Our Mission

Theatre Rusticle is an award-winning independent physical theatre company devoted to creating original and daring work inspired by plays, poems, history and literature. We make plays that are spare yet image drenched and embrace the languages of text and the body. Like the rusticles we are named after, we eat away at the raw material of our sources and leave beautiful, haunting forms behind. Our raw material is text, the body, emotion and narrative. Our forms are the plays we create.

Our mission is to test and push the boundaries where text meets movement and movement meets the word. We embrace a physical process that integrates practices straddling theatre and dance alongside a rigorous distillation of text and action. Our mission is to challenge artists to push the limits of their artistry and to invite audiences to experience their own imaginative and inner landscapes while offering vibrant, immediate and evocative theatre. We celebrate the singularity of each artistic contribution and each audience response in the hopes of creating a rich tapestry of experience for all that reflects our dreams and realities, our inner and outer lives and how we define ourselves and the world we live in.

A child of fringe festivals, we performed our first work at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1998 and since 2000 have been self-producing and developing new work. We were incorporated as a not for profit charitable organization in March 2005.

Theatre Rusticle is the recipient of 16 Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations for outstanding work in Independent Theatre including Outstanding Production and Direction for "April 14, 1912". In 2008, we toured to SuperNova Theatre Festival and Magnetic North Festival.

Recent Productions: The Stronger Variations (2014), Dinner at Seven-Thirty, Buddies in Bad Times (2013), Peter and the Wolf, Theatre Centre (2011), Birnam Wood, Theatre Passe Muraille (2010).

Toronto's Best Movement Theatre Company (NOW)

About THEATRE RUSTICLE

"One of the most imaginative companies in Canada". Paula Citron, The Globe and Mail

" a lyrical mix of movement, music and text...a hypnotic waltz of the real and unreal...fact-based and fantastical", The Vancouver Sun.

" Superbly deconstructed...an expressionistic journey into the subconscious...Theatre Rusticle makes for very compelling theatre". Paula Citron, The Globe and Mail.

"McMackon knows how to give vibrant physical and textual life to a scene". Jon Kaplan, Plays International Vol.22.

"A brilliantly executed piece of theatre". Robert Cushman, The National Post.

“…a piercing intelligence…McMackon gives shape and form to the inexpressible”. Glenn Sumi, NOW