DFest is celebrating 20 dynamic years.
The 20th Annual Directors’ Theatre Festival runs April 22-26 at UFV’s Chilliwack North campus in Chilliwack.
“The festival is a great opportunity to see and celebrate the work of students from across the province," said Ian Fenwick, Festival Founder, and UFV Faculty member. "Audiences can experience more theatre in five days than is possible in an entire year.”
Plays of almost every genre will be represented over the five days, from comedy to tragedy and more. While some of the plays presented have been written by well-known playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee, 10 of them are original.
These plays will see their premieres at DFest. The majority of the plays presented are by Canadian playwrights including the work of recent Governor-General Award-winner Jordan Tannahill. There will also be staged readings of scripts-in-progress written by upper-level Creative Writing students who are learning playwriting from UFV Associate Professor John Carroll.
A special feature of this year’s festival will be the return of UFV’s Friends of the Theatre to participation on stage in their production of All I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
The festival begins on the Wednesday, April 22 with a series of previews and matinees, followed by Thursday’s opening ceremony at 4:30 pm.
DFest is a festival of short plays directed and performed by UFV Theatre students as well as post-secondary students from Capilano University, Thompson Rivers University, Trinity Western University, and UBC Okanagan. The festival has grown over the last two decades to become the biggest event of its kind in B.C., attracting 150 students with 3500 tickets sold in 2014. This year, audiences can choose from twenty-five one-act plays featuring more than sixty performances playing multiple times in three performance spaces at UFV’s Chilliwack North’s Performance Theatre campus.
Single tickets are at an accessible rate of $5 per show, with packages of 4 tickets for just $15, or a festival pass valid for all 25 show slots for $40. Details at UFV.ca/Theatre. Tickets can be purchased at 604-795-2814, theatre@ufv.ca or at the box office on the day of the show.