“My goal is to hire as many Indigenous artists on Geordie’s creative team as I can,” says Jimmy Blais.
When actor, director and playwright Jimmy Blais, Attd 09, looks back on his Department of Theatre audition at Concordia, he remembers sweaty palms and an anxious stutter.
“I wasn’t even able to get the first three lines of my monologue out, that’s how nervous I was,” he recalls.
Thankfully, the try-out took place over two days and by the end, Blais had found his confidence.
“The Faculty of Fine Arts wanted people who could be a part of an ensemble, and not just try to stand out as a star,” he says. “I think they saw that in me.”
The ability to collaborate well is a core part of Blais’s mandate as artistic director of Geordie Theatre. Founded in 1980, the English-language theatre company is familiar to generations of Montreal anglophones who enjoyed its plays as elementary and high-school students.
When Blais was hired by Geordie in 2021, he became the first Indigenous artistic director of a non-culturally mandated theatre company in the province of Quebec. The member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation had formerly served as Indigenous Artist in Residence at the National Theatre School (NTS) of Canada from 2018 to 2019.
Blais’s association with Geordie began soon after his Concordia studies. He toured with some of the company’s school productions as an actor.
The experience helped him secure the role of Watio on the hit APTN television series Mohawk Girls, which ran from 2010 to 2017.
“What was most notable about that show was how it broke down stereotypes of Indigenous people,” he says.
“It showed what it meant to be Indigenous in a way that a lot of Canadians had never recognized.”
‘Nurturing the Indigenous talent pool’
As a teenager in the Montreal neighbourhood of Saint-Laurent, Blais played volleyball and baseball, and was known to crack the occasional joke at school.
“I guess I was considered a bit of a class clown,” he says. “I liked to make people laugh from the stage in drama class.”
At Concordia, Blais was inspired by professors like the late Joel Miller, another NTS luminary.
“He taught me, especially in terms of Shakespeare, how to analyze text on a deeper level,” recalls Blais.
“That helped me later on the set of Mohawk Girls, when I needed to focus on where my character fit into the story.”
Concordia also taught Blais how to be “as truthful as possible, and how not to be performative on stage,” lessons he now imparts to his own ensembles of actors.
Blais has ambitious plans for the company he has led for the past three years.
“My goal is to hire as many Indigenous artists on Geordie’s creative team as I can,” he says.
To that end, he has established an Indigenous Artistic Growth Program, which has commissioned works from three playwrights so far.
“Mentorship has been a big part of it,” Blais remarks. “I love the idea of constantly nurturing the Indigenous talent pool.”
The Geordie Theatre’s 2024-25 season will look to do that and more.
The lineup includes Jordan, by Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan, which depicts Jordan River Anderson — a Norway House Cree boy whose death at age five of a rare genetic disorder sparked a political battle over medical costs between provincial and federal governments — as a superhero.
Megalodon, a play co-written by alumnus Omari Newton, BA 06, and his wife, NTS graduate Amy Lee Lavoie, is a comedic and poignant look at teenage friendship and identity infused with hip-hop and jazz.
Through these productions and his other work at Geordie, Blais hopes to inspire greater creativity and innovation within the theatre sector.
“Canadian theatre still plays it quite safe,” he says. “A lot of good new work from unrecognized writers is being put on the back burner. We’re trying to change that.”