Ker Wells
Ker Wells was raised on a sheep farm in Cascumpeque, PEI. He graduated from Mount Allison University and The National Theatre School of Canada, and was a founding member of Primus Theatre, under the direction of Richard Fowler, at the time an actor with Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret. With Primus, Ker trained, performed and taught across North America and Europe, creating indoor performances, radio dramas, and outdoor parade spectacles, including: Caravan of the Midnight Sun (New Year’s Eve pageant/parades, 1991 and 1992, Winnipeg) and Viaggio al Cielo (1991) and C’era Una Volta in Montagna (1997) community performances created with the inhabitants of the village of Nocelle, Italy.
In 1998, Ker co-founded Number Eleven Theatre, with whom he created and directed Icaria, The Prague Visitor, and The Curious History of Peter Schlemihl. Other original performance works include the two-person The Confessions of Punch and Judy, and Living Tall, which have toured widely in North America and to Europe. His solo performance Swimmer (68) premiered in Toronto in June, 2011. Also in 2011, Ker directed Exilio My Life as Bolaño, created with U.S. and Mexican artists in Guadalajara, Mexico. Struck, a devised performance he created with New York’s NACL Theatre, premiered in Cleveland in Spring 2013, and played at HERE Arts in NYC in December, 2013. In the summer of 2014, he was the stilt director and performer in The Weather Project, NACL Theatre’s large-scale community arts performance about climate change, presented at the community baseball field in Yulan, NY in August, 2014.
Ker received his MFA in 2013 in the York University/Canadian Stage Direction program, and directed two productions in Canadian Stage’s 2013/14 season; Macbeth in Toronto’s High Park and Sarah Berthiaume’s The Flood Thereafter. Ker was a returning guest faculty member at the National Theatre School of Canada, the Humber College School of Performing Arts, and The Contemporary Opera Lab at the University of Manitoba. In January 2014, Ker became an assistant professor at the School for Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University, where he taught acting and directing, with a specialization in physical and devised theatre and original creation.
Ker directed the creation of The Gift of Celebration at the National Theatre of Greenland in 2015, led workshops in the coastal Nunatsiavut/Labrador Inuit communities of Nain and Hopedale in 2016, and directed creation workshops of This is Not A Conversation with Itai Erdal and Dima Alansari for The Elbow Theatre Society in Vancouver in 2015-16.
Ker and Megan met at Simon Fraser University in 2013, and began planning an outdoor spectacle performance on PEI the year after. They co-directed and co-produced the first four years of The River Clyde Pageant from 2016-19.
On August 30, 2019, Ker passed away. He is dearly missed by so many of us, and we continue the work of the River Clyde Pageant as a legacy and tribute to his indomitable creative spirit.
