Theatre

HIVE 2 took over 2 warehouse spaces at the Digital Media Centre for a 9-day marathon of perspective-rocking, intimate, outrageous, and eclectic performances by 11 independent B.C. theatre companies. Our installation you and the moon used interactive video, animated illustration, wild shifts of scale, and one very surprising performer to tell a love story for an audience of one.

you and the moon was picked up by The Cultch and remounted in 2010 in the Micro Theatre Series

This is geocaching as you've never seen it before. The Only Animal's artists create hidden treasure troves on ecological themes. Discover what is hiding in the great green. If you missed the launch day—never fear, you can experience Treasure Trail on your own. 

HIVE is a performance event created by 11 of Vancouver and Victoria's creation-based theatre companies. In 2006, these companies created 11 intimate performances for audiences ranging from one person to twenty. The event used every corner of The Chapel, a converted funeral home that is now a venue and art gallery in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Get set for an interspecies collaboration that can happen in your own back yard. Inspired by text from Tinkers novelist, Paul Harding, as adapted by Playwright Kendra Fanconi and created by animation artist Cindy Mochizuki and sound artist Nancy Tam. Watch at home, and be ready to build something new. You can do it with one-hand tied behind your back...

dog eat dog leaps from parallel worlds, to the real world with five true stories, inspired by recent news reports. The Only Animal is on the hunt for survival tactics: tracking a refugee from Hurricane Katrina, a Sasquatch stalker, an unlikely escape artist, a feral grocery clerk, and the woman who holds the world record in grilled cheese consumption. Truth is there, somewhere in the cultural-Cusinart of song-lyrics, CBC, natural disasters urban myths, prison art, roadside attractions, and competitive eating contests.

Climate change requires that our societies evolve, quickly and creatively. The Only Animal believes the arts have an important role to play. Generation Hot invites younger artists to take part in theatrical action in this climate moment.

The One that Got Away tells the story of a girl with a fish where her heart should be, chasing her rapscallion grandfather into an afterlife reckoning with love and loss. This play-in-a-pool combines narrative, music and innovative water staging in a tale of submerged Jewish identity. It premiered in Vancouver, Canada as a co-production with Electric Company and the Norman Rothstein Theatre, and received 11 nominations and 4 Jessie Awards including Best Production of 2002.

Welcome to the 3rd Annual SLIME conference. Join 100 animals, seven young translators, scientists and suits, and fellow humans and step just slightly in the future... Seated amongst the delegates, you might hear an otter swimming down an aisle, a dolphin whistling at your elbow or a seabird over your shoulder: animals too have something to say. We c

July 2005

Winner: Jessie Richardson Award for Significant Artistic Achievement - Expanding the Scope of Site-Specific Theatre in Vancouver

Inspired by human-scale chess on the streets of New York and the Permaculture movement, Cedar Board Game is a free, live, interactive, collaborative event for twenty-five players at a time.  Cedar Board Game is a playful engagement with the natural environment that features the five senses and your own ingenuity. We provide the giant game board. You and your kids, family and friends are the ones who play.

Through Generation Hot: Waterborne, a five-month mentorship program, The Only Animal and Vancouver Fringe Festival are supporting and presenting the work of seven writer-directors ages 17-24. Thanks to support from the Telus Community Foundation as well as RBC’s emerging artist program, these young artists have participated in free workshops creating short works for this year’s Fringe. Each participant has found a personal response to a chosen site on Granville Island and the theme of Water.

Tinkers is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Paul Harding. This new transcendentalist work features an intimate and dazzling relationship with the natural world, woven into a story of family karma.  Through an intergenerational story we meet a young boy and his search for his long-lost father Howard, the epileptic peddler with donkey and wagon, estranged from his family, and ever-ecstatic in his relationship with nature.