Fresh off the plane from St. John’s in Newfoundland and Labrador where she was born and raised, multidisciplinary artist Kate Story is being welcomed back to her other home at downtown Peterborough’s The Theatre on King as the black-box theatre’s executive director.
Solidifying the title, Story is taking to the theatre’s stage this Sunday (October 29) to present her one-person show Anxiety, which first premiered at the theatre at the end of last year. This time it will be broadcast live to air for Trent Radio’s Radio from the Stage initiative. The production is framed by Peterborough/Nogojiwanong poet laureate Ziysah von Bieberstein, with a closing music set by Benj Rowland.
In Anxiety, Story weaves the epic poem Beowulf into an exploration of the English language, the roots of white supremacy, and Story’s own experience being raised by a lexicographer father. She performed the show at the Festival of New Dance in St. John’s earlier this month.
With so much focus on her own upbringing and past in the show, Story says she’s still processing just how “super moving and super significant” it was to be able to perform the critically acclaimed show in the very same theatre she had performed in as a teenager. Only back in Peterborough for a few weeks, Story is already longing to return to the east coast — a longing that has never faded.
“The second I left Newfoundland, I became really homesick and had a physical pain in my chest, and that’s never stopped,” Story says. “That was an unexpected thing that stays with me, and I think informs a lot of my artistic output.”
An author, dancer, choreographer, performance artist, actor, and director, there’s no limit to Story’s creativity and, as with Anxiety, her work often involves a collaboration of art forms and artists. In her previous role as artistic administrator of The Theatre on King and now as executive director, Story has become an advocate and organizer for artists in the community, having also founded Peterborough DanceWorks and served on the board for the Electric City Culture Council.
Though Story now expresses she is torn between her two homes — the Southside Road home in St. John’s built by her great-great-grandfather and her Peterborough home — she didn’t always harbour this attachment to her hometown.
“I look back and I understand a lot of this now through the lens of being genderqueer,” Story explains. “In my generation, being gay or lesbian was hidden, so I didn’t have a lot of models — I just knew I didn’t belong. And when you grow up on an island, I think it’s pretty easy to imagine that if you got off that island, everything would change.”
Ironically though, when Story finally left the east coast at 16 years old, she went straight through the mainland and ended up on another island: Vancouver Island. There, Story attended the pre-university school Pearson College — Canada’s only United World College, a movement encompassing 18 global schools dedicated to uniting cultures and countries around the world through education — that held a pathway that led her to study at Trent University.
Upon completing a degree in cultural studies, Story spent an additional year in Peterborough, where she threw her heart into performance at Union Theatre before moving to Toronto for graduate studies. Though she knew right away her heart wasn’t in it, it wasn’t until Story was in a bad car accident that she figured out what was most important. At 24 years old, she and some friends were driving back from Newfoundland when their car hit black ice and flipped off the road and into a ditch.
“It’s a miracle we weren’t killed,” Story points out.
That near-death experience had a significant impact on her mindset, and Story de-registered from the graduate program while she was still in the hospital.
“It sounds dramatic, but I felt very calm, like I just had this really great perspective,” Story recalls. “Nothing bothered me because we were alive and that’s all that mattered — we had survived, and I had this Zen-like calm.”
With a new perspective, Story returned to Toronto and did every bit of theatre she could, from production assistant roles to performance. In the meantime, she was still assisting at Millbrook’s 4th Line Theatre and, in always feeling a disconnect from Toronto, found herself eventually returning to the comfort of Peterborough.
“I drifted back in the mid-90s and it did remind me of the St. Johns I’d grown up in and the arts scene I’d been aware of as a young person,” she says. “It was very multidisciplinary.”
Story credits “really amazing artists” in Newfoundland like Gerald Squires, Lori Clark, Lois Brown, and Andy Jones as being large inspirations for her because they were each very experimental in nature, not limiting themselves to one style of art.
“Peterborough was really like that,” Story notes. “You can collaborate and — maybe because of my dance background and because my mother was a musician — I just like interdisciplinary collaboration. Peterborough was a place I recognized that I could do the work I wanted to do and there was a space for me.”
It comes as no surprise then, that when she was seeing Ryan Kerr as he was opening the Theatre on King, Story became immersed in it too.
“There is still a yearning for experimental regionally produced performance and Ryan’s always had literary events, visual art exhibits for youth, radio drama, DJ events — there’s been pretty much everything,” Story says. “It’s not just a theatre space. It’s a space I have a lot of passion for, and I’ve seen some pretty magical things happen.”
Adding another art form to the mix, Story has published six novels, including Urchin which was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for young people’s literature. She also has a short speculative fiction collection, Ferry Back the Gifts, which was a short fiction finalist for the 2023 ReLit Awards, which have celebrated the best titles released by independent presses in Canada for 23 years.
“That’s a big honour,” Story says. “The ReLit Awards are wonderful, and I’m really sad to hear they’ve been struggling.”
Story is referring to the recent announcement by ReLit Awards organizers that the awards have gone on hiatus, after three years of submitting unsuccessful applications to funding agencies — a familiar situation for Story.
Earlier this year, The Theatre on King was denied funding from the City of Peterborough’s community grants program, despite having received the maximum $15,000 allocation the previous year. Following an unsuccessful appeal at a city council meeting in March — despite seven community delegates speaking eloquently in support of the theatre — the theatre launched a fundraising campaign and, in June, Kerr renewed the organization’s lease for the theatre’s space.
“I am so moved whenever I think about it,” says Story of the fundraising campaign’s success. “It just was way beyond anything I would have ever expected, and we got all that support so we’re good for this year. But that doesn’t solve the long-term problem of where our funding is going to come from next year.”
Earlier this month, the City of Peterborough approved realigning the community grants program in 2025 into three funding streams, including a new arts investment fund. Administered by the Art Gallery of Peterborough in collaboration with Electric City Culture Council, the fund would include existing funding for individual artist grants, Artsweek, and the city’s poet laureate program and, beginning as a two-year pilot project, a new $60,000 professional arts organization grant program.
While Story is “happy to hear” the arts stream will fund professional arts organizations, she says not enough is being done.
“It has to stop being thought of as a handout when you give money to the arts and artists,” Story explains. “It’s an investment in a sector and, in the same way you invest in roads and sewers and waste collection, you invest in (the arts sector) as well. We need more investment from the city than the small amount of money that has been proposed.”
Though Story notes that a “shadow has been cast” over The Theatre on King since the appeal was denied, she and Kerr have received huge support from the community. Despite these reminders of the lack of funding to the arts, Story encourages artists to continue doing the work they love and finding their audience.
“If you’ve got stories inside you that have to come out, you have to do it and find a way to bring those stories into the world,” she says. “There are places where you can do readings, cafes that have exhibits, (and) the internet can be used for good. You can find people, but you must get those stories out of you.”
Story says while the smallest reason is to make art is for your own sake, the biggest reason is that the world needs “unity.”
“Find what your thing is and where you could connect, and what’s easiest for you to connect,” Story explains. “Find other people who are doing stuff, and just keep doing it, because people were making art before there were literary magazines and theatres. Just try to keep the faith, just do the work — doing the work now includes looking around and asking, ‘How can I get this out there?’.”
Practising what she preaches, Story is continuing to work on her next projects, including penning another novel — which she describes as a “comedy-horror for adults” — and an ensemble production called Project Baroness coming to The Theatre on King this fall.
For now, you can see Story perform Anxiety on Sunday, October 29th beginning at 8 p.m. with a live-to-air studio audience at the Theatre on King at 171 King Street in downtown Peterborough. Admission is free or pay what you can, but seating is limited. If you can’t attend in person, you can listen live at 92.7 CFFF FM (channel 287 on Cogeco).
This story has been updated to clarify the nature of Pearson College, to correct a misspelling of Lori Clark’s name, and to correct a typo in a quote.
