THE OTTAWA STILT UNION

The Ottawa Stilt Union is a bilingual company of performers based in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, creating work that uses stilts, acrobatics and other forms of extreme physical action to tell stories.

Laura Astwood taught a series of stilt workshops at the University of Ottawa in 2006.  She then recruited some of those student-performers to participate in the NAC’s Snow Show in January and February of 2007.  The idea of the Ottawa Stilt Union arose during those rehearsals.  Seven of us were involved in that performance, portraying the characters of the Winds as stilt figures.  People were impressed and delighted by our work and it seemed to us that there was an audience for more stilt performance in Ottawa.  Almost immediately an opportunity arose to make a performance for The Magnetic North Theatre Festival and so we established the Ottawa Stilt Union and created BEOWULF, co-produced by the University of Ottawa Theatre Department.  We spent the month of March 2007 developing new skills appropriate to the new work, then the months of April and May 2007 building the performance itself.  We performed for three weekends in May and June 2007, the last weekend forming part of The Magnetic North Festival, then again in August 2007 when we were invited to perform at Andrew Haydon Park as part of the City of Ottawa’s cultural programming.

Our upcoming work is THIS IS A VERY OLD STORY: a 40 minute stilt ballet with live music, acrobatics, masks and monsters and magic.  We’ll be performing in this year’s Fringe Festival on Tabaret Lawn at the corner of Laurier and Cumberland.

The members of the Ottawa Stilt Union are:

Laura Astwood
Marie Claude Dicaire
Céleste Dubé
Jean-François Dubé
Bryony Etherington
Élise Gauthier
Brandon Groves
Lauren Hart
Alexandra Lent
Guy Marsan
Laura Montgomery
Fletcher Gailey Snell
Kaitlin St-Jacques
Sarah Waisvisz
Emma Zabloski