Small Wooden Shoe

Director: Jacob Zimmer 

Founded in 2001 by Jacob Zimmer in Halifax, Small Wooden Shoe is a (mostly) theatre company now based in Toronto. [blog: where the name came from]

We believe theatre is a useful tool to think-through, feel-out and change-up important social, historical, political and other everyday issues.  

Small Wooden Shoe engages with the world in a curious, critical manner while maintaining the need to perform – to step up and entertain. By being direct, honest and genial we hope to ease or transform the possible alienation between performers and audience while admitting difference. We do this in an attempt to find ways to ease or transform the possible alienation of contemporary life while admitting, if not embracing, difference. 

Small Wooden Shoe seeks out partnership opportunities with other artists, creation companies, venues and presenters across disciplines and fields. We understand and encourage the inter-dependant nature of contemporary art practice.

Wanting a local, national and international conversation about the world and about performance, we believe that touring, traveling and meeting are essential ways of extending the reach of the company and the work we do, while getting vital feedback and inspiration. 

In our work creating meetings and events, Small Wooden Shoe uses current and effective facilitation, brainstorming and consultation practices, mixed with our own innovative and idiosyncratic performance style. We bring experience with conferences, unconferences, keynote presentations, debating workshops, online collaboration, and 10 years of making theatre in which groups come together to make the world a more interesting and engaged place. We are bent on proving that good ideas are entertaining and that pleasure and thinking require each other.

Small Wooden Shoe projects are created in collaboration, most often led by Jacob Zimmer. Jacob brings the conceptual framework and starting points to the collaborators and the show is the result of the responses to his propositions and his response to those responses. This creative feedback-loop expands the work beyond the possibilities of a single maker, with all participants having a personal investment in the work, while maintaining a distinct and rigorous artistic vision that identifies the work as a Small Wooden Shoe production.

We envision a local, national and international conversation about the world and about performance. Our participation is maintained through travelling and meeting: essential ways of extending the reach of the company and our projects work while also engendering vital feedback and inspiration.

>> WHAT THE PRESS SAYS

Performances:
Currently touring: Dedicated to the Revolutions (Halifax – May 24-29 at the SuperNova Festival)
In the works: Perhaps in a Hundred Years, Antigone Dead People , Upper Toronto and more
Annual: 3penny Christmas Concert

History

Believing that developing a sound artistic practice shouldn’t limit us to one performance style or genre, our work has included political agit-prop (Delayed Knee Jerk Reactions Series), hard-boiled live-to-air radio (The Mysterious Death of WB), Chekhov adaptations (The Orchard), multi-media solo shows (No Secrets) and durational task based performances (Mostly Just Doing the Saturday Crossword) and the conversational formalism we’ve become best known for (Perhaps in a Hundred Years and Dedicated to the Revolutions.) We have also convened Christmas concerts, on-line think tanks, public meetings, taught workshops, given keynote lectures and work on publications, all of which we consider to be part of the same larger project that is Small Wooden Shoe.

Past Performances: