Gyllian was in busy with show week,
so instead of submitting a bio, she provided a link to her website. The site contains her bio, and several resources from shows she's be involved with over her career.

http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~graby/index.html

You will be able to catch Gyllian's work this
month by checking out SMASH!, the February
2009 mainstage production up at
Brock University's Marilyn I. Walker's
School of Fine and Performing Arts.

For more details, check out:

http://www.brocku.ca/dramatic_arts/

Bryan:
What turned you on to theatre and the idea of dedicating your life to it?

Gyllian:
I grew up in Wales on a farm in the country. There was very little theatre although, ironically, the Malvern Shaw Festival Theatre has re-opened since I moved to Niagara. My mother was very artistic and we always had music and crafts in our house, but I'm almost embarrassed to say because it is such a cliché, it was reading my grandmother's tatty old school Collected Works of Shakespeare that first got me interested. My Dad built me a puppet theatre and in the holidays we'd put on plays with recorded dialogue. Theatre for me was always something I did with people I love, rather than something I dressed up to go out to. When I moved to Alberta I met some of the most exciting artists I've ever encountered and started a theatre company with them, creating new works. I'm still living with one of them. There's a certain kind of raw and passionate devised work that grows out of a community that I find the most rewarding thing in life.

 Bryan:
 Talk about one of your proudest moments as an artist. 

Gyllian:
I think it's divided between two moments. I loved working on Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes and adapting it into an opera ballet. When Ray came to see it in Edmonton, it received a standing ovation and his delight in seeing his novel staged was very moving. The second moment was a strange one. I was at a Board meeting of Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton, when I was artistic director. There were grant cuts and we were trying to figure out what to cut from our programming. The phone rang and it was Robert Lepage and Marie Brassard in London, England; they were euphoric! They'd just opened my translation of Polygraph at the ICI gallery theatre and had already been invited to tour it to a larger theatre. I was able to turn around to my Board Members and tell them that I could guarantee 100% box office for that show, which I had programmed for later in our season over some anxiety that a bi-lingual play from Quebec wouldn't go down well in Alberta. But it did!

 Bryan:
How do you take your coffee; and what's your fave sit-down coffee spot? 

Gyllian:
I like a tall latte, and Le Gourmande Grille on St. Denis, Montréal. In St. Catharines I travel around, Stregas, Coffee Culture, Pan's, Fine Grind

Bryan:
How has it been working on Smash?

Gyllian:
I've had a wonderful time. The team here is really supportive and I was very fortunate to be able to cast the company in the roles and to get Aaron Berger as assistant Director. It's a smart and wordy comedy as you might expect, based as it is on Shaw's last novel, so I needed to find people who were able to enjoy and flavour the rhetoric as well as work with the physical comedy. We've had a hoot developing some new lazzi and fooling around with old traditional ones. It is so great to work on a comedy. 

 Bryan:
 If you could cast any actors in any show, who would they be and what show? 

Gyllian:
It depends so much on the show it's hard to say. I loved doing Byrony Lavery's powerful play FROZEN for the Lyndesfarne Theatre reading festival last October, and I would like to work with Thom Marriot, Monica Dufault and Deanna Jones again. But there are so many brilliant actors I love, and so many projects I'd to get going on.

 Bryan:
What kinds of stories or themes attract you when you're looking for a play to direct?

Gyllian:
I'm working on some extremely diverse things. I enjoy formalist structuralist work, especially if it is poetry. So, Harold Pinter, rest in peace, is a great magnet for me. I gravitate to Australian writer Louis Nowra's work for the same qualities-- performance poetry is one of my favourite things. I adore Anne Carson's translations of Euripides -- "Grief Lessons", her collection of Greek Tragedies is marvelous and inspiring. I also enjoy comedies like SMASH that are simply clever and delightful and invite us to laugh. Sorry, this question is just too difficult! I guess I would say that if there's a spatial challenge, a new way of connecting words to psychological conceptions of space, and then I'm interested.

Bryan:
Thank you so much for particpating! It was wonderful catching up with you again. Break a leg with Smash!