Workshops and classes

Morning Practices, Context Seminars and Collaboration Workshops.
For performance makers and other humans. 

Developing a practice or a community deserves a workout and a chance to play. Develop your physical, thinking and emotional muscle, flexibility and playbook for collaboration and creation with director and facilitator Jacob Zimmer and Small Wooden Shoe collaborators.

Morning Practice are a pre-work day warm up that integrates physical theatre exercises, self-care and peer to peer support. Context Seminar is a rigorous yet casual sharing of histories, practices and readings. Collaboration Workshops are multi-day Making practices that encourage effective and honest collaboration towards a shared goal.


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Past and potential future workshops

Idiosyncratic Performance Making 
with Jacob Zimmer

Workshops for live performers.

Director, dramaturge and creator Jacob Zimmer combines Anne Bogart's Viewpoints, Laban Efforts, Jonathan Burrows composition strategies and his own diverse performance background in collaboration and creation.

We'll work on building awareness, presence, attention and curiosity with a big dose of pleasure. Great for anyone who works in devised and/or collaborative performance and folks who want to add some play and surprise to their work.

Jacob's uses personalized approaches to expand our range in generating gestures and making physical choices. We’ll work through personal exploration, group improvisation and creating physical material while staying open, available and curious.

No experience necessary as long as you’re willing to move.

Workshop 1 focuses on physical and improvisation practices. Workshop 2 focuses on creation and collaboration.


Jacob Zimmer makes idiosyncratic theatre and podcasts and designs processes for finding better questions. Born in Cape Breton and raised in Halifax, Jacob now lives in Whitehorse after 15 years in Toronto. Along with being the new Artistic Director of Nakai Theatre, he’s the founding director of Small Wooden Shoe Planning and Performance, a designer at Intervene Design and faculty member in Leadership Development at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He also collaborates with Public Recordings, Dancemakers, Secret Theatre and others. Jacob studied at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. He studied Viewpoints and composition with Anne Bogart and SITI Company, interned with The Wooster Group and participated in creation workshops with Jonathon Burrows and participated in many more curious activities.

As the founding director of Small Wooden Shoe he has been independently producing and creating performance through collaboration and improvisation for over 10 years. Highlights include Dedicated to the Revolutions (Buddies in Bad Times, High Performance Rodeo, Super Nova, Magnetic North Festival), Perhaps in a Hundred Years (Hub 14, Summerworks, OFFTA), Life of Galileo (for Tracy Wright, Convocation Hall), Upper Toronto (Toronto Public Library, PARC etc...) and Antigone Dead People (Toronto, Tokyo).