MAINSTAGE 2026-27
The Impossible Has Already Happened
The Impossible Has Already Happened comes to you after a New Zealand tour, a remount and tour of Western Canada. The project is allowing us to question the role of art in partnering with the environmental situation. A 60-minute love story of water and our relationships with it.
As the water’s voice, performer Tobias Macfarlane narrates. Dancers transform the skeleton of a hut into home, house, outhouse, shelter, boat while lights made of ice slowly melt and projections evoke freighters barrelling heedlessly ahead, dream beaches too hot to touch, and an earnest guide providing ridiculous instructions on how to manage climate change.
As an evocative electronic sound score uses delight as a bridge to experience water - from tiny water droplets to roaring surf, 3 dancers, one narrator and fiddler Kathleen Nisbett themselves become water - flowing around obstacles, merging with the ocean’s never-ending roll.
Potent but not bleak, often humorous, the production plays with scale and the enormity of the climate crisis and the absurd role we as individuals play.
MascallDance
TRAILER
ARTIST BIO
MascallDance
Jennifer Mascall's perspective is driven by curiosity, which often leads to surprising places. After 50 years of creation, she feels she has only just begun her path as an artist. Recently, we have pivoted to focus on climate, and view the audience as collaborators. Our most influential teachers this year were dance artists, particle physicists, Indigenous Elders, Rabbis, and climate scientists. MascallDance is a creation, production, and education endeavour with 30+ seasons of works; many with extensive touring lives. Annually we offer residencies, intensives, and workshops based on where our own body of knowledge meets the interests of participants.
Performance History & Upcoming Performances
Premiere Date 18 March, 2023 Carterton Events Centre, Wairarapa, New Zealand - Tour until April 5th: Wairarapa, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Taupō, Tāmaki Makaurau, Whakat.
Canadian Tour: Friday, October 27 2023, Anvil Centre. Tour until Sunday, 19th of November 2023. New Westminster, Medicine Hat, Langley School of Fine Arts, Firehall Arts Centre, Revelstoke, Winnipeg Rachel Browne Theatre.
Project Created by: Original Creative Team:
Sound Design: Kathleen Nisbet and Jason Wright
AV Design: Claire O’Neil, Jennifer Mascall and Jason Wright
Light and Set Design: Marcus McShane
Costume Design: Anne de Geus, Tobias Macfarlane
Costume Consultant: Ralph Escamillan
Key Artistic Collaborators: Canadian version performed by:
Allison Brooks, Jack Chipman, Ysadora Dias, Marisa Gold, Tobias Macfarlane, Kathleen Nisbett.
Performance type: THIS WORK IS BUILT FOR THEATRE
How do you define this work: Dance/Theatre Mixed Media
Length of performance: 55 minutes
Audience type: General Audience ,Children/Family
Number of Performers on tour (including choreographer): 6
Number of Support Staff on Tour: 1-2
Availabilities: 2027 Spring Season (Mar - June),2027/28 Season,2028/29 Season
Project Details
Community Engagement
General Technical Requirements: Blackbox theatre with Marley floor, including:
-Projection, Lighting
-LAV Microphones
-ceiling beams or grid to suspend props
-access to water
Required amount of time for tech set up: 8 hr day
Alternative Venues: Marley floor, access to water
Our community engagement and outreach activities overlap heavily and though premade, are more effective when in collaboration with both the presenter and the community.
Outreach Activities
We prefer to collaborate with the presenter to create something that resonates with the local community but have included:
Talkbacks (tend to be more personal about audience member's relationship to water than exclusively the piece.)
Master-classes for local students and professionals featuring choreography from the piece.
Environmental presentations/workshops tailored for all ages. Best in collaboration with local experts or historians about the city's history of water.
Community talks for adults featuring stories of people's relationship to water.
Audience participation presentations for young children about a droplet's cycle of life.
Contact information
www.mascalldance.ca
@mascalldance
https://www.mascalldance.ca/new-page-5