Lee Pavilion, Citadel Theatre
September 2015-2016
Special Installation Project
For nineteen years Catalyst made its home in a largely empty warehouse in Old Strathcona. We filled it with the shows we created – investing our hopes and dreams, our imaginations, our blood, sweat and tears in them. But these shows were ephemeral. They only live on in our memories – intangible but valued possessions, the ghosts of our creations. When we leave a place we’ve called our home, and move into a new one, we pack all our ‘things’ into crates and boxes and send them to a new address. We try to recreate, or carry forward what we thought of as home in the last place we lived by filling the new one with all our “worldly possessions”. But what about our ‘unworldly possessions’ – all our accumulated experiences and memories? What if it were possible to pack them into boxes and crates? That is where this installation begins. Inside these crates are the ‘hauntings’, the ‘dreams’, the ‘traces’ we have accumulated of all the shows we made in our old home on Gateway Boulevard. We’ve packed them up and brought them with us. They will connect us to what we have done, and where we have been, as we look ahead toward what we will become.