Jake Tkaczyk
PhD Candidate 2020-23
Jake Tkaczyk’s formal arts education to date has focused on live theatre performance, with a diploma in Theatre Performance and Creation from Red Deer College and a BFA in Acting from University of Alberta. He has performed with various theatre companies in Edmonton and toured throughout the province of Alberta. Selected professional performance credits include Mr Burns: A Post Electric Play, Urinetown, Lungs, and With Bells On (a drag comedy by Edmonton playwright Darrin Hagen).
As a young gay theatre artist who grew up on a farm, Jake was drawn to the possibilities of self-created work, and became fascinated with the chance to express his convictions and change other people’s minds through timely and provocative live performance.
Jake recently received the Alberta Foundation for the Arts' Young Artist prize, presented to the top 25 young influential artists in the province of Alberta.
Jake is currently employed by the arts service organization Theatre Alberta as Programs Co-ordinator, developing programs and producing events to support the theatre community in Alberta. He also manages a yoga studio and is a RYT-certified yoga teacher.
research interest
In a world of symbols, I create performative experiences of awe, meaning, and pleasure. I reinvigorate audience and artist through cross-pollination of disciplines, asking artists to work in forms outside of their comfort zones. Designers are not only asked to build the space or the costumes, they participate in the creation of text and perform in aspects of the show. The content and aesthetic is aimed at exciting, challenging, and changing the audience. My praxis is an act of resistance to a culture of divisiveness, shame, and terror.
Currently, I enjoy framing my work as small experiments with radical intent geared toward creating liminal space. This liminality allows for the artist to craft ‘awe’ in a performative sphere. Through the use of theatre and performance, the ability to play with what is sacred and holy in liveness is frequently explored in my work.
Initial sources that have inspired me are (but not limited to): Jordan Tannahill’s Theatre of the Unimpressed, Sara Jane Bailes’ Poetics of Failure, Deanna Fleysher, Lin Snelling, and Kristine Nutting.
The ability to take an image and stretch it to its absolute is part of what audience and artist find satisfying. In theatre, there is a natural tendency to settle for what is easier, or “possible.” This happens before a chance has ever been fully taken on the initial impulse. If you want to have a real and alive lobster on stage miraculously appear on astro-turf, while the entire audience is covered in a white tarp, you must try until the Artistic Director of the Fringe Festival calls you on your cellphone the next morning demanding you remove it from the show.