The Thistle Project received some lovely accolades at the end of the year. NOW magazine placed our production of Peer Gynt at #7 on their Top Ten Shows of 2010 list, and we received a great write-up in the British publication Plays International.

Keep your eye out on Thistle as we develop new project for the upcoming year. We wish you all a wonderful, prosperous and happy New Year!

The Thistle Project's artistic directors have had a very good year in the 2009/2010 season.
In addition to a successful run of Peer Gynt, our second mainstage show, Matthew and Christine have been busy bees.

Matthew started the season in Ottawa commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Inséparable, and ends it that way as well, since the play was picked up by Arts Court for their new Summer Fling Arts Festival from 10-22 August. If you're in Ottawa in August, don't miss Matthew in uniform playing a very unsure General James Wolfe.
Next he returned to Toronto for a very busy Autumn, including development workshops for Peer Gynt, Theatre Rusticle's Peter and the Wolf, and Erika Batdorf's One Pure Longing, as well as a remount of the Classical Theatre Project's Twelfth Night, for which he garnered a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination, along with the rest of the ensemble.
After our very own production of Peer Gynt, the Spring saw Matthew moving into work on Theatre Rusticle's Birnam Wood at Theatre Passe Muraille, then visited the iceberg again as Jack Phillips in Rusticle's West Coast tour of April 14, 1912. After returning from the West, he dove into (or climbed into) working on One Pure Longing in preparation for its run at the Luminato Festival from 11-14 June.
The summer sees Matthew going back and forth from Ottawa, choreographing 32 Octaves a new butoh piece for Annie Lefebvre as part of a commission from the National Capital Commission at the Remic Rapids on the Ottawa River. He takes a yoga teacher training course in July and then returns for three weeks in Ottawa in Louis Lemire's Inseparable (without the accent this time), which rounds out the entire season.

While Matthew likes to flit, Christine likes to focus. She has been working more concertedly on fewer projects and this has paid off massively.
Christine acted as the producer on Peer Gynt which meant that she was our media contact, our space coordinator, our volunteer wrangler, our needle woman, our fundraiser and basically our champion in every way. The job was a continuous one from about October until the close of the show at the end of February, and Christine was tireless for the entire time.
This was rendered even more amazing in light of a new theatrical relationship she established this year, with Vikki Anderson at DVxT Theatre. In November, Christine played to warm reviews and an entirely sold out run in their atmospheric production of The Turn of the Screw. The show was also a hit with the Dora jury, and the production received several nominations, including Outstanding Performance by a Female for Christine.
She then went on to prepare to play Juliet, again with Vikki, as part of the cast of Romeo and Juliet in the Dream in High Park. This production opened 29 June and runs through the entire summer, which rounds out her season.

But the big excitement occurred on 28 June when Christine won her first Dora Mavor Moore Award for her work in DVxT's Turn of the Screw. The Thistle Project (the entire project) does a very big happy dance for Christine, as well as for Clinton Walker and Vikki Anderson, who also won in their categories. Congratulations to all.