Noah Drew, MFA
Pronouns: He/Him
Not a thesis supervisor
- Associate Professor, Theatre
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Sign in to editResearch areas: voice, acting, Fitzmaurice Voicework, presence, public speaking, nervousness, somatics, embodiment, drama, theatre, performance, storytelling, interdisciplinarity, listening, sound, sound design, music composition, playwriting, devised theatre, performance creation, collective creation, dramaturgy, performing arts, immersive performance, live games, ethnographic performance
Contact information
Biography
Drew's sound designs and music for theatre and dance have been performed on four continents, and have been honoured with six Jessie Awards (19 nominations total) and a Siminovitch Prize nomination. Drew's projects have included work with the National Arts Centre of Canada (Ottawa), NeWorld Theatre (Vancouver), The Arts Club (Vancouver), Bard on the Beach (Vancouver), The Belfry Theatre (Victoria), Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Theatre (Ottawa), Little Swan Pictures (Philadelphia/Portland), Theatre Tribe (Los Angeles), and White Pines Productions (Philadelphia), as well as many others. Prior to joining Concordia in 2012, Noah taught at Vancouver Film School, Temple University, Douglas College and various private schools/studios in Canada and the U.S.
Noah's research and research-creation focuses on exploring strategies for catalyzing and cultivating heightened states of presence in performers and audiences. Noah's work draws on aspects of sensory immersion and sensory dramaturgy; (auto)ethnography and a dynamic interplay between true lived experiences and fiction; gamified theatre, and somatic practices.
Teaching activities
Courses taught
Voice for the Stage (all levels), Scene Study I & II, The Engaged Theatre Artist, The Actor's Profession, Acting for Media, Shakespeare
Artistic performances
You are my constellation
30-minuteoriginal solo performance. Part storytelling, part multi-media documentary, and part love letter to my creative community, the piece emerged out of a year of“micro collaborations” with 15 different theatre, dance & music artists across the globe, in which I explored ways to stay creatively vital while‘suddenly’ finding I’d become a bureaucrat. “You are my constellation”premiered at the 2023 Freedom & Focus Festival in Los Angeles.
The Riot Ballet
I was a co-writer, co-creator, sound designer and performer for “The Riot Ballet” – a collectively created international, intercultural theatrical examination of ecological crisis, protest,violence, and crowd behaviour. The project includes first-hand accounts and video footage from participants in the recent political riots in Bogotá,Colombia, political protests in Barcelona, Spain in 2012, London’s economically-motivated riots of 2011, and Vancouver’s 2011 Stanley Cup riots.The project is created by a global team of artist/researchers including Catalina Medina, Artistic Director of Bogotá’s Baracuda Carmela Theatre (Colombia); Martin Andrews, Artistic Producer of Working Group Theatre (USA); Emer O’Toole (Concordia Irish Studies); Shawn Ketchum Johnson (Seattle University); and my own theatre and new media company Jump Current Performance(Vancouver). Co-investigators/collaborators for this project have included Jonathan Lessard (Concordia Design and Computation Arts); Angelique Willkie (Concordia Contemporary Dance), and Anna Estrada (Director of Acting at the Barcelona Institute of Theatre). Creation of the project began as part of the Rebellious Subjects Conference in Barcelona in December 2013 (which explored similar themes) and continued with workshopping sessions and in-progress presentations at Concordia. Full production and performance took place at Concordia and Seattle University (2019).
Inside/Out
Icreated a sound design for actor/writer Patrick Keating’s autobiographicalperformance which tells his story of his years spent in and out of Canada’spenitentiary system. The production premiered at the Shadbolt Centre for theArts in Burnaby BC in February 2016. It has since performed in Edinburgh,Vancouver, Victoria, Halifax, and Prince Edward County, and was produced in2021 as a work of digital theatre with screenings in Canadian prisons.
Tiny Music
I wrote and composed a `soundscape musical’ about a person with an auditory-processing disorder that causes him (and the audience) to disappear into the sonic details of the environment around him. This piece investigated immersive, theatrical, narrative representations of auditory-processing disorder and autism, and explored the relationships between ethics, family, and the subjectivity of sensory perception. The project premiered on the main stage of the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver in February 2014.
Hear Me Looking at You
Iwas the director, dramaturge and vocal coach for an autoethnographicperformance piece, co-created with Anthropology professor Dr. Dara Culhane(Simon Fraser University). Central themes include the changing nature of memoryover a lifetime, and the reinterpretation and recreation of autobiographicallife stories through narrative and storytelling performance. The piece hadperformance in Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, Galway, and Dublin.
This Stays in the Room
Iwas a co-creator and the sound designer for this collectively created,intercultural work of autoethnographic spectacle performance, which exploredthemes of shame, forgiveness, vulnerability and hope. In an intimate,media-rich non-conventional theatre setting, the piece investigated the internalstruggle with one’s own morally ambiguous behaviour. After a three-yearworkshop-development process, which included five distinctly differentcommunity-groups and over twenty professional artists, “This Stays in the Room”premiered at Gallery Gachet in Vancouver in March 2014 and was remounted atVancouver’s Waterfront Theatre in December 2014.
God of Carnage
Idirected and sound designed a production of “God of Carnage” by Yazmina Rezafor Stendhal X, a company founded by graduates from Concordia’s ACTT program.This production put a mixed-race, queer couple at the centre of Reza’smulti-award-winning, globally-acclaimed play about the tensions and mayhem thatdevelop when two sets of parents meet to reconcile after their children have aviolent playground encounter. The production performed in Montreal, Gananoqueand Ottawa in 2018.
Promnesia
Iwas the creator/director of this game-like structured improvisation for severalactors, which explores the physical, psychological, and interpersonal act ofremembering. What behaviours of remembering emerge as cognitive loads increase?What is our responsibility in voicing someone else’s memories? When does theattempt to remember take us out of the present, and when does it bring us intocommunity? The piece performed as part of “Alvin Alvin Alvin Alvin Alvin AlvinAlvin Alvin: Reflections Around the Work of Alvin Lucier” (2018) the firstmajor event of the LePARC research cluster of MILIEUX (an event Ico-produced/co-curated).