“There’s this great thing that happens when you have a live performance and a live audience...it’s kind of magic,” reflected Erin Brandenburg, ‘02 Grebel alumna.  

Erin has chased the magical experience of theatre for as long as she can remember. “It was just my thing,” Erin shared. “I loved it. I grew up writing my own plays and being in school performances and musicals. Even as a teenager, I was doing dinner theatre in Windsor.” 

Erin Brandenburg

Today, Erin works in the creator end of theatre primarily as a director and playwright in Toronto, collaborating with a diverse range of artists and performance companies. She has directed plays that have engaged audiences across North America and overseas in the Netherlands. 

Erin lived at Grebel during her first year at the University of Waterloo while studying in the Drama and Theatre Arts program. She remembers how she valued the community and enjoyed the diversity of courses it provided, especially a class she took with John Fast: Quest for Meaning in the Twentieth Century. 

Looking back on her career, Erin can see that many of her projects “have a lot to do with the Mennonite Church community [she] grew up in.” In every play, Erin aims to find the “place where artistic innovation and equity meet.” Each performance is designed to be entertaining, but beneath the surface, Erin often explores social justice issues and strives to inspire conversation about difficult topics. 

“Sometimes, it’s a bit like a Trojan Horse,” Erin explained. “You’re creating work that’s artistically exciting and innovative; it’s a good story and you’re working with fantastic performers and creators, but the message is showing something you think you know in a new way.” For example, in 2015, Erin directed a play called This Will Lead to Dancing. The play centered around the topic of LGBTQ inclusion in the Mennonite Church, and it was intended to “start conversations about inclusion and what it means.”  

Grebel has influenced Erin’s work through the connections it provided during her time on campus. Erin is currently working on a project with Ken Harrower, someone she met in the Grebel lobby twenty years ago. Together, they are creating a musical about Ken’s inspiring life story called The Flin Flon Cowboy. The play will premiere in the fall of 2024 in Toronto. 

Theatre of the Beat (TOTB) is another Grebel connection that has surfaced in Erin’s career. Johnny Wideman, Grebel alumnus and founder of TOTB, and Erin have worked closely on several plays together. This Will Lead to Dancing was their first shared project. It toured in Canada and the United States, visiting large cities including St. Louis, Cincinatti, Chicago, and Windsor. Their most recent play, Selah’s Song, is currently on tour and was written by Johnny and directed by Erin. “It’s a family-friendly puppet musical about a girl who is facing injustice and standing up for her community,” shared Erin. She added, “Theatre of the Beat is really great at speaking to their community and the communities they work in, whether that means adding puppets in their plays with live music, or it means, after the show, there’s going to be in-depth conversations with experts or advisers.” 

Erin’s work is highly inventive. In 2020, amidst provincial COVID-19 lockdowns, Erin directed a performance with TOTB called Unmute—it was hosted entirely on Zoom. Just a year earlier, Erin partnered with Toasterlab to create a virtual reality exhibit in Toronto’s Albion Library. “I’m definitely on the more experimental side of things. I’m just curious about how we can use different tools.”  

The Albion Project involved recording volunteers as they shared personal stories in different locations within the library. Visitors could later stop by the designated locations, pick up a VR headset, and suddenly become immersed in “a lady’s story about why a certain book is important to her.” Erin views the integration of new technology into theatre as an extension of its purpose: “It’s performance and storytelling but using different forms...and it’s exciting.” 

Erin’s advice for current Grebel students is to "sit down and have a conversation with somebody—somebody unexpected. Usually that will lead to something interesting or exciting.” For Erin, the decision to break the silence, and talk to a stranger waiting in the Grebel lobby, created a connection that is being revisited twenty years later.  

Erin is still breaking the silence today through storytelling. “It’s how we connect with each other.” In this way, the magic of theatre is really the magic of people. It is the beautiful interaction of a speaker and a listener, a performer and a spectator, a stranger and another stranger sitting in a lobby, who are brought together by the stories they share and their willingness to watch and listen.

Erin's story is part of Grebel's 60 Stories for 60 Years project. Check out our 60 Stories page for more articles in this series. If you would like to nominate a Grebel alumnus to share about their experiences at Grebel, please submit a nomination form.

By Tim Saari

Erin Brandenburg lived at Grebel in 1997 and graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2001 with a degree in Drama and Arts Management. She now works as a director and writer and lives in Toronto. Erin will be directing her first short film this summer on Pelee Island.