COLLIDER
COLLIDER
Pathetic Fallacy by Anita ROCHON
Photo by Peter POKORNY
2018
K BODY AND MIND by Conor WYLIE
Photo by Dan O’SHEA
2019
Mid-Light by Mahaila PATTERSON-O’BRIEN
Photo by Sepehr SAMIMI
2020
New Age Attitudes: Live in Concert
by Amanda SUM
Photo by Reagan JADE
2021
it is for when you meet me
by Anjela Magpantay
Photo by Chelsey STUYT
2024
SmartSmart by Adrienne WONG
Photo by Chelsey STUYT
2022
Secret Ingredients by Keely O’Brien
Photo by Reagan JADE
2023
About the program
COLLIDER is a project-centered incubator that provides key opportunities for experimental artists through mentorship, access to studio space, a commissioning fee of $5,000 as well as presentation opportunities in HOLD ON LET GO. Artists are invited to dream up and begin to activate works engaged in a global conversation of art-making, and whose processes embrace experimental and interdisciplinary practices. Excerpts of the works are then highlighted at HOLD ON LET GO in both in-development and tour-ready formats, in subsequent years.
The COLLIDER residency was born out of an opportunity to foster the practices of artists in our home community who are interested in, and whose works speak to a global conversation of art making. We want to make a tangible difference to artists and artistic practice in Vancouver. As a company who has been presented at over 50 venues and festivals around the world, TR has experienced first-hand what working in international contexts can do for the development of artists and their work. We want to create space for artists to push against the more dominant forms of performance-making and test the boundaries of theatrical form. This is not only a reflection of TR’s own artistic interests, but a direct result of the work that has evolved out of Vancouver.
COLLIDER Artists and projects have included Anita Rochon with Pathetic Fallacy, Conor Wylie with K BODY AND MIND, Mahaila Patterson-O’Brien with Mid-Light, Amanda Sum with New Age Attitudes: Live in Concert, Adrienne Wong with SmartSmart, Keely O’Brien with Secret Ingredients and Anjela Magpantay with it is for when you meet me.
The residency is open to all performance-based artists. For more information, contact maiko@theatrereplacement.org
2025 COLLIDER artist:
ellis cheadle
ellis cheadle is a theatre artist living and working on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations. She holds a BFA in Theatre Performance from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, and a diploma from Mount Royal University’s acting conservatory program.
ellis is a collaborator, writer, director, and dramaturg with a practice focused on devised and experimental theatre. She is drawn to slow creation processes, and is increasingly dedicated to making malleable theatrical setlists that can responsively adapt to requirements of scale, duration, location, and collaborator curiosities. Her work is known for its commitment to playfulness and absurdity alongside formal rigour and philosophical depth. It’s often wordy, noisy, low-tech, non-linear, and melodramatic. ellis delights in collaging seemingly incongruous genres, themes, and materials, and in trying to find connections where there ought not be any.
ellis’ has led and contributed to projects shared at Festival TransAmériques, Vancouver Art Gallery, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Boombox, What Lab, Exquisite Pressure, Festival de Casteliers, Schaubude Berlin, The Array, Centre A Gallery, The Accordion Noir Festival, and the rEvolver Theatre Festival. In January 2025 she completed the Block D dramaturgy program through the Playwrights Theatre Centre.
COLLIDER piece:
Frankenkenstein
PHOTO: Derek Chan, Ashley Aron and Keely O’Brien by ellis cheadle
Frankenkenstein is a new devised theatre piece by artist ellis cheadle, drawing on fragments of Mary Shelley’s iconic tale to explore monstrosity, electricity, the strangeness of having a body, and the relentless ways the past intrudes upon the present. After early development at What Lab’s Exquisite Pressure and HERE FOR NOW’s Boombox, Frankenkenstein is now being further shaped through TR’s COLLIDER Artist Residency and will be shared at HOLD ON LET GO in 2027.
Frankenkenstein is an indulgent autopsy of the Gothic genre, as stitched back together (again and again) by a hack surgeon. It’s a camp-horror theatrical collage set during a perpetually dark and stormy night. The performance acts as an exhibition of sorts - unveiling the results of experiments performed on collective (mis)rememberings and (mis)understandings of Shelley’s Frankenstein and surrounding lore. In Frankenkenstein, performers weave and loop text, music, and physical action, blurring beginnings and endings. The result is a stacking of ghastly motifs that constantly accumulate and unravel, forcing us to reckon with cryptic questions of action and consequence; monster-makers and makers’-monsters.
2026 Project Collaborators:
Aryo Khakpour, Ashley Aron, elika mojtabaei, Derek Chan, Elliot Vaughan, Keely O’Brien, Paula Viitanen, Marc Arboleda, Marc Castellini
2026 COLLIDER artist:
Jami Reimer
Jami Reimer is a musician, performance maker, composer, and educator. From songwriting to choral conducting to field recording practices, Jami explores voice — human and otherwise. Winner of the 2023 Robert Fleming Prize for Composition from Canada Council for the Arts, Jami’s original work has been presented locally and internationally, including Pavão Cultural (Campinas, Brazil), Cluster Festival (Winnipeg, Manitoba), and International Butoh Festival (Amsterdam, NL). Since 2015, Jami has been helping develop original children's musicals for the summer program at The American School in Switzerland where she serves as faculty. Jami holds a Bachelor of Music from Canadian Mennonite University, a Bachelor of Education from the University of Manitoba and a Masters of Fine Arts from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Jami currently resides on the stolen traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations known as Vancouver.
Find our more at: jamireimer.com
Stay tuned for more info on what Jami will be working on as part of COLLIDER!
COLLIDER piece:
Queue: music for holding (working title)
Queue: music for holding (working title) is about waiting for something all together. Our tempo is 60-85 bpm. Our journey is our own. One ear keeping vigil. One ear on the line.
What is there for us in music that was built only to be useful? I ponder this while I sit on hold, a concert for everyone and no-one chiming with just enough fidelity to keep me barely awake.
I’m not the only one who exhales a little extra when the hold music is familiar — Opus No 1? Or who hums a mindless harmony to a royalty-free elevator blues loop. While on the line, I picture others in this invisible audience of student loan debtors, licence renewers, prescription re-fillers, terms of service disputers, and bank fraud reporters all settling in together. This is a concert for wait-ers. Procrastina-tors. A duration of required musical listening. This holding queue will no doubt end soon.
As we wrestle with restlessness, Queue: music for holding consults the uncanny space between the caller and the invisible line-up, between the domestic and the corporate, between the novelists, philosophers, theologians, market researchers, midi synthesizers, and you, ever-patient focus group — audience on hold — as we dream about better ways to wait.
Jami will be sharing some explorations as part of HOLD ON LET GO (February 2-6, 2027). Stay tuned for more info!