Conrad Alexandrowicz

Conrad Alexandrowicz holds a B.F.A. in Dance from York University, and an M.F.A. in Directing from the University of Alberta. Originally from Toronto, he performed with a number of Canadian dance companies, principally Dancemakers, where he began to produce his own work, much of which featured original text. He left the company in 1987 to choreograph, direct and perform independently. A director, writer and choreographer, in 1995 he founded Wild Excursions Performance as the vehicle for his creative ventures. Over the course of his professional career he created over forty-five dance and physical theatre works, some of which were presented across Canada, in New York City, France and the U.K. He and his work have been recognized with Jessie, Sterling and Dora Awards. Specializing in the creation of varieties of interdisciplinary performance, he invented works that addressed subjects central to the human journey: issues of relationship, gender and power, and the nature of the performance event itself. This included work that was dance-based, but made significant use of theatrical elements; work that was theatre-based but contained significant movement or other non-naturalistic components; and work adapted from the standard play repertoire and staged in innovative ways. 

He became a faculty member in the Department of Theatre at U Vic in 2008, teaching movement for actors and devised physical theatre creation, and directing department productions.

Since his appointment at UVic he has turned to academic writing, and his work has been published in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Theatre Topics. His first book, Acting Queer: Gender Dissidence and the Subversion of Realism, about how theatre training ought to support sex-nonconforming actors, was published by Palgrave in February 2020. In recent years he has been committed to exploring the transformations that might be undertaken in theatre education and practice in response to the climate crisis. The co-edited collection that he instigated, and to which he contributed, entitled Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis, was published by Routledge in May 2021. A monograph, also for Routledge, about actor training in the face of linked environmental crises, entitled Performing the Nonhuman: Towards a Theatre of Transformation, was published in the fall of 2024. Other recent publications include chapters for The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature, concerning the Polish writer Sławomir Mrożek; and The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms, focussing on gay Canadian theatre during the AIDS crisis.

In 2022 he was promoted to full professor.

Select Publications

“Gay Realisms in Canada.” Oxford Companion to Global Realisms. Edited by Katherine Bowers and Margarita Vaysman. Oxford UP, November 2024.

Performing the Nonhuman: Towards a Theatre of Transformation, Routledge/Taylor and Francis, September 2024.

“(Re)Considering Sławomir Mrożek.” The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. Edited by Michael Y. Bennett. Routledge, May 2024.

Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis. Co-edited with Dr. David Fancy. Routledge, May 2021.

Acting Queer: Gender Dissidence and the Subversion of Realism. Palgrave MacMillan, 2020

“Pretty/Sexy: Impacts of the Sexualization of Young Women on Theatre Pedagogy.”
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Volume 3, Number 3 (2012): 288-301.

“Dancing the Page: Reflections on Staging Poetic Text.” Studies in Theatre and Performance, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2015): 120–139.