Waisvisz, Sarah
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Sarah Waisvisz is a playwright, director, and multi-disciplinary performer with training in dance and physical theatre (classical ballet, puppetry, acrobatics, stilts). Recent performance credits include Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie (Bear & Co.); Rivkeh in My Name is Asher Lev (9th Hour); Little Swan in Six: At Home (Zopyra Theatre; winner of 2 Rideau Awards and 1 Ottawa Fringe Festival Award); and This Is a Very Old Story (Ottawa Stilt Union). An Artistic Associate with Counterpoint Players, Sarah co-wrote OCCUPY ME with Bronwyn Steinberg, directed by Laura Astwood. Recent writing credits also include ILoveOrangesAndHateThePort (directed by John Koensgen at the 2014 Extremely Short New Play Festival). Sarah is currently developing three new plays including a WW2 lesbian spy thriller and a solo show based both on her PhD research and her own family story. Entitled Monstrous, or The Miscegenation Advantage (dramaturgy by Emily Pea rlman, direction by Eleanor Crowder), the solo show is the PhD dissertation's shadow text: the rebellious twin that refused to be contained by the frame of academia. Monstrous grapples with questions of mixed-race identity, multiculturalism, racism, and the urgency that emerges when questions of belonging and home confront the compulsion to witness the past -- made all the more complicated when you don't know who or what you are. The development of Monstrous is supported by the Ontario Arts Council TCR program (GCTC) as well as the underdevelopment program of the Ottawa Fringe/ undercurrents festival.