New Translation Development – Rural Arts
Bouche Theatre Collective & Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival Present
NEW PLAY DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP
FACELIFT
By Nathalie Boisvert
Translated by Johanna Nutter
Translated from FACELIFT (Quebec, Canada)
Featuring Kate Twa
Ignite the Arts Festival (Ignite the Arts Festival)
Sunday, March 29, 2026
2:00 p.m
Tempest Theatre
125 Eckhardt Ave E, Penticton BC V2A 1Z5
First the foundation, then the eyes and finally the mouth…
SYNOPSIS
While leading a YouTube make up tutorial, a woman is visited by Nelly Arcan and Simone de Beauvoir, transforming the innocent routine of daily make up into a touching look at women’s lives, examining aging, seduction, and freedom. A powerful, funny, elegant, and essential new work from award winning playwright Nathalie Boisvert.
CREATIVE & PRODUCTION TEAM
Featuring Kate Twa | Playwright: Nathalie Boisvert | Translator: Johanna Nutter | Creative Producer: Jack Paterson | General Manager: Trista Bassett (Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival) | Technical Director: Ronan Reinart (Tempest Theatre)
GALLERY
Facelift featuring Kate Twa at Tempest Theatre
(Ignite the Arts Festival, Penticton BC, 2026)
MEET THE ARTISTS
Nathalie Boisvert | Playwright
Nathalie Boisvert (elle) holds an M.A. in Dramatic Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and is the author of both poetry and theatre. Her fifteen plays include L’histoire sordide de Conrad B. (produced in Belgium and France) and L’été des Martiens (produced in Quebec, Toronto, France and Belgium, as well as in two different German translations in Dusseldorf and Berlin). Her work has received several major awards: the Prix Journées de Lyon des auteurs du théâtre for her play Vie et mort d’un village in 2006, and the Prix Gratien-Gélinas for Buffet chinois, produced at Espace Go in Montreal in 2010. Her latest work, Antigone au printemps (Antigone in the Spring), won the Prix Émilie Augier from the Académie Française and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Theatre in French.
Johanna Nutter | Translator
Johanna Nutter (she, they) is a Montreal-based performance maker and facilitator devoted to authentic storytelling. Her award-winning work has toured bilingually across Canada and Internationally. In 2016, she formed creature/creature, consolidating her passion for negotiating the delicate spaces between people, subjectivities, and artistic practices. Nutter is also devoted to advancing creative, active pedagogy, producing interactive educational programming in various African countries.
Kate Twa | Reader
Kate began her professional acting career at 17 with the role Estella in The Citadel Theatre’s production of Great Expectations. Shortly after, she travelled overseas to study in London with the British Theatre Association. Training in the classics by day left her evenings open to explore some of London’s newest playwrights and explosive productions. By 18, she was developing a taste for the raw, insightful, and provocative work she is known for today.
Selected stage performances include Birdbath by Leonard Melfi, No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Miss Julie by August Strindberg, and The Sweetest Swing in Baseball by Diana Son. Kate has acted extensively in film and television (The X-Files, The Outer Limits, Killer App, Da Vinci’s Inquest, and The Dead Zone).
Kate has taught thousands of actors in the craft of acting, is a co-founder of Railtown Actors’ Studio in Vancouver, and is currently Artistic Director of Tempest Theatre and Film Society in Penticton.
ABOUT SUMMERLAND’S RYGA ART FESTIVAL
Summerland is a rural municipality on the west side of the Okanagan Lake in Interior BC.
Every year since 2015, Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival reimagines our small town to be a vibrant meeting place of the arts and community. For a full week, presentations, performances, new creations, concerts, readings & symposiums on contemporary social issues take place in parks, street fronts, local shops, galleries, etc. All within walking distance from each other.
We aim to bridge barriers that may prevent anyone from participating in our communities and the arts, be these ability, cultural, economic, historic, physical, regional or otherwise. We will find a role for you.
NEW WORKS DEVELOPMENT
Summerland’s Ryga Arts Festival aim to empower BC Interior artists’ of all walks of life ito express their own stories, in their own voices, and their own creativity through their own art. We do this by placing the needs of the artists we work with first.
Drawing from our local, regional and national partners and connections, Theatre Makers receives a bespoke New Works Process developed to meet the individual artist’s unique creative, cultural, disciplinary and other needs.
Land Acknowledgment
The Ryga Arts Festival acknowledges with respect that this event takes place on the ancestral and unceeded lands of the Sylix peoples, who have cared for these lands since time immemorial. We are grateful for their ongoing stewardship & hold ourselves responsible for listening, learning, and building right relations through the work we do.
For more information on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada click here. www.nctr.ca
