Hi, I’m Laurie Steven, the founder, and for 40 years, the Artistic Director of Odyssey Theatre.

CBC Radio recently asked me, if, back when I started the company, when theatre was mostly jeans and black t-shirts, I worried about whether audiences would like the masks.

I didn’t worry about it. I had a vision; I could see it. I just assumed everyone would like it. Working in beautiful Strathcona Park, I dreamed of a theatre that would draw people of from everywhere, to explore and celebrate the human spirit. And masks, under the stars, were part of the magic of that dream.

Now, I feel lucky that enough people did in fact like it. They kept us alive.

I believed then, as now, that the role of art is to take us beyond the limits of our day-to-day life, into new imaginative worlds. In doing so, we kindle our creativity, see our world today with playful eyes, and feel empowered to change the future. For me, masks are the key to creating these imaginative worlds.

As a writer and director, I look for an alternate reality which lets us ask questions about our world. For The Girl with No Hands, I asked: If we could get inside the imagination of a homeless kid, will we be more sympathetic to people who are troubled? For Benavente’s 1907, The Bonds of Interest: Can I create the romantic-poetic world of the past, and show it being taken apart by the conniving profit-driven world of Commedia’s brutish servant Policinella, a world that was born in the industrial revolution, a world we live with today? Will we hunger for the world we lost? For A Guy Named Joe: I imagined a crazy world, in which a trio of downtrodden ruffians, raise their stations in life by kidnapping their landlord, and win their freedom once they are caught. I was asking: is it okay that these guys break the law and succeed, if society treats them unjustly?

Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable opportunity to have a vision of a kind of theatre I’d like to see, and then bring it to life.

But the growth and shape of Odyssey that has emerged over the past 40 years, came as much from other kinds of questions I asked myself as artistic director.

The first was: What does our work mean to the art of masked theatre?

With great collaborators like the clown master, Richard Pochinko, the renowned puppet show creator, Felix Mirbt, and Italian Commedia dell’Arte specialist, Alberto Fortuzzi, we experimented with forms of masks and styles of staging. Through early productions clown, puppetry and Commedia were integrated into our theatrical vocabulary for masked theatre.

Almost simultaneously, I asked: what can mask work mean to theatre artists?

I realized that Odyssey needed to be a hub for masks, offering training, work and inspirational experiences for Ottawa artists, and a chance to collaborate on projects and showcase their work, for artists in our field.

Over the past 40 years, we’ve brought seasoned actors, writers, dramaturges, choreographers, directors, musicians, composers, and physical theatre specialists, to give workshops and collaborate on projects. As a result, productions have incorporated artforms like bouffon, Baroque dance, post-modern dance, mime, improvisation, circus arts, opera, each time trying to capture a specific imaginative world. And in the process, we developed Canada’s only new play program for mask and physical theatre artists.

In 1993, I re-examined my assertion that masks are great because they distil the universal in human experience, because all the theatre forms we were drawing on were western. There are international forms of masks and dance-theatre, rooted in cultures and stories from around the world, that were not on mainstages in Canadian theatre. Once I got to know something about these art forms, I thought they should be. So, I invited artists to collaborate.

We worked with Chinese Opera and western ballet choreographer Xing Bang Fu, combining Commedia and Chinese Opera in two productions. Anjali, an Indian dancer and choreographer, collaborated with us to integrate Kathakali into a new work. Peter Chin, whose choreography combines Indonesian martial dance with post-modern dance, came to explore the fusion of his art, with western mask work, in The Wedding. For some time now we have been developing Odyssey’s first international co-production with the Sri Lankan State dance company, looking at how to bring Kolam and Commedia together, two of the three extant forms of masked comedy. Long, meaningful collaborations with these artists, has had a profound impact on me, on the masks we create, and on our style of staging.

Our company’s interest in opening our stage to artists from around the world, also led to our pilot project in 2024, a Festival of Myth and Folktale. This festival defied boundaries that separate artforms into disciplines. It brought together wonderful Ottawa artists who explore myth and folktale through theatre, storytelling, dance, and music. The result was that we built new relationships for the future of Odyssey, as we further explore myth and folktale.

Embedded in these experiments, was the question: what will this kind of theatre mean to an audience?

I hoped, then, as now, that it means adventuring with artists to discover new imaginative worlds, asking meaningful questions, and taking risks with us as we develop new dimensions of masked theatre.

In 2012, I dove more deeply into the question: what does theatre mean to a community? Yes, we make a city feel creative and alive, and yes, we are a recreational place to experience something different.

At the same time, theatre only draws a segment of the community. I thought about all the park users – from family picnickers, to soccer players, to bird watchers and surreptitious dog walkers. Our eclectic Sandy Hill neighbourhood has the widest variety of housing, of anywhere in the City.

I began to think we need to do two kinds of things: create shows that people come to, but also, go out into the community, collaborate, and share our art and creativity with a wide range of people in ways help them tell their stories and create their own art. So began our Outreach Program, in which we do just that.

This work has changed my view of what theatre can be. It has also brought me, and others at Odyssey, into contact with Ottawans who care about community, about making it better: people in social services, parks planning, politicians, business people, city staff, and a host of community-minded individuals. I am privileged to work with, and alongside these people.

Odyssey has faced challenges over the past 40 years. Working outdoors is magical, but it’s hard. We have survived perpetual funding cuts. Sometimes I attribute our survival to unrealistic optimism, because we still operate on a shoe string and struggle to do more with limited resources.

But in truth, it’s the vision of an open-air theater of masks, and people coming from many backgrounds, to see wonderful stories unfold on stage, that has kept us going through the tough times.

I’ve been asked a few times, what my favourite show has been, and every time I say something different as I remember something wonderful that happened with a particular production.

But if one thing stands out, it’s our Youth Apprenticeship Program. It began when I was a teenager knocking on doors of professional theatres, begging to volunteer, because I wanted to know what it would be like to be in a professional company. I was turned down by everyone.

So, when I started Odyssey, I started the Youth Apprenticeship program. This has become a program where young people, with a love of theatre, can train, be mentored, receive workshops, develop a network, all while doing the kind of work, that might be like their first job in theatre. What remains most important to me, is that they can experience both the hard work and camaraderie, that defines life in our profession, and then make informed decisions about their futures.

The Youth Apprenticeship Program also symbolizes, what I believe is at the heart of Odyssey’s philosophy. We are a company that has open doors: for youth, the community, and artists.

This leads me to Odyssey’s World of Masks: our new digital mask resource centre, which will launch in March 2027.

This website began as a way of preserving, through photographs, over 350 theatre masks, that have been created by distinguished Canadian mask makers: hand-crafted, original works of art, that are the foundation of our shows. We have partnered with Carleton University’s Public History Department, to accession our collection for the last number of years.

As we developed the concept of this website, it became clear that sharing the mask collection was just one component of what this site should be.

This should be a place where artists, students, teachers, and people with a variety of life experiences, living in the remotest locations, can connect with our artists, and get inspiration and training that they can carry into their work, and into their communities.

We are grateful to the Trillium Foundation for their support for this project. Be prepared to hear more about this website in upcoming months. And the Theatre would be grateful for any contributions you can make.

In closing, I would like to thank our wonderful Board of Directors, volunteers, the many artists, production and administrative workers who have joined us, often for many years, John Forster, who has been a pillar of this company for 40 years, all our funders, including the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, and the Ottawa Community Foundation, and our terrific audiences.

Most particularly, I would like to thank the individual donors, the Friends of Odyssey, who we honour tonight. We truly could not be here without all of you.

I am excited now to step back and watch the future growth of Odyssey, and wish you many fruitful artistic adventures ahead!

Laurie