Introducing Festival Adjudicator Bea Quarrie

We are excited to welcome Bea Quarrie as our adjudicator for Theatre Ontario Festival, running May 14 to 18, 2014 in Sarnia.  Bea has most recently adjudicated the 2013 Western Ontario Drama League (WODL) Festival and the 2012 Eastern Ontario Drama League (EODL) One-Act Festival.

As an adjudicator, director, and performer, Bea has always believed in the transformative power of the arts.  She has directed over 85 shows, some represented Canada at International Festivals in Japan, Germany, Aruba, and Venezuela, as well as in Canada.  She has been active in educational, amateur, and professional theatre, served on regional, provincial, and national committees, arts councils, theatre companies and theatre service organizations.  She has adjudicated all over Ontario for Sears and regional Festivals, co-founded five professional theatre companies in Peterborough, taught and directed in China, performed in over 100 productions, and is the subject of two films.  In her spare time she paints and exhibits large abstracts with the Abstract Ten group of painters.  Directing Hedda Gabler (Peterborough) and Spamalot (Cobourg) back to back this past year, exemplifies the range of her interests.

The annual Theatre Ontario Festival is a showcase of outstanding community theatre productions, a classroom for passionate and dedicated community theatre artists, a celebration of excellence in community theatre, and a destination bringing together theatre lovers from across the province.  Theatre Ontario Festival will be on May 14 to 18.

Excerpted from Bea's keynote at the WODL Festival "Why do we do community theatre?":

We sacrifice time and money, bribe significant others to join us, celebrate in the successes of our efforts and bemoan missed opportunities.  We commune together in the secular church of our community performance spaces because we love this ephemeral art called live theatre.  We continually aspire to create meaningful experiences for participants on both sides of the stage, often overcoming huge challenges.

As an adjudicator in community festivals, I often ask participants about the characters in their plays—why should we like them, what makes them “real”?  I am really asking the questions that are fundamental to the meaning of each play.  It is the driving force behind the action, the aspirations that are central to that meaning contained in the objectives of the play's characters.  After all, theatre is about aspirations—it is about longing and the desire for answers.  Small theatre concerns itself with small questions, and great theatre with the great Universals.

We work in a community, and the communal ideal of excellence is contagious.  When we can see theatre that responds to our need to love rather than to our need to have an experience that does not call for changes of any kind, internal or external, once actors/directors/designers are not so fearful of censure or misunderstanding that the bums-in-seats mentality dictates, then there is hope that the tide of our introverted, unhappy time will turn and that we will once again be prepared to look at ourselves truthfully.

Joy comes from feeling the power rather than fear when faced with the necessity of choice, to seek out and enjoy, to feel the life-giving pleasure of the power of artistic choice no matter what onstage or backstage role we take on, whether it is a splendidly silly comedy or face, or a deeply moving tragedy.

For all this we must have courage.  I know it exists in community theatres around the province because I have witnessed it personally.  I want to thank participants for returning community to community theatre.  Thanks for trusting that the gift of performance will be gratefully received no matter how complex the material.

If theatre is the coming together of all the arts, I thank all live theatre practitioners for returning all those arts to life.

Read more about Theatre Ontario Festival 2014 on our website