The Deanne Taylor Theatre is VideoCabaret's creation centre at 10 Busy Street in Toronto, built on the conviction that design is a way of thinking, not a layer applied at the end.

Here, work is made before it is shown. A curated consortium of companies drawn from the cultural fabric of Toronto, working across theatre, performance, installation, and visual practice, shares studio and technical space, room to explore, and administrative ground, all within VideoCabaret's own producing life.

Artistic direction usually begins with the script and the performer, and rightly so: writing and performance sit closest to the practice of most artistic directors, and they are the most economical place to start. This process is different. It brings design and production forward on equal footing with writing and performance, as an equal partner in storytelling, from the first day of creation.
 

The theatre is led by Andy Moro, scenographer and VideoCabaret's new Artistic Director — a multi-award-winning artist whose practice has travelled internationally and coast to coast to coast in Canada, and whose decades with the company have helped define its visual and spatial language. His work has always begun where the audience will eventually sit - in the space itself, in the light and the material, in the exact distance between a body and what it stands against. That is the practice this mandate hands the institution — not administration of space, but composition of it. 
 

Moro has a word for the principle: designaturgy, design as dramaturgy carried through every stage of making.
 

VideoCabaret's work is as politically and culturally urgent as it has ever been. What has changed is who makes it. Culture cannot be separated from the environment in which it is created, and the city that surrounds this company has changed — so VideoCabaret must change with it. The people who are the culture will make the culture.

This is not a top-down, class-bound structure handing opportunity downward, but a machine that reflects its environment: politically incisive, formally adventurous theatre, built through deep exchange between writers, performers, designers, and technicians, and shaped by the communities who now fill the room. High-performance theatre: politically awake, alive to the ways culture connects us, and unafraid of the trouble it makes.
 

The Deanne Taylor Theatre exists so this work, and work like it, can be built in earnest: an environment where design leads from the first conversation, where artists have the time and technical capacity to test an idea rather than defend it, and where the conditions of making are treated as part of the art.


PROGRAM VISION

A creation ecology in which artists working across performance, installation, and design have the space, tools, support, and time required to make rigorous, ambitious work.


PROGRAM MISSION

To provide artists and companies in performance, installation, and design with sustained space, technical capacity, and shared infrastructure for creation — and to build a culture of making grounded in collaboration, design literacy, rigour, and shared resources.


VALUES

●      Designaturgy — design (spatial, visual, sonic, and material) as a primary creative language, not a finishing layer.
 

●      Creation over presentation — the theatre exists to support the making of work; public-facing activity emerges from and informs the
residency process; it does not drive it.
 

●      Shared infrastructure as equity — pooling space, systems, equipment, and support redirects capacity toward the work itself, for VideoCabaret and for the artists it hosts.
 

●      Sustained relationships over transactional rental — engagements are selected, supported, and accountable, built on fit and shared standards rather than venue-for-hire terms.
 

●      High standards without hierarchy — excellence in facilities, process, and care is non-negotiable, within a collaborative culture grounded in respect for artists as primary stakeholders.