Our Team 

Kate Alton (Co-Creator/Choreographer)

Kate Alton is an award-winning Canadian dancer and choreographer who has performed on stages around the globe. She is a former member of Toronto Dance Theatre and is Artistic Director of Crooked Figure Dances in Toronto. Kate creates thought provoking, emotionally engaging theatrical dances that are as much explorations of the mind as of the body, working with writers, directors and vocal coaches to develop inter-disciplinary performance works that pack an intellectual and emotional punch. Her work has been presented across Canada and in Europe. Highlights from the recent past include Associate Direction and Choreography for The Exchange Rate Collective's Dora award winning Appetite, performing James Kudelka's works In Paradisum and 15 Heterosexual Duets for Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie in China, Mongolia, the USA and Canada, and firstthingsfirst productions' sold-out shows Namesake and Namesake:Three. Kate is choreographer and co-creator/director, with Ross Manson, of the dance and sound poetry production The Four Horsemen Project, which garnered four Dora Mavor Moore awards including Best Direction by Kate and Ross Manson and has toured nationally and internationally. NOW Magazine named Kate as one of the best Toronto dance artists of the past twenty years.

NEEMA BICKERSTEH (Co-Creator/Soprano)

Neema Bickersteth was born and raised in Albert to a family from Sierra Leone, and now based in Toronto. Bickersteth is a Canadian soprano known for her skills as a singer, an actor and a maker of multi-disciplinary performance. She has performed many operatic roles in both Canada and Europe, including Pamina from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, the title role of Léhar's The Merry Widow and the soprano lead in Dark Star Requiem for the Laminate Festival and Tapestry new Opera. Outside of opera, Neema has been honoured to perform for the XIVth Dalai Lama, Shirin Ebadi and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She has received both Bachelor and Master of Music degrees (Opera) from the University of British Columbia and hasbeen nominated for two Dora Mavor Moore awards for Outstanding Performance in Musical Theatre.

Cameron Davis (Associate Projection Designer)

Cameron Davis is a projection designer who has worked on projection designer: Ultrasound (Cahoots Theatre); Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream (Pacific Opera Victoria); Up The Garden Path (Obsidian Theatre); Domesticated (Company Theatre); Sweet Charity, You Never Can Tell (Shaw Festival); Life, Death, and the Blues, CRASH (Theatre Passe Muraille); Watching Glory Die (Canadian Rep Theatre); Six Essential Questions, Every Letter Counts (Factory Theatre); The Gay Heritage Project (Buddies in Bad Times); Yukonstyle, Cruel and Tender (Canadian Stage); Beyond the Farm Show, The Book of Esther (Blyth Festival); Feng Yi Ting (Spoleto Festival USA/Lincoln Center Festival/Luminato Festival); Chile con Carne (Alameda Theatre);  Card Table Artifice, Natural Magick (Magicana/Luminato); Swimmer (68) (Hopscotch Collective); Rock 'n' Roll (Canadian Stage/Citadel); video designer: Dance Marathon (bluemouth inc - various international festivals); lighting designer: How Do I Love Thee? (Canadian Rep Theatre); They Say he Fell, BIRTH, Tjorvi the Flaccid (Pandemic Theatre). Cameron also teaches and mentors projection design at the National Theatre School.

Charlotte Dean (Costume Design)

Charlotte Dean is a Canadian set and costume designer who has an extensive list of design credits from theatres across the country.  She is at home with new works and classics alike.  Stages where her work has been seen include the Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival, the Canadian Stage, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, the Citadel Theatre, the Tarragon, the Neptune Theatre, Theatre Calgary, the Grand Theatre, and the Charlottetown Festival.  She is a 5 time Dora Award winner with numerous nominations for the Toronto theatre prize, and she has multiple nominations for Edmonton's Sterling Award, and Calgary's Betty Mitchell award. Charlotte is the 2009 recipient of the Virginia and Myrtle Cooper Award in Costume Design. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University.

fettFilm -  Momme Hinrichs and Torge Møller (Production Design)

fettFilm combines video with other media the video artists Momme Hinrichs and Torge Møller primarily want to create multifaceted works of art which do not merely decorate the stage or coexist with it but instead blend various artistic levels to achieve a synthesized whole. In addition to the Salzburg, Bregenz, Vienna and Bayreuth Festivals, the two artists have worked with the State Opera Unter den Linden Berlin; Akademie der Kunst, Berlin; Deutsch Oper, Berlin; the Vienna State Opera; Theatre an der Wien, Vienna; La Monnaie in Brussels; the Bavarian State Opera, Munich; the Semperoper Dresden; L’Opera nationale de Paris; the Komische Opera Berlin; the State Opera Hamburg; Susanne Linke; the Hungarian State Opera, Budapest; and many other small and large European theatres. They have also successfully realized projects in North America and India to great critical acclaim. In Toronto, they have worked with director Ross Manson, and his company, Volcano, on The Africa Trilogy / Another Africa.

KAITLIN HICKEY (ASSOCIATE PROJECTION DESIGN)

Kaitlin Hickey’s recent theatre credits include Associate Projection Design, R-E-B-E-C-C-A (Theatre Passe Muraille), Production Designer, Chapel Arm (Mindless Theatrics), Technical Director & Associate Lighting Designer NIGHT (Human Cargo), Production Manager & Lighting Designer, The Book of Judith (Selfconscious Theatre), Associate Video Designer, Beatrice and Virgil (Factory Theatre), Production Manager Weather the Weather (Theatre Columbus). She is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada.

Reza Jacobs (Composition) 

Reza Jacobs is an award winning composer, lyricist, sound designer and music director, known for his versatility in style and genre. His credits include sound design and composition for the Shaw Festival, Factory Theatre, Volcano Theatre, Cahoots Theatre, Acting Up Stage Theatre, the Luminato Festival, & Harbourfront’s World Stage Festival. As Music Director, he has won Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Caroline, or Change (Acting Up Stage, Best Music Direction & Best Musical 2012), Assassins (TIFT, Birdland Theatre, Award for Best Musical, 2010) and London Road (Canadian Stage Co.). He is also the resident Canadian Music Director for Andrea Martin’s one-woman show, Everything Must Go.

RICHARD JORDAN (UK Producer)

Richard Jordan Productions is a Laurence Olivier and TONY Award-winning production company based in London, England, under the artistic leadership of producer Richard Jordan. Founded in 1998, his company has produced over 200 productions in the UK as well as 24 other countries, including 70 world premieres and 81 European, Australian or US premieres enjoying associations with many of the world’s leading theatres and arts organization. He has enjoyed a long relationship with Canada's Volcano theatre company and previously produced together Goodness in Edinburgh, New York and on tour winning a number of awards. Described by the Stage newspaper as “one of the UK’s most prolific theatre producers”, Richard has been at the forefront of developing and presenting works by a diverse range of established and emerging writers and artists. His productions have won a number of awards including: the TONY Award for Best Play; the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement at an Affiliate Theatre; The EMMY Award for Best Feature Section; fourteen Scotsman Fringe First Awards; two Herald Angel Awards; six Total Theatre Awards; The Spirit of the Fringe Award; Drama Desk; Drama League; New York Critics, Broadway.com; Outer Critic Circle Best Play Awards; three Helen Hayes Awards; the Adelaide Festival Award; the US Black Alliance Award; Obie Award; Jeff Award; the Lucille Lortel Award and the John Gassner Award for Best New American Play. Richard’s past productions in Canada include: Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen; A Reason To Talk; Nine Parts of Desire;  Die Roten Punkte; Miriam Margolyes’ Dickens' Women; Kafka and Son; Basic Training; Hirsch; Looking for Paul; BigMouth; Falstaff; Internal and Fight Night. He has also transferred Canadian productions worldwide including: Rick Miller’s Bigger Than Jesus and MacHomer: The Simpsons Do Macbeth which played sell-out seasons at Sydney Theatre Company; Alphonse; A Suicide Site Guide to the City; A Brimful of Asha; Breath(e); Kafka and Son; Hirsch; Goodness; Century Song and Hamlet(solo). In Canada his productions have been nominated in the Dora Awards.

Camilla Koo (Set Design)

Camellia Koo is a Toronto based set and costume designer for theatre, opera, dance and site-specific performance installations. Recent designs for opera include Maria Stuarda (Pacific Opera Victoria), The Lighthouse (Boston Lyric Opera), Dido and Aeneas (Opera Avalon), Turn of the Screw and La Bohéme (Against the Grain), Giiwedin (Native Earth), and The Shadow (Tapestry New Opera) and Associate Designer on productions of The Magic Flute (Budapest State Opera) and Candide (Châtelet/Hyogo PAC, Japan). She is a graduate of Ryerson Theatre School (technical production), and completed her M.A. in Scenography at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (UK) and the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Utrecht, The Netherlands). She has received five Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Toronto), a Sterling Award (Edmonton), a Chalmers Award Grant, and shared the 2006 Siminovitch Protégé Prize.

Ross Manson (Co-Creator/Director)

Ross Manson is an award-winning director, and the founding artistic director of Volcano, an internationally acclaimed theatre company based in Toronto. Over the past 20 years, Ross has directed and or co-created many shows for Volcano, which have toured around the world, and won or been nominated for over seventy local, national and international awards (including Dora awards for Ross as a director, a play-maker and a co-producer), a KM Hunter Award for his body of work as a theatre artist, a Harold award for arts community service, and the Best of Edinburgh award for his production of Goodness, by Michael Redhill). He has also directed for various companies across Canada, as well as in Helsinki (Svenska Theatre) and in Munich (BeMe). Ross trained in England at the University of London (MA in Theatre, specialty in Directing), in Germany (Directing apprenticeship, Stadttheater Freiburg), and in Canada (Banff School of Fine Arts and Mount Allison University). 

Jeremy Mimnagh (Associate Projection Design)

Jeremy Mimnagh works as a photographer, filmmaker, and projection & sound designer for performance.  He has collaborated on sound and/or projection design with some of the most provocative and thoughtful creators in the country.  His still collections have been exhibited across Canada and internationally. Film credits include the short film: girl in mourning & a settling haze (co-created with Heidi Strauss), From Gentle Ashes and a short film for Bravo! entitled Floating Construct (co-created with Peter Chin), a feature dance documentary titled Jamaican  (co-created with Peter Chin) and a series of short films created around the dance work elsewhere (in collaboration with Strauss and Laura Taler/Grimm Pictures).  www.mimnagh.ca

Gregory Oh (Pianist) 

Gregory Oh gained his notoriety as a “new music revolutionary”, but he is equally at home in opera, theatre and indie rock. Holding graduate degrees from the Universities of Toronto and Michigan, Gregory is an acclaimed classical pianist whose repertoire spans five centuries. His recent work has carried him to performances in venues as diverse as the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, to the legendary techno club Berghain in Berlin, to the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, to the Wordless Music Series at the Lincoln Centre in New York. Gregory was contemporary music curator at Toronto’s Music Gallery for many years and is now the artistic director of the Open Ears Festival in Ontario, Canada and the acclaimed new music group Toca Loca. He has worked at San Diego Opera, the Canadian Opera Company and the Banff Opera Program. He teaches at the University of Toronto, is on faculty at the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, and is a resident   artist at Soulpepper Theatre, Toronto.

Rebecca Picherack (Lighting Design)

Rebecca Picherack is an award-winning Toronto-based lighting designer who has created lighting for dance and theatre projects across three continents. Dance Designs include Falling to Grace (Tanya Crowder/Julia Sasso), Art Fag (Daryl Hoskins), She's Gone Away, Still, Waking En Dessous, Love/Loathing (HUM), Aflutter featuring At Last, aRound2 (FourChambers /Heidi Struass), Namesake (Crooked Figure Dances and first things first productions), Signs (Princess Productions), and No Man's Land (Michael DuMaresq). Theatres include: Blyth Festival, Buddies in Bad Times, DNA, Crow’s Theatre, Factory Theatre, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Mirvish Productions, Native Earth, Nightwood, Nightswimming, Obsidian, Tarragon, Theatre Centre, Theatre Passe Muraille and Volcano. Rebecca has 12 nominations and 2 Dora Awards for her work.

Debashis Sinha (Percussion & Computer)

Debashis Sinha's creative output spans a broad range of genres and media, from solo audiovisual performance projects on the concert stage to the rich sonic space between your headphones.  Driven by a deep commitment to the primacy of sound in his creative practice, Sinha has developed his artistic voice by weaving together his own experience as a 2nd generation south Asian Canadian, his training with master drummers from various world music traditions, a love of electronic and electroacoustic music and technology, and a desire to transcend the traditional expectations of how these streams might intersect and interact.  He has appeared as a solo artist at the Sound Symposium, ORF Kunstradio, Deutschlandradio Kultur, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Madrid Abierto, MUTEK, the Guelph Jazz Festival, Radio National España, and the International Symposium on Electronic Art, to name a few, and as a member of various musical ensembles across the country and internationally.  Parallel to his solo sound work, Sinha maintains a robust presence in the theatre world, winning 2 Dora awards for Sound Design for his work on Crash (Theatre Passe Muraille) and We are Proud to Present… (The Theatre Centre/Why Not Theatre), alongside nominations for other Toronto area theatre works. Companies Sinha has worked with include Soulpepper Theatre Company, Peggy Baker, The Stratford Festival, inDance, Tribal Crackling Wind, Volcano Theatre, and others. http://debsinha.com