Sophie May Healey in Hysteria’s House, Found Festival 2026. Photo supplied
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There’s just no telling what will happen when you find yourself at Found. Yes, the festival of encounters with art and artists in unexpected places is back Thursday with a 15th annual edition.
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You too could be a Found-ling, and find yourself in a secret warehouse, or a historic house, a church or an antique and collectibles shop. Or you could be strolling through a park, and happen upon a human clock. Or (maybe still in your bathrobe), you’re find yourself inside a Google Doc.
Found is all about brokering experimental relationships between performers, unusual spaces, and … you. To see what happens.
“The heart of site-specific and found-space art is to walk into a space you normally wouldn’t expect, and the art transforms the space and the space responds to the art,” says Found Fest director Whittyn Jason, a busy theatre designer with a particular love for site-specific theatrical experiments. “It feels so real; because you aren’t normally supposed to be there, it adds an element of danger” to the theatrical experience.
It’s exciting to give your preconceptions a shake. As Jason says, “your expectations are subverted when you don’t know the rules…. Very punk rock/ DIY roots.” Site-specific “makes theatre so much more dynamic, interesting, challenging.”
SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026. Rehearsal photo by Sable Boltz.
Besides, “bringing a piece to a space that’s non-theatrical,” as Jason puts it, means it’s accessible to an audience that might not show up to conventional theatres. That was particularly important to Cree playwright Shyanne Duquette, in the second year of their Found Fest “Fresh Air Artist-in Residency. Which was why they were so delighted with the venue for their new play SKNHEAD, Found’s feature presentation: “a secret commercial location somewhere on 97th Street between Jasper Ave. and 102 A Ave.” After all, the characters are mixed-race inner-city kids, outliers desperate to belong to something, who gravitate to gangs. Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Tara Beagan directs. (Stay tuned for ’s upcoming interview with Duquette).
It’s a ‘gift from the gods’, to borrow from clownspeak, to find the perfect location for a creative idea. Jason laughs, “it’s always a good sign when the playwright is excited about the space, and you hear ‘this rocks!’” Or “it has to happen here.” Jason will only say that the secret SKNHEAD venue is “intriguing” and “an Edmonton icon.”
Goalie Play, Found Festival 2026. Image supplied.
In their first year as Fresh Air artists-in-residence, Alex Ward (playwright) and Alexander Voutchkov (producer/dramaturg) present a “work-in-progress reading” of Goalie Play. The central character is an NHL goalie — paired with a drummer — who suffers a career-altering injury, and is forcedto examine his life, and re-imagine it without hockey.
Whittyn describes it as “an interdisciplinary one-man show (starring Ryan Blair), with elements of puppetry, live drumming, recorded voice…. a feast for your senses, an inter- disciplinary piece about what it means to make sacrifices to an institution that’s larger than you, larger than life.”
Sophie May Healey in Hysteria’s House, Found Festival, photo supplied
Hysteria’s House, by and performed by Sophie May Healey, takes the audience to the historic John Walters House in Kinsman Park. “It’s a romp!” says Jason, who’d seen an earlier Nextfest iteration of the “dark comedy/ clown/ neo-burlesque” solo show, directed by Alexandra Dawkins. “Sophie is so funny … such a magnetic, mesmerizing and enigmatic performer.” And since Hysteria’s House explores the dark Victorian corridors of femininity and misogyny through the lens of gothic romance, “a parlour of the era” is an uncanny location. (Jason warns it’s a tight fit, so don’t dawdle getting tickets.)
The multi-disciplinary performance poetry piece Mass For Shut-Outs takes the audience to Robertson-Wesley United Church. Created and performed by Tanya Davis, a former P.E.I poet laureate (and Found Fest’s first Maritime artist), it re-frames a Catholic mass for people who have historically been ostracized from the Church. There’s live music, and at the post-service reception, in time-honoured church tradition, there’s juice and cookies.
Mass For Shut-Outs, We Quit Theatre at Found Festival 2026. Photo supplied.
You don’t have to be in Edmonton to go to Found Fest 2026. The highly original Winnipeg based duo We Quit Theatre, Dasha Plett and Gislina Patterson, brings 805-4821, “a trans coming-out story made up of other stories,” as Jason describes, to Google Docs (“with occasional links to YouTube,” and, hey, a dialogue from Hamlet). You can interact with it as “a live-typed digital performance” on your laptop; or you can have a more communal experience by showing up in person at the Studio Theatre for a “movie screening,” complete with popcorn.
Jason calls 805-4821 “multi-media queer phantasmagoria.” Plett and Patterson, they say, are “a couple of the most interesting contemporary artists in the country right now,” says Jason. We Quit Theatre will be back, in person, for Common Ground’s “Prairie Mainstage Series,” with i am your spaniel; or A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson.
The timing of 805-4821 is on the nose: our Moment in history is hard and getting harder for queer and trans people. “As a queer non-binary artist myself, I want to be able to curate the art I want to see! This feels important and timely.” The We Quit Theatre pair “has quite a following,” Jason says, cheered that “people are excited about queer and trans art!”
Untitled (clock piece), Found Festival 2026. Photo supplied.
And speaking as we are about timely, Untitled (clock piece), by Toronto-based Susannah Haight and Edmonton’s Tia Kushniruk, is an outdoor 12-hour durational performance piece in which six dancers move in real time through a clock made of stones. It happens in Henrietta Muir Park across from the Muttart. Says Jason “we’re researching mosquito repellent as we speak.”
At Maven and Grace on Whyte Ave., writings from the bottom of the lost + found bin, curated by Philip Hackborn, this year’s edition of Found Fest’s annual poetry showcase, gathers poetry from an assortment of Edmonton poets. Says Jason, they explore “the theme of what we have lost and found; one person’s trash is one person’s treasure.”
There’s a music series, an AfterFound Cabaret, an “after-dark craft night.” And Tamarack’s Sound Fest is a free two-day celebration of Indigenous and Métis food, music and art. It’s time to get Found.
PREVIEW
Found Festival 2026
Produced by: Common Ground Arts Society
Where: assorted “found venues,” including the great outdoors
Running: Thursday through Sunday
Tickets, information, full schedule: commongroundarts.ca.
