The Purple Stage goes to the Toronto Fringe!

This summer brings an exciting new adventure for The Purple Stage: The Toronto Fringe Festival! In July, we will be performing a 4-show run at the historic Theatre Passe Muraille. We will be continuing to develop last year’s show, and share it at the Fringe Festival. This will expand our audience reach larger and wider than ever before.

This new challenge is a wonderful opportunity for the artists in our company to spread their wings, meet new people, share their artistry and integrate into the professional theatre community in Toronto.

We need your support more than ever! Our budget is tight, and we need your donations to continue providing the support that our neurodiverse community relies on. Please consider donating what you can to support our journey. Whether it’s $5 or $100, anything helps!

Your donations will go directly to paying the neurodiverse artists who will be performing at the Fringe.

Look out for The Purple Stage at the Toronto Fringe Festival, which runs July 3-14, 2024!

WHAT IS THE PURPLE STAGE?

The Purple Stage is a professional neurodiverse theatre company. The Purple Stage grew out of Purple Carrots Drama Studio, and features neurodiverse artists from the community. It’s a space for artists with diverse needs and abilities to take their work to a professional level.

By creating original performances in an extended rehearsal process, The Purple Stage provides meaningful job opportunities to the artists in our communities, and shares our work with the public.

Drawing inspiration from the artists’ own lives and ideas, we create original theatre pieces together, featuring song, dance, movement, acting, performance art, improvisation and object puppetry.

HISTORY

Our first project was an original show called “Here We Ar”e, which premiered in December 2019 at Array Space in Toronto. In this project, six Purple Carrots alumni shared their dreams, wishes, fantasies and realities in a roller-coaster performance of song, poetry, rap, dance and scene work. We had a sold-out run and the show was very well received by our community.

Our second project was created at the beginning of 2021, a film titled ARE YOU MY FRIEND? We were deep in the COVID lockdowns, and we could not gather. We worked hard over Zoom, we shared our feelings and ideas about friendship, and we made a really wonderful time capsule of this strange time in our community. A version of this film was shown at the Pegasus Incredible Film Festival in the fall of 2022.

Our third project, an in-person theatre show called ALLIGATOR, QUEEN, UMBRELLA, opened in December 2022 at Array Space. In this project, we expanded our company with several new cast members, and we began to really develop our voice as a company.

For a short compilation from this show, check out this link: https://vimeo.com/792301155/95fac48bce?share=copy

In 2023, we took our work to new heights with our most ambitious production to date. I DON’T MIND THE GAP opened last December to a sold out audience. Our company took big risks creatively and grew into more mature, daring and detailed performers. This is the show we will be developing further for the Fringe this year.

We can’t stop now! Help us keep going.

Thank you so much for your support. You are empowering neurodiverse artists in our community to share their ideas with the world, in the way they want to do it.

See you on The Purple Stage!

Cover Photos are stills from video by Ana Figo