Thought Residencies

Hi! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my fifteenth thought. I'm thinking about celebration, joy and bliss. About creating space and time to mark meaning. How there are traditions that are mainstream and well known. And then the ones that one creates for themselves, for their families, chosen families, friends. These unique moments that are ultimately so personal, so tied into need, want, recogni...

Idea Generation Hi! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my fourteenth thought. I'm thinking about ideas and idea generation. Where ideas come from, how they come to be and what ideas are in response to. Intellectual beginnings, imagined beginnings, historical beginnings, advocacy beginnings. Where people go to get their ideas. How idea generation can be nurtured, challenged, pushed. Who do our ide...

Thought # 13 Hi! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my thirteenth thought. I'm thinking about playwrights – young and old, near and far, all over the planet. I'm thinking about where ideas come from for playwrights, how long it can take to write a play. I'm thinking about playwriting, hunched backs over desks, waking up in the middle of the night with an idea. So many ideas, so many playwrights a...

Hi! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my twelfth thought.   I'm thinking about theatre programming, morning meetings and coffee.    I'm thinking about opening nights and audience reception and I'm thinking about mandates and mission statements. I'm thinking about the power of theatre and theatre that is uh... effervescent.  

Thought # 11 Audrey Dwyer   Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my eleventh thought.   I'm thinking about perspective and observation. I'm thinking about breath. I'm thinking about self-reflection and understanding. About searching for answers and being thorough. About social location and the future – new worlds, new ways and time. I'm thinking of interpretation, comprehension and time. I'm...

Thought # 10 Audrey Dwyer Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my tenth thought. I'm thinking about catharsis and the news. How the news impacts their audience in terms of climax and catharsis. How news watchers are taken through that process throughout the day. I remember the 80s and the little girl who fell down a well, people fixated on television sets to find out what happened in real ti...

Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my ninth thought. I'm thinking about how stories have the potential to uplift us and to inspire us and to connect us. I'm doing research on a web series right now. Life is so unpredictable and it can take us down so many roads. I'm thinking about how our curiosity in childhood and / or teen-hood impacts our choices as adults. About how being resilient and...

Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my eighth thought. I am thinking about coffee, autobiographies, video communication, buying books and how we learn. I'm thinking about mornings that look like nights and the consistency of the sun rising and setting and the full moon. I'm thinking about the world around me. I'm thinking about the things that change, the things that change that one knows w...

Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my seventh thought. I am thinking about The Golden Rule and how similar it is across religions. I just read about The Bronze Rule which is "If they are not bothering you, don't bother them." And then there is The Platinum Rule, which is "Do unto others as they would like to be done unto". Then there is The Diamond Rule, which is The Diamond Rule: "Imagine...

Hello. My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my sixth thought. I've been thinking about checklists, meetings, leadership, mediation, emails and snow. It is supposed to snow at 1 am tonight. I'm thinking of a good night's sleep and how excited I feel about work, theatre, audiences and ideas ideas ideas. I'm thinking of all the people out there buzzing with ideas, coming up with things, all of my crea...

Hello. My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my fifth thought. I've been thinking about initiatives, audiences, finances, theatricality and artistry. I've been thinking about the potential and possibilities of theatre, what the exchange is and honesty. What is real? I've been thinking about relationships, feelings, wildness and order. And I've been thinking about awareness, etiquette and abandon and...

Hello. My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my fourth thought. I'm thinking about writing for the camera, first draft completed, theatricality on film and implicating the audience in the story. I just finished watching Fleabag and I can't stop thinking about the show and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Theatricality on film and being seen. Acknowledging the viewer. I'm also thinking about Lizzo and the lyric...

Hi! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my third thought. I've been thinking a lot about how we hold space and how we facilitate other people's processes. I've been thinking a lot about therapy and therapists and their self-care and how they process all of the different things that they uh hold, encounter, listen to and um yeah just thinking about safe spaces for everyone to process... trauma

Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my second thought. I uh just got home from dress rehearsal. It's around one am Um I've been up since eight. I'm thinking about what's on the list of things to do tomorrow, about submitting a grant, I'm thinking about vitamins and how they're better if you take them with a fat, from what I've read thinking, I'm thinking about taxes, um and I'm thinking abo...

Hello! My name is Audrey Dwyer and this is my first thought. I've been thinking about how we learn and I've also been thinking about rituals before you go to bed like what people do that helps them to fall asleep. And if they do the same thing night after night after night or if people switch it up. It's uh after 1 here and I just got home from a dress rehearsal so yeah just thinking about how peo...

I was at Union Station for the Raptors parade and it was so FUN, the energy and the humanity was so, really, kind of thrilling and warming. But also I am now reminding myself that for Fridays' big Climate Strike that I need get: water in a reusable bottle, I need sunscreen, I need toilet paper or tissues, maybe a first aid kit, a phone charger and some SNACKS. So if anyone happens to be reading th...

Ok you guys here's a doozy. Umm...So the last couple of months I have been toying with the idea of putting together a workshop? a seminar? a healing circle? a sharing forum?... to talk about how to manage life as a performer, as a woman, with a hormonal cycle. And so tips and tools and advice and sharing of knowledge and medicine about how to bring yourself healthily to the work and make sure that...

This is 'climate crisis week' internationally leading up to the Big March on Friday the 27th - hope to see you there in the streets - and so most of my thoughts are about the actions that ARCA - Artists for Real Climate Action and thisisnotadrill.ca are up to this week - the theatres that are encouraging activism in and around their theatres this week, and Greta on the Youtube and her impassioned...

We were moving some furniture pieces around tonight, in my home, and we moved a Billy bookcase, thank you IKEA circa 2001, probably, And, uh, oof, there was a lot of dust underneath the bookcase and, uh, I was getting tired and everything seemed a bit overwhelming so I hopped on my phone and read about JT's... "costume" and uh, yeah, tonight is not a night for me to share any thoughts that I have...

Today my six year old daughter and a friend of hers from school gathered a huge bag of walnuts from the park next to the playground. After experimenting with different ways of exploding them on the concrete or by jumping on them, they brought the rest of their haul home, to the townhouse complex where they both live. And bit by bit - the girls - anywhere from 2 years old to 10 years from the townh...

Lately we've been doing a lot of talking about Do-ing vs. Be-ing at our house, and, um, trying to just take a - little - LOOK at that, and - the experience of that or our understanding of that at our house and, y'know, we do a lot: I think we are Big Do-ers, over here. Yup, we, uh, do...do do...haha! And uh yeah, and I'd like to do a little bit more Being without worrying about the 'To Do' do that...

My parents were living and working in New York City when the towers fell. My father watched it with his own eyes and they plucked charred pieces of paper from their Brooklyn balcony for days afterwards. Uh, that same day my husband was on a train with a group of children to perform at an international children's peace festival, but they had to stop the train at the border and bus the kids back, fi...

I'm sitting on the third floor watching a really powerful thunderstorm sweep through the rooftops around me and I am realizing that I am sitting in the sky, i am literally sitting inside the sky. My whole life I've lived on first floors and basements of Ontario homes and buildings and, sitting up here in the sky in the middle of a storm, I'm thinking about my friend Liisa Repo-Martell and all the...

I've been thinking about the public in the private and the private in the public which is so much of the territory that I have to live in as an actress, and I just came in from the West Toronto Railpath that runs along my home - because I'm trying to get outside more before the snow flies for walks or jogs, and I was just listening to the Guilty Feminist Podcast about abortion rights in Northern I...

This morning I woke up in Toronto and tonight I will go to sleep in Toronto,  but right now I'm standing on the platform of the train station in Stratford and I...    came out HERE    where it's VERY COLD    to wait for a huge hurtling steel vehicle barreling towards me    rather then sit    one minute longer    in the unwelcome, uninvited and disturbing gaze of the middle aged male stranger who's...