Frost Bites: Telling stories that ‘need to be told’

The two weekend festival kicks off with Land, Place, Home, community-based storytelling based on the experiences of newcomers. There will also be family and community events at Bernie Morelli Recreation Centre. Frost Bites continues next weekend with innovative and intimate performances in nooks and crannies of The Staircase. Here from all the creators here. 

This weekend and next, Hamilton Fringe’s wintery Frost Bites theatre festival returns to welcome spring and bring a host of exciting talent to local stages. Celebrating its 10th anniversary as a unique performance event, Frost Bites has grown significantly from its roots as a site-specific theatre festival. As outlined by Hamilton Fringe director Chris Stanton, this growth stems from the festival’s evolution from a purely theatre-based event to a series of community-based activations and curated partnerships with arts and non-arts based organizations.

“Frost Bites has been a bunch of different things since inception,” he says. From site-specific theatre, to curated community events to free family-oriented programming, he and the rest of the festival organizers wondered “what would it look like if it was all these things, but at the same time?” As such, this year’s Frost Bites will not only stretch across two weekends and take place at multiple locations, but involve active collaborations with a host of arts and community partners. For Stanton, the experimental scope of Frost Bites is a way to “give folks the support they need to tell the stories hidden in plain sight in this city.”

Kicking things off at Theatre Aquarius this weekend is Land, Place, Home, a community-created performance shaped by the lived experiences of newcomers, immigrants, and refugees. Using choral movement and voice, along with music, monologues and storytelling, the piece asks questions of identity, belonging and the “othering” of the immigrant experience in Hamilton. A rich work of theatre, Land, Place, Home draws upon the collective, personal stories of a handful of newcomers to Canada, weaving them into a layered story of many voices and poetic imagery.

Featuring a trio of performers, including Elie Assaf, Wend Yasen, and Pravash Pandey, and drawing from a broader collection of personal stories, the piece interrogates their experiences while also augmenting their voices. With minimal props and set pieces, the result is a theatrical experience stripped of pretense and brimming with quiet moments of truth. As each performer adds a word, image or sound in concert with one another, Land, Place, Home stitches together a collaborative and insightful tapestry of identity, journey and risk.

Nearly a year in the making, Land, Place, Home is a collaboration between Open Heart Arts Theatre and ABRAR Mental Health & Trauma Services, a community-centred Hamilton organization that works to foster healing, growth, and resilience for newcomers and immigrants. For Open Hearts Arts founder Kelly Wolf, working with ABRAR was crucial to the project. “We always collaborate in partnership with an organization with some kind of understanding of the communities that we're working with. With this piece, the idea of trauma and mental health supports have been an undercurrent, and a foundation throughout the process.”

In partnership with founder Abrar Mechmechia, Wolf invited local newcomer performers to share their stories, then guided selected participants through a writing workshop led by playwright Marie Beath Badian, shaping those stories into a unified piece. To ensure the production reflected authentic immigrant experiences, Wolf and producer Rose Hopkins soon brought director Ahmad Meree onboard to lead the artistic vision. An award-winning professional playwright and director, Meree has worked and toured extensively, including with Kitchener’s iconic MT Space. But he also brings first-hand experience with his own story.

"I came to Canada as a refugee from Syria. I escaped the Syrian war to Egypt, where I went to the Academy of Arts. After I graduated, I arrived in Canada almost 10 years ago." For Meree, the story of Land, Place, Home resonates deeply with his own practice. "This type of work around themes of displacement, of refugees, of loss and belonging, it's been my daily life since I arrived.” Rooted in his own traumatic experience, and explored in his own work, including his plays Underground, Adrenaline, and Suitcase, Meree is passionate about the kinds of stories told in Land, Place, Home. 

“These kinds of stories? They are urgent and need to be heard. And this is, I think, one of the most important things about theatre. It tells stories that need to be told. These are our stories, for this moment, right now. When all the conflicts in our countries are solved and life is beautiful, then, maybe, we can do Shakespeare. But, for right now, these are the stories we have to tell.”

​​For Meree, working with the project’s assembled performers has been its own reward. "Everyone here has a unique story, and they tell it in their own way. And that's the point of this project. It makes it what it is. So, it's been amazing and heartwarming to be part of the process, and to listen to these stories."

In addition to Land, Place, Home, the first weekend of Frost Bites also includes free family programming at Bernie Morelli Recreation Centre. It includes a lantern-making workshop with Shadowland Theatre, interactive storytelling with Djennie Laguerre, an interactive drum circle with the Auntie Social Singers, and a community poetry activity co-presented by gritLIT. It all concludes with a magical Procession of Light on the streets surrounding the centre with a performance by Hamilton Aerial Group.

The second weekend of Frost Bites will put the spotlight on Hamilton’s longtime performance venue The Staircase. Hosting well over a dozen artists spread out across multiple floors, Frost Bites at The Staircase leans into the historical resonance of the building, allowing each artist to become both storyteller and listener to the whispers of the site. In this way, the festival will invite audiences to The Staircase not just as a performance venue, but as an active creator in the work of each of the featured artists.

The power of the venue is something that Carly Anna Billings and collaborator Cecilia O’Grady evoke in their supernatural presentation The Paranormal Parlour LIVE. Says Billings: “We’re inviting visitors into our Hamilton parlour for some local spectral stories over a warm cup of tea with a side of light laughter. We’ve always believed to best know a person you have to know two things: what they’re afraid of and what makes them laugh. There’s no better place to reveal those things than at the iconic Staircase.”

For Key Paul Straughan, drag artist and founder of Transgendent Co., the magic of working at The Staircase is “how much the space starts giving you ideas. It doesn’t feel like a blank slate. It already has personality, history, and mood, and you kind of end up in conversation with it.” For the show Wherefore (Diana)? Straughan is eager for “audiences to experience work differently than in a traditional theatre. It feels more intimate and a bit more adventurous, like everyone is discovering something together. That sense of exploration is what makes working in this venue so fun.”

Site-specific theatre breaks the walls between performer and spectator, precisely what drew theatre-maker Skye Rogers to the festival. In The Table Knows Our Name, Rogers and her partners in Tapestry Theatre Collective will perform the first durational performance in the festival’s history. “We’re cooking up food, and creating a three-hour dinner party that spans the entire duration of the performance evening. Through our stories, songs, and movement, we raise questions about the homes, lineages, and recipes that shape who we are. There are so many fun and magical pockets in this building,” she says, “and I think audiences will get a real kick out of it.”

For playwright-performer Anna Chatterton, being a part of Frost Bites’ 10th anniversary is a bit like coming home. “I was part of the first festival in 2016, and was so into all these performances that took place in unexpected places… I really fell in love with the format of all the shows in one building.” Performing at The Staircase is all the more magical, she says, from "all the nooks and crannies that I hadn't realized were there and can be made into a performance space.” 

In Breakthrough / A Ton of Chatter, she is presenting “a theatrical version of a short digital play I created during the pandemic, but this time performed with my daughter and mother. A woman's perfect day is disrupted when she discovers a blast from her past in her bathroom cabinet.”

Triple Futures, featuring artists Roya Motazedian, Rijaa Khan and Ryma, all wanted to use The Staircase as a focal point to explore the hidden history of Hamilton with Mahi on the Mountain. “I firmly believe that places, spaces, and land all have their own souls, stories, and heartbeats,” says Motazedian. “So, making a show meant for one specific room felt like I was both listening to this heartbeat and also offering up my own to this space.” 

Co-creator Ryma agrees, adding "it is so intriguing acting in a space where all the performance spaces are so intertwined with one another. It creates a sort of relational environment between all the stories being presented, despite them coming to life separately."

Actor-director Mandy Roveda was also drawn to The Staircase as a creative lens to peer into Hamilton’s past for her work. “Proof transports you to the backroom of a Hamilton speakeasy during Prohibition. This is Rocco Perri’s territory, and you are the bootleggers coming to be tested.” Roveda says her favourite quality of site-specific work is “how the challenges of a space shape the piece in the most exciting ways. What might first seem frustrating or impossible often sparks solutions that make the work even stronger.”  Like Chatterton, she cites a love of The Staircase’s nooks and crannies, adding, “I can’t wait to see what the other artists have cooked up!”

Multi-disciplinary artist Devin Bateson is a relative newcomer to theatre, which perhaps made him well-suited to the non-traditional work of Frost Bites. “I'm trying to figure out where I fit in. See if my seemingly silly, yet has-a-secret-point work rings true. And, by gosh, I think I've fooled them once again.” In A Series Of Forms You Are Required To Fill Out, Bateson is “poking fun at how silly governing structures are, and budget cuts in the name of ‘efficiency’ all just to short the system and sell it off for privatization.” A longtime Hamiltonian, Bateson has been coming to the Staircase since his early 20s, saying “I'm just so happy they are still here.”

For artist-poet Chidera Ikewibe, creating work for Frost Bites has meant seeing an unexpected intimacy in the shape of her piece. "It's really surprising," says Ikewibe. "I cannot wait to figure out how to blend and break the rules of stage, performer and audience.” In her piece The Job Interview, Ikewibe reflects on how disastrously such events can transpire. "As someone who has been in front and behind the interview desk I want this play to poke a little fun at the whole song and dance of interviewing for a job.”

An expanded two‑week, multi‑venue celebration featuring dozens of artists and new work, this year’s Frost Bites shines a spotlight on the power of deeply personal storytelling across the city. From the raw first-person experiences of Land, Place, Home to the intimate work winding through The Staircase, Frost Bites offers audiences of all ages an unconventional path to explore identity, history, and the stories that shape the community that surrounds them.

NEED TO KNOW

Frost Bites
Hamilton Festival Theatre Company
Feb. 27 to March 1, and March 6 to 8
Theatre Aquarius, 190 King William St.
Bernie Morelli Recreation Centre, 876 Cannon St. E.
The Staircase Theatre + Lounge, 27 Dundurn St. N.
Find tickets and more details here.