History of Project
Our first collaboration, Underwater Overwater, was a site-specific devised theatre piece about Toronto’s interactions with its waterways and weather. The piece took place around a dining room table in a house in Regal Heights, Toronto. It explored the hidden waterways and changing landscape of the city, weaving various bodies of water and weather systems into its narrative, including Garrison Creek, the river running beneath the house, Lake Ontario, and the waters of an impending storm.
Underwater Overwater was devised through a collaborative writing practice we refer to as compilation, in which collective members respond to one another’s writing for source material. We expanded this model into a devising practice to create this piece. Underwater Overwater debuted in 2018 to sold out audiences and a second iteration of the piece was produced by the collective in 2019.
The narrative of the show featured three characters, each telling the story of a flood they insisted had or would take place in different times (past, present and impending) in which Lake Ontario rose to Davenport Road, the shoreline of the lake in a previous geographic era. The culmination of the piece was a flood of sound, represented in 2018 as a cacophony of weather reports, poems and music, and in 2019 by audience members speaking and repeating poems, overlapping and increasing in volume as guided by the characters of the show. The themes of the shifting cityscape, landscape and climate initially explored in Underwater Overwater were revisited and developed into our next project: This Inescapable City.
Probably Theatre Collective 