Archive Theatre was founded in 2011 by Kristen Holfeuer in Saskatchewan. Archive Theatre works with archive materials (letters, youtube videos, and various ephemera) combined with a style of physical theatre termed “Glyphwork” and live music to create speculative documentaries.
I’m interested in archives of the quotidien: notes passed between teenagers and saved in a shoebox, VHS footage of birthday parties, projector slides of family vacations. I write documentary theatre by reconstructing people, relationships, and experiences as drawn from everyday objects. My plays, “For The You,” “Virgin/Punk/Archive/Speak,” and “I’ll Find You” take handwritten letters as their point of departure. These works begin as documentary theatre before opening into rigorously researched speculation which draws personal and public, real and unreal, past and present into immanence in a fictional narrative that is, all the while, not necessarily untrue.