About
Creative Producer Philip Hackborn (they/them/any), is a performance artist, actor, and poet situated in amiskwaciwâskahikan, colonially known as Edmonton. They exist and make art at the intersections of race, gender identity, and madness. Over the years, they have assisted theatre productions in abandoned warehouses, improvised live with the players of escape rooms as voice-over animatronic characters, and discreetly threaded theatrical ritual under the surface of most of their work.
Select performance credits: FEED (MZD, Zero Lab #3), Hamlet in Isolation (Thou Art Here), Krampus: a Christmas Escape Adventure (Canscare), Devour Content Here (Cowgirl Opera). Select writing credits: Madness and other Ghost Stories (re:Create, Found Fest), The Shadow and the Fool (re:Create, Next Fest), Fragmented Journeys and Liminal (Skirtsafire, Expanse Festival, Alberta Circus Arts Festival). They also have an ongoing private writing project titled Frag/ments, which at one point saw snippets of poetry and philosophy stuffed into old pill bottles and sold out of a vending machine.
Works
At Next Fest 2020 and 2021 re:Create produced, curated, and hosted the Clown and Mask showcases, respectively titled Is This Thing On? – a webcam cabaret for clowns and Click/ Clack, Clowns at the Keyboard – another webcam cabaret. Both showcases were presented online during lockdowns, bringing digital laughs to the home offices and living rooms of Next Fest patrons- and brought audiences (which a clown cannot do without!) straight to a chatroom with the performers.
At Next Fest 2022, we presented our first full length show, The Shadow and the Fool: a progress showing for a process growing. This was an experiment which blended storytelling, academic lecture, and theatrical ritual. It was built in order to share research that Creative Producer Philip Hackborn had self-conducted around the similarities between the writings of CG Jung and the Clown and Mask process of Richard Pochinko, while exploring their own madness. Sharing that research, weaving the story of how these ideas took form throughout, and reading direct quotes from Jung’s work as the Commedia del’arte character Il Dottore, the show culminated in a rejection of Jung and the revelation of the underlying ritual taking place the whole time which was designed to reconcile great love of performance with deep terror and stagefright.
Madness and other Ghost Stories is an ongoing series of storytelling circles, first presented at Found Fest 2024. Prioritizing care and community in equal measure with creativity, this story-swap brought artists, writers, and storytellers around a campfire in Mill Creek Ravine to share tales of what haunts us in our hearts and minds. Avoiding diagnostic language and treating what is traditionally viewed as “limitation” as the point of creative generation itself, the evening was full of dramatic monologues, poetry in both classical and contemporary language, flash fiction, and a song performed a capella. What really began that night was a growing community of artists and audiences pursuing new ways of talking about experiences of madness.