Stage Advice with Jillian Keiley Canada's National Arts Centre

In this final episode of the podcast as her tenure draws to a close, Jillian interviews former NAC English Theatre Artistic Directors Marti Maraden and Peter Hinton-Davis, two giants on whose shoulders she stands. This formidable trio, who share a rare experience at the helm of Canada’s national theatre, unpack the privilege, responsibility and complexity inherent to the job, and reflect on the challenge embedded in the institution’s name: National. Arts. Centre

Jillian speaks with directing supernova Julie Taymor about pushing theatricality in cinema and innovating cinematic language in the theatre. Also: playing with idiographs across scale, the poetry of transitions, gender in Shakespeare, and working with your life partner.

Jillian speaks with singular international theatre maker and Artistic Director of Quebec City’s Ex Machina, Robert Lepage, about stretching rehearsal schedules to make space for the “rendering farm”, creating the conditions which optimize creative agency, and technicians as brilliant puppeteers.


Also: collaborating with one’s critics, and the galvanizing power of subtitles.

Jillian speaks with Soulpepper Artistic Director Weyni Mengesha about the crucial vitality of bringing your whole unabashed self as a director, radical gestures of welcome, and theatre as a sacred space. Also: individual and collective responsibility for centering the marginalized, and not making assumptions about your audience.

Jillian speaks with internationally acclaimed director Yaël Farber about the rehearsal room as a sacred ecosystem where the civic and the spiritual collide, vulnerability is nurtured, and unpredictability is welcomed as the kernel of transformation for both artists and audience. Also: the actor as activist and the wholeness required for sustainable truth-telling.

Jillian speaks with Daniel Brooks, one of Canada’s foremost directors and inaugural Siminovitch Prize laureate, about his expansive and unyielding devotion to process and his ethos (with longtime collaborator Daniel MacIvor) of maximum preparedness, maximum spontaneity. Also: trusting the intuition of your body as a director.