Gyllian Raby: Home

Welcome to Gyllian Raby's website

They say a document set into motion in cyberspace never disappears: hit the send button, it will ricochet for years.

Theatre is like that, but zings about inside, embedding at a cellular level in the makers and participants across the boards. You don't see it, but it's there, the show your grandmother took you to when you were seven years old.

wicked photo

Poster from Something Wicked This Way Comes, a show produced by Northern Light Theatre in 1991-1992.

When my basement started to leak I realized I’d like to reclaim some bygones mouldering in their damp boxes. I found some things, forgotten for years, that Martin Morrow might have liked when he wrote the book Wild Theatre, One Yellow Rabbit's history. How many times do I have to decide not to throw them away? My friend Michelle of Red Dog Design inspired me to pour them out over cyberspace.

I thought, "now that I’m teaching and I have to continually re-arrange everything I know so as to keep adapting, there might be something satisfyingly useful about an accessible archive". And since Michelle linked the fragments together I can see a trajectory and a pattern or two that I wasn't so aware of before.

This material mostly archives my work with professional theatres and universities — especially Brock University, where recent years have given me the stability to develop sturdy and flexible processes for devised theatre using an RSVP (Halprin, Lessard, Lepage) process with my collaborators at Carousel Players theatre. The best records are from the period when the amazing Juliet Kershaw was publicist for Northern Light Theatre — she really knew how to organize press and art. She was even able to organise me!

Comments are welcome...

Best to all; peace, love and prosperity,

Gyllian