stage left: the cost of living
The Sky is the Limit Theatre
January 10, 2025
TEXT CONTENT FROM GRAPHIC ABOVE
Title of production: The Cost of Living
Run dates:
Preview: January 16th at 8 PM
Shows: January 30th at 8 PM; February 1st at 8 PM; February 2nd at 2 PM
Performance venue:
Preview: Mainline Theatre (3997 St Laurent Blvd, Montreal, Quebec H2W 1Y4)
Shows - Aux Angles Ronds (5333 St Laurent Blvd, Montreal, Quebec H2T 1S5)
Give us an elevator pitch of your show.
For some, every ordinary day is a fight for survival, justice, and belonging. In The Cost of Living, The Jess-ter draws you in as performers bring to life a trial about land, power, and ethics. As the scales of justice—both literal and metaphorical—tip and turn, the story expands to confront urgent questions about indigeneity, migration, and the cost of existence in a colonial world. This bold collective creation weaves personal stories with inventive theatricality, placing the audience in the jury box to weigh testimonies that transcend borders and binaries. Created by a collective of emerging artists, the show delivers searing honesty, radical care, and unapologetic humor; a must-see for those seeking theatre that disrupts, provokes, and inspires action. Are you ready to weigh in?
What is your favourite part of this production?
At the core of this production is a focus on creating and maintaining a caring space where we, as marginalized artists, can freely reflect on our shared thoughts and experiences, develop relationships and share warm meals.
Why is this play important for audiences to see right now?
There are three main reasons why it is important for Montrealers to see this show:
What we share: our content is heavily based on our personal experiences, combined delicately with theatrical craft. This is a rare, affordable and stereotype-defying opportunity in Montreal’s heavily western and white theatre scene to receive stories by a wonderfully diverse group of indigenous, immigrant and queer artists.
The way we share: One of the values of our ensemble is honesty. We practice truth-telling in all of its complexity. The show is filled with fuck-you humor, balanced with radical care.
Who we are: we are all recent graduates and current students of Concordia’s Theatre program; young, emerging and underrepresented. We are a mix of research-creators and studio artists who are engaged in exploring our own methodologies for theatre research and creation, weaving our findings on stage throughout this show.
In a sentence, tell us about the vision or the message for this production.
Put simply, in Canadian society, the cost of life and being alive is higher for some (Immigrants and Indigenous peoples among other marginalized populations) than the rest– but is this high price worth paying?
How has the current social or political climate influenced this production?
The alarming rate of the murder of Indigenous people by the hands of Canadian police (13 people since Aug 29, 2024) and dehumanizing new anti-immigration laws and stances in Quebec are two of the salient recent manifestations of colonialism on the land which we gather on today. Settler hegemony and patriarchal practices are as present as ever, continuously and disproportionately affecting people worldwide. How do we move towards creating a society where the “cost” of living is affordable for all?
How does this production align with your company’s mission or artistic vision?
The Cost of Living is based on foundations of community and care in both content and process, and follows western and non-western, feminist and queer methodologies of story telling and creation, including the land-based teachings of the Métis story of The Giving Tree, and the Kanien'kehá:ka creation story of The Sky Woman.The Sky is the Limit Theatre (TSLT) is an emerging, collective-creation based theatre company that regularly invites emerging/young artists to create original works that ruminate on questions of the human condition through vastly diversified lenses. Since spring 2023, the team of The Cost of Living have come together twice, creating two shows considered prequels to this one, questioning their existence as outsiders in Canadian society. In this third iteration, we mobilize awareness of our marginalized selves, not as statistics but as individual humans, through a combination of personal attestations, public provocations and demanding action.
BONUS QUESTION: If your show had to take place in an entirely different setting (e.g., outer space, underwater), how would it change? Would it change?
Had this show taken place on a land other than Canada, one (perhaps a fictional one) where people weren’t divided along ethnic lines, this show would not have had to be created.
The Cost of Living
By The Sky is the Limit Theatre
January 16 - February 2, 2025
Mainline Theatre and Aux Angles Ronds