Jake Tkaczyk
Jake Tkaczyk (PhD) is a theatre-maker, educator, researcher, and cultural leader whose practice investigates how awe, meaning, and pleasure can reshape contemporary performance. His research challenges the dominance of linear, plot-driven theatre by exploring performance as an experiential, participatory, and collaborative encounter. Working across devised theatre, improvisation, site-responsive practice, and performance pedagogy, he is interested in how live performance creates moments of wonder, humour, vulnerability, and collective meaning-making. His work examines the relationship between aesthetics, liveness, audience participation, and artistic risk, asking how theatre can move beyond representation to become an event that transforms both performer and spectator. He did his doctoral research with Transart Institute and Liverpool John Moore University.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
My practice explores performance as an experience rather than an object. I create work that privileges awe, pleasure, humour, and liveness over narrative certainty, inviting audiences into active encounters that are collaborative, surprising, and deeply human. Through devising, improvisation, and interdisciplinary creation, I investigate how performance can generate new forms of meaning by embracing uncertainty, participation, and embodied experience. I am interested in theatre as a space for experimentation, generosity, and collective imagination, where artists and audiences become co-creators of the event.
PRACTICE INCLUDES
Devised theatre; Improvisation; Participatory performance; Site-responsive performance; Ensemble creation; Performance pedagogy; Artistic leadership; Festival curation; Producing; Dramaturgy; Interdisciplinary performance; Community-engaged practice.
RELATED RESEARCH & PRACTICE AREAS
aesthetics of awe, meaning, and pleasure;
audience participation and co-creation;
Canadian theatre and performance;
antipositivism;
contemporary dramaturgy;
devised and postdramatic performance;
experimental pedagogies;
humour as artistic methodology;
interdisciplinary artistic practice;
liveness, presence, and failure;
performance and cultural leadership;
performance philosophy;
practice-as-research.