Debbie Patterson – 2014 Major Arts Grant

Debbie Patterson is a Winnipeg playwright, director and actor. A founding member of Shakespeare in the Ruins (SIR), she served as theatre ambassador for Winnipeg’s Cultural Capital year and was the University of Winnipeg’s 2012 Carol Shields Writer-In-Residence, as well as playwright-in-residence for Theatre Projects Manitoba’s 2013/14 season. She is currently a member of the Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Playwrights Unit. Playwriting credits include Sargent & Victor & Me, the musical Head, Candy From a Baby, and Molotov Circus. She lives in Winnipeg with her family: Arne MacPherson, Gislina Patterson and Solmund (Salty) MacPherson.

How it Ends: a performance piece

Using a process developed in her most recent work Sargent & Victor, theatre artist Debbie Patterson will create How It Ends, a play that explores the choices made about our own death. The creation process as she describes it will “welcome chaos, rigorous development and non-attachment to results”. She plans to craft a performance piece using three successive layers of text: transcribed interviews, found text and written text exploring her own relationship to the first two layers of text gathered. A workshop of the work-in-progress will culminate in an in-studio presentation.