Jordan Tannahill

Jordan Tannahill is a Canadian playwright, filmmaker, and theatre director.

Contents

• Jordan tannahill 2014 canada council laureate governor general s literary awards
• Jordan Tannahill Ethics and Playwrights
• Plays
• Films
• Books
• Awards
• References

Tannahill writes and directs performances for theatres, galleries, and found spaces. His work often contains elements of magic realism and explores themes of queer identity, youth subculture, and suburbia. For instance, in his play Concord Floral, a loose adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century allegory The Decameron, ten adolescents flee to an abandoned greenhouse when a mysterious plague is visited upon their suburban neighbourhood. Tannahill's play rihannaboi95, on the other hand, follows the dramatic fallout of a queer teenager's lip-synching video going viral, and was staged via live streaming.

A number of Tannahill's early theatrical works were created with, and sometimes featured performances by, non-traditional collaborators including night-shift workers (The Art of Catching Pigeons by Torchlight, 2009), frat boys (Takes Two Men To Make A Brother, 2009), preteens (Insurgency, 2010), and employees of Toronto's famed discount emporium Honest Ed's (Honesty, 2012).

Tannahill's production of Sheila Heti's play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, which he directed and produced with frequent collaborator Erin Brubacher, premiered in 2014 at his storefront theatre Videofag, more than a decade after Heti first began the script. Heti's struggle to write the play is one of the central plot-lines in her bestselling novel How Should a Person Be?. The production, nominated for four 2014 Dora Mavor Moore Awards, was remounted at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre and The Kitchen in New York City in 2015.

As a filmmaker, Tannahill's work has been presented in galleries and festivals across Canada and internationally, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto International Film Festival, and the British Film Institute

In the field of dance, Tannahill choreographed and performed with Christopher House in Marienbad for the Toronto Dance Theatre in 2016 and choreographed House in the 2014 solo Rough House, also for the Toronto Dance Theatre. In 2015 Tannahill wrote the text for The Dietrich Group's This Is a Costume Drama, which premiered at Harbourfront Centre's World Stage.

From 2012 - 2016 Tannahill was the co-proprietor of Videofag with William Christopher Ellis, an alternative arts space operated out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market.

His non-fiction book Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, was published in 2015 by Coach House Books and was called "essential reading for anybody interested in the state of contemporary theatre and performance" by The Globe and Mail

Tannahill has been described in the press as 'the future of Canadian theatre' (NOW Magazine), 'the hottest name in Canadian theatre' (Montreal Gazette), and 'the posterchild of a new generation for whom 'interdiscplinary' is not a buzzword but a way of life' (The Globe and Mail).