Black Theatre Workshop launches 55th season under ‘Tallawah’ theme

Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop (BTW), an award winning English-speaking theatre and Canada’s longest running Black theatre company, is back for its 55th season.

On friday night, they unveiled the programming for this year’s theatre productions, the cohorts in this year’s artist mentorship program as well as introducing everyone to the first-ever recipient of the 2025 Jacklin Webb Theatre Scholarship.

Always ones to encourage dialogue and honest representation of Black culture and society, they’ve even named this season after the famous Jamaican patois word “Tallawah”.

“Tallawah is an idiom that comes from Jamaica, which is where I’m from, and there’s a phrase that says, ‘we likkle, but we tallawah’, which means we’re small, but we’re mighty, we’re small, but don’t underestimate us,” explained artistic director at the Black Theatre Workshop, Dian Marie Bridge.

Awarding the Jacklin Webb Theatre Scholarship

As a longstanding BTW member, actor and president of the board for a number of years, Webb’s children approached the Black Theatre Workshop after her passing, with the idea of naming the new scholarship in honour of her enduring legacy.

The cash-prize scholarship will serve to support young and aspiring theatre artists for the next five years.

Faced with a plethora of strong contenders throughout the application process, Bridge says they had a difficult decision to make.

“We considered not only the person’s academia, but also their role in the community and how they fit into the Montreal Theatre community,” said Bridge.

After much deliberation, the decision was made to award the scholarship to Noah Hammermeister, a hard-of-hearing artist who went from washing dishes in Regina, Saskatchewan to pursuing theatre at the National Theatre School of Canada.

“It’s my first ever scholarship to be received and awarded like this, and especially coming from like an all black community scholarship, because I’m from Saskatchewan, it’s not a very big black community out there. So, the fact that I’m being welcomed into this new community is really important and it feels amazing,” said Hammermeister before being presented with his award at MAI Café at the launch event.

Productions seen on stage this season

Further establishing young artists in the theatre community, they’ll be producing a theatre piece for young audiences entitled “Pirate and the Lone Voice” by playwright Donna-Michelle St-Bernard as part of her ongoing project where she is currently writing a play about each country in Africa.

“It’s about these two teenagers who discover pirate radio and who are using it to fight the corruption in our country, and so it’s a really fun, playful look at how youth express themselves through music, through radio,” said Shannon Corenthin, producer for the Black Theatre Workshop this year.

The play will tour many schools across Montreal from Oct. 6-31, 2025, ending at Union United Church in Montreal.

And for the mainstage production, they’ve brought the powerful and witty show entitled “Our Place” by playwright Kanika Ambrose to the city for its Montreal premiere after it saw tremendous success while showcasing in Toronto.

“It’s about these two women who have emigrated from the Caribbean, from two different islands in the Caribbean, one French Creole and another English Creole speaking island and they kind of deal with the paperwork that comes with moving to Canada and sending money back to their family and romance, all of that while they work at a jerk chicken shop,” explained Corenthin.

The production will be at The Segal Centre for Performing Arts Studio from Nov. 19-30, 2025.

Expansion of the Artists Mentorship Program

They’re also bringing back the Artist Mentorship Program for its 13th year, with a brand new cohort of 20 black, indigenous and artists of colour – coming together from all across the country.

“It’s a six-month-long project, and so folks start in September and go right through to March, and the end the cohort culminates in a public showing of the work that they’ve been doing over the course of the last six months,” said Bridge.