Rage and Feminine Energy: TD AMPLIFY Episode 1

TD AMPLIFY kicks off its 2026 season this January with Episode 1, featuring the talents of duo Rita Rebetskaya and Polina Káulio, dancer Sierra Oszust, and the band SHYFRiEND. Blending physical theatre, dance, and music from three very diverging acts, Episode 1 centres on exploring liminality using the feminine form as the medium. 

“If I look at the grouping of [Episode 1] in a real, honest way, I think it's this sense of the body,” says Kenna Burima, this year's TD Incubator Fellow. “We just have to sometimes go, ‘okay,’ and disassociate from our bodies… I'm fascinated by artists who are like, ‘No, instead I'm going to experience and express my experience of the world through the body.’”

Focused on local artists and performers, TD AMPLIFY is a variety show series housed in the effortlessly cool Engineered Air Theatre at Werklund Centre. The series is programmed by a different fellow each year, who orchestrates a diverse range of acts pulled from Werklund Centre’s TD Incubator program. Unlike other variety programs, however, TD AMPLIFY challenges the artists to build a collaborative performance that’s always fresh and unique.

“The intention, I believe, is for something to be fully new, right?” says Burima. “You get a bunch of artists in a room together, and then you present that, rather than something being created and then brought to the stage.”

Together, Rita Rebetskaya and Polina Káulio are the co-founders of Murmur Theatre. Brought together by their backgrounds as theatre professionals new to Canada, the duo focuses on storytelling through physicality. Episode 1 is built around an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, devised by the duo, which focuses on the play’s main female character and thematically explores femininity. Using a mixed-media toolset and Murmur’s minimalistic, metaphorical, and movement-focused style, Rebetskaya and Káulio plan to immerse the audience in a post-apocalyptic setting. 

“When we take the play, especially when it's an old play, in order to make the audience feel something, we should feel something in the first place, right? So how can all these events that took place a long time ago in a different country be relevant to us?” Asks Rebetskya. “Every single time we approach a character, scene, or event which happens in the play, we try to find their triggering connection. What we feel about it and how or what it would be if it were for us nowadays.” 

For those wanting a preview of what they'll be up to onstage at Episode 1, Rebetskaya and Káulio will be debuting their take on Woyzeck for the Murmur Theatre launch at Spanic Arts on January 2.

While contemporary dance is her favoured style, Sierra Oszust is also well-versed in jazz and classical dance as well as kinesthetic awareness. She holds a fascination with body horror as a narrative tool, which is something she plans to bring to her part of Episode 1. Much like Rebetskaya and Káulio, Oszust thinks first and foremost about how physicality can bring a story to life. She looks forward to the opportunity to work with people from other disciplines and see how their approaches to their craft differ from her own.

“As more of a physical performer, I tend to have more of an embodied practice and an embodied way of working. I find musicians tend to have good listening, and they're able to keep stuff I miss. It's nice to just have different ways of working, kind of coming together, so I can change the way that I work in the future,” says Oszust. “It can bring audiences from all those different areas of art, and it's a good way to amalgamate everything together to build more of a community.” 

This excitement to work with artists outside of their world is shared by SHYFRiEND’s Julie Olive, who says, “I have two left feet, and I'm scared of busting it down too crazy. Every time that I've gotten the opportunity to collaborate with dancers, it's brought me so much more inspiration than I had before and so much less fear about how I'm perceived as a human in a meat stack.” 

Known for the loudness of their outfits and the theatricality that they bring to the stage, the self-proclaimed scum-pop band SHYFRiEND is the brainchild of Olive. For Episode 1, her ambition is to focus on using the range of SHYFRiEND’s instrumental skills to build an auditory world that supplements the narrative Rebetskaya, Káulio, and Oszust will be embodying. In being given the leeway of sharing the spotlight, Olive is taking the opportunity to really focus on creating a rich soundscape that’s different from anything currently in SHYFRiEND’s discography. 

“I'm really looking forward to pushing the boundaries of what I make into something a little different this time… I'm looking forward to the attention being on the people who are actually moving and creating the visual world. I really love the idea of just being able to provide a sound and an environment auditorily, instead of the everything that I usually do with dressing up crazy and all of that,” says Olive. “I want people to see that although there is so much fun and so much silly to be had with music, that there are other ways that you can tell a story… I want to make sure that people go into it with an open mind and get to experience something really different than what they would expect –– especially from my project.” 

Balancing acts, especially ones so talented, is the loftiest seeming part of a TD AMPLIFY show. Burima worked together with the season’s director, Steven Conde, to bring together acts that are at an early-prime stage in their career and that speak to each other dynamically. Conde is tasked with staging each performance in a way that emphasizes the conversation between artists. While creating is up to the artists, Conde’s role is to refine the cohesiveness of the presentation for the audience.

“This particular cohort has a feminine energy about them –– rage and feminine energy within power. I'm very excited to see how they all connect in the space, because I feel like there are a lot of intersections between what they do. They all speak to amplifying these feminine voices out there in the arts world,” says Conde. “All of them are challenging the art form that they're in. They all want to stretch the boundaries and push against convention. I find it’s very, very exciting, especially for this platform, because that is what we're looking for. We're looking for something that people have not seen in the past.”

TD AMPLIFY Episode 1 takes the stage on January 16. It will not be a show to miss, and it’s only the beginning.