Community Spotlight: Kel MacDonald

Written by Jared Davidson

Since March, theatre communities have been fragmented. Instead of connecting over drinks while waiting for shows to start, theatre lovers bump into each other in online waiting rooms. They chat in the comments on Facebook streams and reminisce over year-old photos of packed auditoriums. 

For artists like Kel MacDonald, it’s just not the same. 

“I miss the lobbies, the waiting rooms and the bars,” says MacDonald. “I feel like, today, when you go into a Zoom room, it’s a bit more difficult to mingle and chit chat and really feel like you’re seeing people.”

The sense of being there has disappeared in so many areas of life, and its lack is acutely felt by theatre lovers. But there are efforts underway to use the online tools available to bridge the gaps between disconnected communities. 

MacDonald is the Assistant Facilitator to one such initiative. The Strata Inc. Workshop Series is helmed by Megan Peircey Monafu, and the idea stems from Monafu’s play of the same name. The goal is to give Ottawa students from grades 7 through 12 the skills and opportunity to create their own audio works. 

“It was a super contemporary idea before COVID,” says MacDonald. “And then COVID happened and it became all the more pressing to make sure that young people had a good digital toolkit that they could draw from.”

Each student who participates in the workshops will be empowered to create something unique, be it a podcast, a radio play, or something more experimental. They’ll be given the tools they need, in addition to one-on-one training courtesy of Monafu and MacDonald. 

The workshop will be conducted online, a necessity that MacDonald hopes won’t prevent a genuine connection with the students. She believes that a collaborative atmosphere will help to close the distance created by a reliance on digital means of communication.

“Because the students are creating something they care deeply about, that’s going to tell us a lot about them even though we haven’t spent time with them,” she says. 

For MacDonald, the goal of the Strata Inc. Workshop Series is to show students what can be done to achieve connection through art, despite the challenges of distance and isolation. She wants to dissuade young artists from losing sight of the purpose of art, from creating something flashy without much substance.

“It’s less about trying to impress people with what you can do technologically and more about getting at showing the gooey centre of your honest, vulnerable heart,” says MacDonald. “It sounds super twee, but I think that we could all use a little more earnestness in our lives right now.”

MacDonald, a uOttawa student, spends much of her time on video calls for lectures and meetings, so she knows firsthand the extent of technological fatigue. And though she will always gravitate toward theatre, she finds herself moving away from her screens in search of artistic sustenance. 

“What I’ve found a lot of comfort in is public art and outdoor art,” she says. “I have a newfound appreciation for any statue in Ottawa.”

Kel MacDonald is an emerging artist pursuing her master’s degree in theatre at the University of Ottawa and the cofounder of indie company The Precariat alongside Hilary Peck. She is the Assistant Facilitator for the Strata Inc. Workshops with Megan Monafu and in partnership with GCTC. For more information about these workshops, check out this streamed interview with Megan Piercey Monafu.