Meet our 2023 Theatre Critics!

Denise Kenney

Denise Kenney worked as a theatre performer, creator, and director and has written, directed and produced narrative and documentary film and television. She is Co-Founder of Kelowna’s Inner Fish Performance Co. and the Eco Art Incubator. Theatre highlights include: New Moon for Key City Theatre, Port Townsend, WA.; The Half Life of Marie Curie and What A Mess for Penticton’s Tempest Theatre; Sites Embodied, a site-specific performance project in Cyprus; Handheld Devices: Body Politic for Montreal’s Encuentro Festival; Green Space for Edmonton’s Canoe Festival; and Soundcan: Art of Public Noise, a project that toured Europe. Denise is an Associate Professor in Performance at the University of British Columbia- Okanagan. She is currently working on her own one-woman show entitled Canary.

Neil Cadger

After graduating from the Lecoq Theatre School in Paris in 1984, Cadger co-founded Wissel Theatre in Gent, Belgium with an international group of alumni. Wissel theatre collectively devised interdisciplinary performances and toured internationally for a decade (highlights: Battersea Arts Centre and ICA in London; Shaffy Theatre in Amsterdam; The Kitchen, New York; Theatre 140 and the Beursschouburg in Brussels). He has taught, directed and performed in film with theatre/dance companies. In 1989, with Denise Clarke and Mark Christman, he won a Dora Award for Best Directing for Erotic Irony; he created, performed and toured devised sound, and movement pieces internationally between 2000 – 2015. (soundcan: the art of public noise, Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, 2011; Sound can fly, with Steve Heimbecker, Toronto 2001; biped dream with Michelle Sereda in Regina 2003). From 2000–2005, he taught in the Drama Department at the University of Saskatchewan, and in 2005 he founded a BFA in interdisciplinary performance at the UBC Okanagan campus. In 2017, he founded the Living Things International Arts Festival in Kelowna, and annual festival of object theater, circus, dance, music & visual art. For the 2021 edition of Living Things, together with Andrew Stauffer, he collaborated virtually with 50 movement and sound artists from across North America to create The Collective Body, an outdoor audio-visual instillation, which hass since been presented at the Luna Festival in Revelstoke (September 2021), in Edmonton by  Mile Zero Dance (October 2021), and at the Vernon Public Art Gallery (March – April 2022). He received the UBC Dorothy Somerset award (outstanding contributions in performances in theatre) in 2021, and the city of Kelowna Honour in the Arts Award in 2023.