Innovative Performance Creation

The Key to Innovative Performance Creation

Specializing in multidisciplinary productions, Catch the Keys Productions is dedicated to creating unique experiential art: from theatre to music, visual art, dance, film and technology, Catch the Keys concentrates on the new collaboration of art and expression. With a foot permanently planted in the creative lab, Catch the Keys is constantly cooking up new stage works intended to push our own limits, and those of our collaborators and audience.

Notable Productions

Dead Centre of Town (Annual)

Edmonton’s only travelling haunted house, Dead Centre of Town annually digs up and dances with the dusty bones of the sadly forgotten history of Edmonton. Based on the interesting and sometimes sordid history of our fair city, Dead Centre of Town takes place in found locations like The Globe Bar and Tap House (2007), which was once a mortuary, the ARTery (2008), which lives on the only unaltered pre-World War One streetscape in Edmonton, The Iron Horse (2009), the first train station South of the North Saskatchewan, New City Suburbs (2010), one of Edmonton’s first vaudeville houses, and Avenue Theatre (2011), one of Edmonton’s first moving picture theatres.

A mix of spectacle (we once lit someone on fire, buried someone alive behind a brick wall and threw two people off a bridge) and factual history, Dead Centre of Town is a wild ride sure to make you sleep with the lights on. Catch the Keys has proudly worked with some of Edmonton’s best emerging actors, animators, technicians and sound designers to pull off this production.

Snout (Azimuth Theatre, 2013)

In the dark, I hear the wolf. The wolf, he tells her he protects his loved ones, but really, the wolf betrays her secrets, spills them out onto the street for everyone to see. A physical theatre production inspired by the Isis/Osirus myth, Snout explores the damages, both real and imagined, infidelity plays on a relationship.

Choreographed by Good Women Dance Society Collaborative Movement Artist Ainsley Hillyard, and scored by composers and sound artists MUGBAIT, Snout is a journey through the dimensions of love, misunderstanding and murder.

Art on Art

This is an experiment. A series of commissioned thematic photos taken by Vancouver’s Sheena Caddick were provided to musician Andrew Smith of the electric arc, who created a musical score inspired by the story of the photos. The music was then given to Megan. Having not seen the photos, Megan wrote a script. The script, as directed by Beth and brought to life by the collaborative acting talents of Stuart Hoye, Nicole Marie Schafenacker, and Nikolai Witschl, yielded a beautifully lyrical movement piece which explores the improbable logic of romantic love. Art on Art was first mounted at the 2008 NextFest NiteClubs and again with Indie 5 in May 2009.

The Revolution

Exercise the might of the creative collective. Through the collaboration of visual art, music and live theatre, The Revolution took place in three different spaces at the same time and, through the advent of performance and technology, carried the same theme through the birth of spontaneous art and music based on a play written by Megan, and project managed by Beth in partial completion of her degree. The Revolution played at the University of Alberta in January 2007.