One Yellow Rabbit (OYR) produces and stages cutting-edge, unconventional plays and performances. The brainchild of founders Blake Brooker and the late Michael Green, who sadly passed away in 2015, OYR was born in 1981 and now makes its home in The Big Secret Theatre in Arts Commons (formerly EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts) where most of its performances are staged. The organization also presents the wildly popular High Performance Rodeo, Calgary’s International Festival of the Arts, every January.
“Really, we were influenced by the music scene, the DIY, punk ethos,” says Blake of the theatre company’s formative years in the early 1980s. “All you had to do was pick up a guitar, have a place to play it, and learn your instruments with your friends. We thought we could do the same thing with theatre.”
From staging early performances in nightclubs, church basements and restaurants, the OYR team, which also include members Denise Clarke and Andy Curtis, has written and produced plays such as Serpent Kills, Permission and Hunger’s Brides, which it has performed in Prague, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in Mexico City, among many other points on the globe. It has also collaborated with writing and producing the Second World War themed Liberators, Occupiers, and Population with German and Dutch theatre companies.
The company has become one of the city’s signature cultural institutions. “Our raison d’etre is to be another part of Calgary,” Brooker proudly explains. “People ask, ‘Why don’t you move to Toronto or L.A.?’ Our lives are here. You can make up stuff here as well as you can make up stuff in Helsinki.”
