Jump Current Performance
Jump Current crafts stories and performances, focusing on ways that innovative design and technology can illuminate live human-to-human connection.
Our mandate:
- Create and produce works of theatre and media-based performance.
- Develop artists and communities through teaching and learning in workshops, internships, and other interactive experiences.
- Research, develop, and champion uses of design and technology that deepen live human-to-human connection, and counteract alienation.
Our vision:
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- We believe theatre happens wherever people share a physical space with an intention to witness and imagine. We draw on the full range of narrative forms — (auto)biography, collective history, journalistic account, myth, fable, pop culture, documentary, and dream — because we recognize that humans are hard-wired to interpret our lives through stories. We see story as essential to our survival, and to our ability to thrive.
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- Drawing on 21st century design innovations, our vision is to craft auditory, visual, and tactile experiences, through technological and/or organic means, so that our audience’s senses entice them into the stories we tell. In addition to actor-driven, script-based work, our theatre includes elements of interactive media, game/party, and ritual. We invite people to adventure into worlds where the everyday blurs into the extraordinary, where physiology encounters circuitry, where flesh meets code.
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- We explore ways that technology can increase human connection, and help counteract people’s sense of alienation from one another. Technological expertise facilitates and distinguishes our work. The irreplaceable intimacy of humans gathering together is the beating heart of what we do.
Projects
Based on Jamie Nesbitt’s real family history, Salamandra tells the story of Jamie inheriting a 150 bedroom castle in Zakopane, Poland. Through his 90-year-old grandfather (the play’s narrator), Jamie learns how his movie star aunt and his minister of war uncle lost Salamandra Castle to the Nazi’s 70 years earlier. Swept up by the past glory of his now-fallen aristocratic family, Jamie begins re-creating Salamandra on stage — part play and part movie. But all is not as it seems. As Jamie dives deeper into the past, a darker side of pre-war Poland begins to appear, shedding new light on his family’s actions. Faced with the difficult task of how to tell the past truthfully, Jamie finds fiction and non-fiction beginning to blur. Salamandra begins to take hold of Jamie, throwing him into a quickly unraveling world where ego, blood, and time collide.
Salamandra has been developed with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council and Soulpepper Theatre. It received a work-in-progress staged reading at the 2014 rEvolver Festival in Vancouver. Watch for full production in 2023.
Created by Noah Drew, Emer O’Toole, Martin Andrews & Catalina Medina
Co-produced with Working Group Theatre (USA) & La Barracuda Carmela (Colombia)
SHOW INFO: www.theriotballet.com
Written & composed by Noah Drew
Direction & dramaturgy by Jamie Nesbitt
Arrangements & musical direction by Yawen Wang
Who we are
