Common Boots Theatre (formerly Theatre Columbus)

Mandate

To create, through a collaborative process, new and original Canadian plays that combine a physical theatre tradition with social and personal issues relevant to our time and place.

Mission Statement

-Create and present performances that investigate and inspire citizenship

-Contribute original scripts to the canon of Canadian plays

-Advance the skills and security of professional theatre practitioners through the creation and production of original theatre

-Advance the role of the performing arts as an active ingredient in public life

About Our Charity

We create original works that explore the connections between the individual and society, examining and transforming the ties that bind us — our ideas, our fables, our morals and our environment. Our collaborative work emphasizes the virtuosity of the performing artist with inventive staging and scripted stories. The process evolves organically, through facilitated improvisation. The space and environment for each production is unique and integral to the art — a winter evening, a proscenium, a warehouse, a black box, or the airwaves. Built, broken, recreated and refined in the process of performance itself, the resulting play is a living organism that adapts to its surroundings over time. The published play offers a polished spontaneity.

Theatre Columbus is one of over 250 professional performing arts organizations in the city of Toronto. It is part of vibrant group of independent theatres that create collaboratively-devised theatre for specific spaces, and one of only a few whose works feature women as central characters and use humour as a primary dramaturgical agent.

Our annual activities include an outdoor winter production, the premier of a new work for the mainstage, and the commissioning and development of up to three new works. We have experimented with audio plays for podcast and aim to include these as a regular creative platform. We connect with the greater community and support professional artists through workshops and special performances.

The History

Since its launch in 1983, Theatre Columbus has produced over 30 new plays. The company’s most enduring works — The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine (1988) and The Attic, The Pearls and Three Fine Girls (1994) — were created collectively, have been published, and are produced every year somewhere in the world. The company’s most recent offering, The Public Servant, collectively created by Jennifer Brewin, Haley McGee, Sarah McVie and Amy Rutherford, will premier next June in Ottawa as part of the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC) 2014-2015 season. Most recently, we have reinvented outdoor theatre with winter productions performed at Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works.