Deborah Pearson

Maker of Live Things

The Hope Project

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The Talent

A woman in a sound booth is talking. She is talking to herself. She is talking to you. She is talking to everyone. She is gifted, professional, mercurial; it seems as if she can summon almost any kind of voice and create any kind of world.

The Elders

The Elders (Os Anciaos) is a play starring actors between 12 and 18 years old, set 40 years in the future, who play politicians 40 years older than they are.

Make Yourself At Home

Inside an empty cardboard box big enough for two adults to sit in, you meet a stranger. A stranger who wasn’t born here. They want to make you feel at home. After they’ve made you tea, they ask you to think about a room, from any point in your life, that reminds you the most of home.

‘Where were the doors and where were the windows?’

History History History

In 1956, there was a popular uprising against the USSR in Hungary. The battle was fought primarily from the Corvin Cinema, and the uprising lead to one of the largest refugee crises of the twentieth century.

The Future Show

“As soon as I finish speaking you will clap. Even those of you who were a bit bored will clap because it’s a comfortable way to signal an ending.”

Baby Steps

Baby Steps is the winner of the 2023 Honours for Eurodram – the European Network for Drama in Translation.

No Time To Sleep

A 24 Hour Live Performance, filmed and streamed in Lahore, Pakistan. Starring Sarmad Khoosat, created collaboratively by Olomopolo, Ryan Van Winkle and Deborah Pearson, from a concept by Ryan Van Winkle.

MON€Y

I said, are you ready to laugh?

The Filibuster

The Filibuster is a 12 hour durational performance piece featuring a series of female identifying performers speaking spontaneously at a podium, tackling the baggage around public discourse and women. The first performer is 13 years old, and the piece features progressively older performers as the 12 hours goes on, until the last performer is in her 70s or 80s. Audience members are invited to come and go over the course of the piece.

Post National

Instructions towards an uncertain Future

‘‘There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.  There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.’’

— Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, The New York Times, 2015

It’s All Made Up

Deborah Pearson wasn’t very comfortable writing fiction.  To her, it felt like lying. As a result, she’s made her career in theatre by telling real stories about her life or her performers’ lives. Designer and artist Chloe Lamford designed The Site at the Royal Court, and challenged Deborah to write some fiction for it.

Inside Bitch

A collaboration with playwright and performer Stacey Gregg.

What is lost when we try to tell a story?

“You’ve seen Orange is the New Black. You’ve seen Locked Up. You’ve seen Bad Girls.  So, what have we got that’s different? Well, for one, we’ve been to prison.”

The Whole Darned Thing

The Whole Darned Thing was a podcast where, for seven episodes, a different artist took me through the entire plot-line of something they had seen or read.

Made Visible

How do you acknowledge the exceptional situation of being white, from the inside, without saying all the wrong things?

Drifting Right

The piece seeks to engender a cross-political dialogue between my left leaning tendencies, and those who support the rightwards shift currently happening in Western politics. It is a piece about talking to conservatives, and sharing a boat with a conservative.

InFORMING CONTENT

inFORMING CONTENT is a three-day creation lab combining experimental approaches to theatre-making with academic research.

The Queen West Project

The Queen West Project had each of the six audience members wearing headphones, and using a map, on their own distinct route through the Queen West neighbourhood, leading to the grounds of CAMH, where they then followed a dancer through the grounds of CAMH.  The piece ended in the community garden at the rear of the CAMH grounds, where all six audience members gathered with the six dancers.

A Synonym for Love

A modern English libretto for Handel’s first opera, Cor Fedele.

Like You Were Before

Like You Were Before was developed at BAC and the Arches. It was presented as a studio show, but in Edinburgh I performed an intimate version at Alphabet Video, the legendary independent video store that has since closed, and where I worked when I first arrived in the UK.

CO-ED

CO-ED (Or how to become your gender in 10 easy steps) was a double bill for the final year drama students at York University of an all male play directed by Ross Manson called Table Talk  that I wrote when I was 22 years old, and a devised piece based on that first play, called The Play About the Other Play, created by myself, the director Claire Calnan, and the female students.

Music’s Been Ruined by Dating

Music’s Been Ruined by Dating was an intimate piece for four audience members at a time, staged in a tent made of bedsheets.