For Ruby Slippers Theatre’s next instalment of Theatre in Multi-culture: Perspectives, Gavan Cheema interviews Carmen Aguirre and Adele Noronha about allyship.
CARMEN AGUIRRE Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning theatre artist and author, and an Electric Company Theatre Core Artist. She has written and co-written over twenty-five plays, including Anywhere But Here and The Refugee Hotel. Carmen is the author of the #1international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of aRevolutionary Daughter (2012 CBC Canada Reads winner), and its bestselling sequel, MexicanHooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution. She is directing Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding at Vancouver’s Studio 58 in November of 2023. Carmen has over eighty film, television, and stage acting credits, and twenty theatre directing credits. She is a 2020 Siminovitch Prize finalist, and a graduate of Studio 58. carmenaguirre.ca
ADELE NORONHA Adele Noronha is a theatre artist whose heart forever sits on the west coasts of two countries at opposite ends of the world. She holds a decade-long practice as a performer, thinker, and a dabbler in creation, curation, production, and dramaturgy.
GAVAN CHEEMA Gavan Cheema is a director, writer, producer, and co-Artistic Director of Theatre Conspiracy. She is based out of Vancouver: the traditional, unceded, and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is a first generation Canadian, with roots coming from the five rivers of Punjab. She is a recent recipient of the Sam Payne Award for Most Promising Emerging Artist at the Jessie Richardson Awards.
Gavan’s play Himmat premiered in Vancouver at The Cultch in May 2022 and will be presented at the Surrey Civic Theatres in Spring 2024. She holds a double major from the University of British Columbia in Theatre and History, as well as a high school teaching certification. She has created work and directed for various local, national and international stages and has extensive experience in youth engagement, theatre education and workshop facilitation.
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RST acknowledges that we are uninvited guests on the stolen lands of the Coast Salish People, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. We are committed to working in solidarity with people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and person of colour as accomplices in transforming the white colonial patriarchy into something more compassionate and equitable.
