About Us

GETAWAY HOUSE: The Company

Getaway House aims to create theatrical experiences that are powerful, daring, beautiful, & worthwhile... for anyone(if not necessarily for everyone).

The standard for a Getaway House performance is "good food". After all, "good food" can sometimes be something healthy, and at others, something deliciously decadent; something time-tested and traditional, or something innovative and untried; a home-cooked stew, or the finest gourmet fare; a delicious snack, a life-saving scrap, or a thanksgiving belly-stuffer. "Good food" varies according to the occasion and the need, but we all know when we've had some.

Getaway House brings together experienced artists, newcomers, special guest contributors and others, thus staging the convergence of very different backgrounds and perspectives.

And because we believe that "who's on stage tells you who's in your audience", this means that Getaway House productions have more of a chance of reaching those who would normally never attend a live show.

This orientation does not, however, spring only from some sort of social impulse, but primarily from an artistic one. The greatest danger for live performance today is its confinement to the theatre scene and the art world, which come to function like "cultural zoos" - beloved by their regular supporters, visited occasionally by others, undeniably rich in value and beauty, but separated from most people's daily lives and expectations.

The deepest artistic goal of Getaway House is to help long-separated modalities find their way closer to each other again: word, image and movement after their division into "literature," "visual art" and "dance"; poetics and ideas, after their division into "art" and "thought"; ritual and spectacle after their division into "special occasion" and "entertainment".

Getaway House events seek to follow the wise words of Einstein, who said: "Everything should be made as simple as it can be, but no simpler".

MICHAEL CAPLAN, Artistic Director

My own creative experience is varied (download complete résumé or short bio), including theatrical performance, live music, and publishing & design. (I've also recently tried my hand at video editing, and I'm doing some non-fiction writing which has not yet been published.)

THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE

In public school I directed skits with friends and performed in musicals. I then discovered physical theatre, experimental performance, and eventually contemporary dance (B.F.A., Concordia University, 1987). I've since done solo performances, staged productions in theatres and other settings, facilitated large, collaborative community performances, and planned special events for major corporations and non-profit organizations. I have taught movement, theatre and contact improv for diverse groups of all ages.

The performances that best represent the diversity of my interests include Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie's Grasslands: Where Heaven Meets Earth in rural Saskatchewan (Assistant Director/Event Coordinator), and The Heron Bay Project with the Pic River Ojbiway community in northern Ontario (Co-director), both dance-based community events; Shadows of Angels, two "theatre noir" plays for Cabbagetown Theatre Company (Director); Murderland (Director/Author), a collaboratively-created, surrealistic, participatory murder mystery, also with Cabbagetown Theatre (the company's first-ever show); Paradox and Starring..., original productions with students of the North York Board of Education (Assistant Director/Co-author); What Happened, an adaptation of a dance/theatre piece by seminal avant-garde choreographer David Gordon, staged for 8 Grade 6 students and performed at York University (Director/Choreographer); and Stories for J's B-Day, a solo performance in my own home featuring kitchen polkas, storytelling in a tent in the bedroom, and breaking dishes (Director/Author/Performer).

LIVE MUSIC

I play guitar and sing "sweet hurtin' songs"- old country music, folk, blues, bluegrass and standards.

I started sometime in the late '80s, but didn't "come out" as a singer until 2004, when I rocked my first house: an audience of cowboy ranchers and modern dancers in the bar of the Val Marie hotel in rural Saskatchewan, during the closing night of Grasslands (see above).

I then performed regularly for nearly two years at the Grasshopper Bar in my home neighbourhood of Cabbagetown, Toronto, and in 2006 recorded a CD, Steelpan Country, with Gabriel Chartrand, the only person of Aboriginal descent (Cree) to master the steeldrum.

In the summer of 2008, I was a special guest performer for the New Dance Horizons Aria fundraiser in Regina, and sang while Bill Coleman tap-danced for the Special Event Honouring James Hillman in Pittsburgh. (Hillman, an innovative thinker and former director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, has been a major influence on my own explorations of culture, craft and imagination.)

PUBLISHING & DESIGN

My interest in publication design began when I was young, and I started working professionally in the field in 1990. In 2004, I created the layout for David Earle: A Choreographic Biography, Michele Green's book about the founder of Toronto Dance Theatre and Dancetheatre David Earle, published by Dance Collection Danse, and described by Ballet-Dance Magazine as a "magnificent new volume" and by Dance International as "elegantly designed".

I currently do editing, information and visual design, branding and typesetting for such clients as Dance Collection Danse Press/Presses, Canada's national dance archives and publisher dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of Canadian theatrical dance history; Spring Journal & Books, the book publishing imprint of Spring Journal, the oldest Jungian psychology journal in the world; CMAS, which supports, monitors and advises Citizenship & Immigration Canada's LINC childminding programs on health and safety issues, administration, and programming; LINC itself (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada); Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie and Dancetheatre David Earle, among others.

ETC.

I currently serve on the Board of Directors of Earth In Motion World Indigenous Dance. I'm also a member of the Steering Committee for the Professional Development Conference for LINC Childminders (due to my publishing work for LINC), and I'm the Managing Director of the International Trade Club of Toronto, a non-profit association of public- and private-sector trade officers (of which my father was one of the founders). In the past, I served on the Boards of Don Area Co-operative Homes Inc. and Cabbagetown Theatre Company.

Getaway House