About Us
We make theatre, build partnerships, gather communities, and invest in the art of formulating crucial questions for today’s society.
We create new work; produce a movement arts festival, the Expanse Festival; support local emerging and established artists through our various training opportunities.
For over 25 years, Azimuth theatre has adapted to the needs it perceives in its community. We value agility, necessity, and courage, seeking to foster these attributes in ourselves as well as the artists, communities, and audiences we engage with.
Vision
An Azimuth is a navigational measurement. It offers a quantity for the distance between a fixed reference point and a point of interest; the distance between what is known and what compels us forward. It represents distance travelled or distance yet to go.
Azimuth Theatre is a spirit; independent, courageous, intimate, agile, and engaged. We create and present original Canadian performance that examines society and the human condition with a critical gaze. We build work that is ephemeral, flashing to life in response to our current social or political climate (Apocalypse Prairie, 2012), as well as work that is enduring, taking longer trajectories of growth and investigating deeper, on-going human experiences (Woody). We take risks in content and form, but we always bring care, artistry and compassion to the work, along with a genuine desire to expand the terrain of what we think we know.
We build community. We support local artists making performance that is important to them. We assist emerging artists in further identifying their voice and their contribution to the Edmonton and national theatre ecology (AZ-MAP). We value interdisciplinary work and partnerships and seek to build innovative relationships with a variety of organizations, artists, and communities, both artistic and social. The Expanse Festival and Performance Lab bring together artists and audiences interested in movement-based work, pop-up performance and any artistry that expands the physical experience and expectation of what performance can be.
We believe in compassionate, rigorous, and honest conversation. We believe in making space for under-represented voices and in contributing to the removal of barriers that prevent celebration and education surrounding diversity in our society.
We create and support performance work that reflects the world we live in, asking questions that will lead us towards a future we can all be proud of. We use theatre as a vessel to move us across the Azimuth. Get on the ride. Let’s see where it goes, together.