a collective endeavour, together with Martine Dennewald, she became co-artistic director of FTA.
Passionate about contemporary writing, she served as the international projects advisor at the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD) from 2010 to 2014. Head of foreign programming for four editions of Dramaturgies en dialogue, she was also in charge of the centre's translation activities.
Along with Martin Faucher, who invited her to join the FTA team in 2014, she developed the FTA Playgrounds, and created the FTA Clinics in 2016. This artistic support programme designed to benefit the local theatre and dance communities quickly went global (France, Germany, Italy, Flanders), bringing together a large international community of dramaturges. In 2020, Mill co-created and hosted the FTA-produced podcast Habiter la vie. She also co-edited the book FTA : Nos jours de fête, published with Somme toute in 2018, and is currently working on a dramaturgy handbook, a joint publication forthcoming in 2022.
Fostering close ties with local artistic communities, Jessie Mill supports various theatre and dance projects as a dramaturge. She has also published several essays on the performing arts, namely in the cultural journal Liberté, where she serves on the editorial board. She occasionally works as a visiting instructor, course lecturer, or mentor at the University of Ottawa, at the National Theatre School of Canada, and at the Université du Québec à Montréal, in addition to offering cross-disciplinary workshops on dramaturgy. She has been a long-time collaborator of the pan-African festival Les Récréâtrales, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where she provides guidance to young artists as part of the LABO ELAN programme. She hopes to build bridges between her two favourite festivals.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Jessie joined the conversation from what is now known as Montreal, on the traditional territory of the Kanien'kehà:ka, a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst many First Nations including the Kanien'kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron/Wendat, Abenaki, and Anishinaabeg, .
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
