Theatre people go where the work is, but Valmai Goggin (’06) took that idea to an extreme. She went all the way to Iqualuit following graduation from Mount Allison.
“A person finds themselves with a student loan and a boyfriend with student loans,” she says, “and we thought, ‘Well, we could stay here (in Atlantic Canada) and make no money for 10 years and starve as artists,’ so we moved up there.”
She spent her Iqualuit days working at a pedestrian job that enabled her to pay down her loans, but those long, northern nights were her own, filled directing community theatre, including what may have been the northernmost production ever of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Valmai is considered a director to watch, whether at Sage Theatre’s Ignite Festival, directing a stunning production of Castle in the Sky, Francesca Albright and Jude Allen’s docu-drama about the 2006 Medicine Hat Murders; collaborating with her colleagues in Theatre Transit, a small local theatre company; or up in Fort McMurray, where she is heading later this year to direct a production of Chicago in early 2012.
Read full story: State of the arts: Director not afraid of risks (Calgary Herald)
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