Jump Current Performance
Jump Current crafts stories and performances, focusing on ways that innovative design and technology can illuminate live human-to-human connection.
Our mandate:
- Create and produce works of theatre and media-based performance.
- Develop artists and communities through teaching and learning in workshops, internships, and other interactive experiences.
- Research, develop, and champion uses of design and technology that deepen live human-to-human connection, and counteract alienation.
Our vision:
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- We believe theatre happens wherever people share a physical space with an intention to witness and imagine. We draw on the full range of narrative forms — (auto)biography, collective history, journalistic account, myth, fable, pop culture, documentary, and dream — because we recognize that humans are hard-wired to interpret our lives through stories. We see story as essential to our survival, and to our ability to thrive.
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- Drawing on 21st century design innovations, our vision is to craft auditory, visual, and tactile experiences, through technological and/or organic means, so that our audience’s senses entice them into the stories we tell. In addition to actor-driven, script-based work, our theatre includes elements of interactive media, game/party, and ritual. We invite people to adventure into worlds where the everyday blurs into the extraordinary, where physiology encounters circuitry, where flesh meets code.
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- We explore ways that technology can increase human connection, and help counteract people’s sense of alienation from one another. Technological expertise facilitates and distinguishes our work. The irreplaceable intimacy of humans gathering together is the beating heart of what we do.
Projects
Welcome to The Riot Ballet – an immersive, interactive theatre/game event. The experience begins online, then becomes live in a cluster of immersive performance spaces, where you encounter characters, scenes, instructions, puzzles, technologically-responsive environments… and other audience members. Don’t worry – you may choose to participate to whatever extent you’re comfortable, or to remain a passive observer. Your task is to avert a potential riot before it explodes. As The Riot Ballet progresses, a narrative emerges in fragments: the government works hard to make citizens feel heard and represented… but do their polished messages mask corruption and authoritarian motives? Protestors emerge to challenge the government. Are these protestors’ actions as selfless as they seem? How far are they willing to go to make their point? Journalists report the action as it unfolds. Are they unbiased or are they twisting facts to support a hidden agenda? The show culminates in a (safe but spectacular) burgeoning riot, where your actions in the moment determine just how intense the riot will become.
The Riot Ballet was co-created by Noah Drew, Emer O’Toole, Catalina Medina, Martin Andrews and Shawn Ketchum Johnson, and co-produced by Jump Current Performance (Canada), Working Group Theatre (USA), and La Barracuda Carmela (Colombia).
The Riot Ballet was made possible through the partnership of Concordia University’s Department of Theatre and Seattle University’s Department of Performing Arts and Arts Leadership, and by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science.
tiny music is an original soundscape musical by Noah Drew about what it means to listen – really listen – to those we love, to the world around us, and to the call of our own hearts.
Loosely adapted from Shalom Aleichem’s short story “The Fiddle” and partly based on members of Noah’s family, the story follows Ezra, a 25-year-old Jewish-ish autistic man, whose sensory-processing disorder causes him to experience sounds in a heightened way. Sonic details in his environment, unnoticed by others, occur for Ezra as music – sometimes distracting, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes wonderfully entrancing.
Throughout the show, the audience is immersed in Ezra’s world through scenes, songs, instrumentation, live-processing effects, and a highly detailed soundscore. Realistic sounds – and the actors’ voices – float, loop, blur, distort, extend, rhythmicalize and harmonize as Ezra navigates his environment.
tiny music performed on the Norman Rothstein stage at the 2014 Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver.
Who we are
