Hi there, I’m Nicola–pleased to meet you!
I am a theatre artist residing in Langley, BC: Kwantlen, Katzie, Semiahmoo and Matsqui territory.
While I am a trained actor, my current focus and passion is directing. I started directing in 2017 for local companies in the Fraser Valley area, and then applied and was accepted to a year-long directing apprenticeship at Pacific Theatre, a professional theatre company in Vancouver. After the apprenticeship, I founded Little Dipper Theatre Co. along with some local artists with a passion for contributing to the theatre culture in Langley, BC. We believed there was room in the Langley theatre ecology for a semi-professional theatre company that focuses on women’s stories, Canadian works, new works and classic scripts. To our surprise, we have found ourselves meeting a need in Vancouver as well, with many actors from Vancouver auditioning for us and bussing out to rehearsals. We work with artists all around the Fraser Valley at all levels of experience. I continue to work both with Little Dipper as well as other local theatre companies.
Tech Week for Gallery 7 Theatre’s Pride and Prejudice
How I Work
I value emotional and physical safety. I work to create an environment where artists feel comfortable expressing their needs and concerns. I do check in and check out activities that help monitor the team’s emotional space. I teach actors how to let go of rehearsals at the end of the day, especially with emotionally challenging plays. I share my own struggles when appropriate to help set a tone of acceptance. The rehearsal hall is a safe space for tears.
I value professionalism and artistic rigour. I communicate clear and reasonable deadlines and hold artists to them. I create an environment where artists are motivated to do their best work to create the best product we can together. I believe that no matter the experience level, there is no greater joy for an artist than creating the highest quality work we can.
I value kindness and positivity. I endeavor to speak only kindly and respectfully to any artist I work with. If something sensitive needs to be discussed, it will be done in private. I believe actors are extremely brave. Stage managers are gold. Designers are exciting and powerful. Playwrights are putting their heart and soul on the stage for all to see. Producers give so much to the art they love. Everyone deserves respect and to be honoured for what they do.
I value specificity. Any direction I give is specific and as clear as it can possibly be. I believe actors especially crave direction or feedback, and so I endeavor to give each actor feedback at every rehearsal. I am constantly working to improve on how and when I give feedback. I also guide actors to be clear in their motives, choices, movements.
I value collaboration. Whether in design work, scene work, movement work, vocal work, individual work or group work, I crave input and ideas from the artists I work with. I see the role of director as a facilitator. The successful rehearsal room is where artists actively and passionately give their ideas and insights. The best ideas come out this way. I value working with artists that are active in the creation process as opposed to simply looking to me for ideas or direction: in other words the director “works with” and doesn’t “tell”. Even though I do a lot of solo prep work beforehand, we come up with the final ideas in the room together.
I value structure and ritual. I believe artists work best when they feel well taken care of. I start on time and end on time. I send the rehearsal schedule out a couple of weeks in advance. I only call actors when necessary. I work to ensure that actors feel calm and prepared by the time Tech Week comes around.
Publicity Shoot for Little Dipper Theatre’s Wild Light
What I believe about Theatre
Theatre is a unique art form that brings a group of people together into a room to be present together, empathizing with the humans they see on stage. It is live and in person. The audience can feel the energy radiating off of the actors and cannot skip ahead or mute…there is a contract of trust between the audience and the performers, an agreement to be present with each other for a period of time. What a beautiful thing. There is nothing else quite like it.
Theatre (and stories in general) can be healing. They can help us process difficult things one step removed, creating a safe space for the brain to work hard to understand. Stories are a training ground for real life, so when a similar event occurs we have an idea of how we would like to proceed.
Good stories bring disparate feelings and ideas together, encouraging the brain to make connections, to have mixed feelings. Any scenario where people practice having mixed feelings and practice understanding things from multiple sides is healing to our often polarized world.
The purpose of art is to ask questions. It is NOT to tell people how or what to think (propaganda).
Stories reflect people back to themselves. The more true to life the people on stage are, the better the story is (i.e. complex people, complex situations, complex emotions. Life is complex, life is not black and white).
Acting and theatre is about radical empathy for other humans: do not judge your character. Take this with you into real life as well.
Good art isn’t necessarily comfortable art. If you have patrons emailing you to complain because what you made pushed their buttons, it may be a sign of success.
Opening Night for Little Dipper Theatre’s Common Grace
My Background
I immigrated to Canada from South Africa as a child in 2000. Because of this difficult experience of having to start from scratch socially and culturally, I am drawn to stories that explore the bonds between people: themes of community, connection, and family.
I grew up in Christian circles and was raised very conservatively. My faith background is a part of me that I am constantly processing and wrestling with, as I have received some significant emotional injuries from certain faith circles, enough to be diagnosed with C-PTSD. This part of my journey is what causes me to be drawn to plays that are existential, have characters that wrestle with their past or with trauma, have characters and storylines that are complex and not black and white, and also to stories that have some sort of hope or redemptive quality to help ease the trauma journey.
Yes, I got my BA in Theatre in 2007 from Trinity Western University, a small (lately rather notorious) Christian liberal arts university with a small but passionate theatre department that was at the time run by some faces familiar to the Vancouver theatre scene like Ron Reed, Angela Konrad, Rob Salvador, Craig Erikson, as well as many others. The over 30-year-old program was recently shut down in a controversial move by the very conservative current administration. It is strange to have a degree from a department that no longer exists and from a university with an administration that does not value my degree, but I am the artist I am today partly because of the training I received there.
I embrace the gifts and challenges my past gives me, and am so thankful for the many different kinds of people theatre brings my way. Each different life I encounter is a new way to view the world and a new perspective on my own journey.
