Canis Tempus was formed in 2005 to explore
the melding of text, movement and visual design elements into a rich, entertaining, and culturally significant theatrical endeavour. The group develops works within a movement and visually-based, non–linear theatre tradition, incorporating stylized gesture and movement along with mask work.

Canis Tempus premiered its first production, Juliet & Romeo, at the Montreal Fringe Festival in June 2005. The work is a two-person experimental re-working of the Shakespeare play. The Montreal Gazette called it “exceptionally beautiful and exciting”.


Canis Tempus combines visual and theatre arts and takes both to exciting, unexpected places.
photo by David Bazemore

In October 2006 Juliet & Romeo toured to the Lit Moon World Shakespeare Festival in Santa Barbara, California, where it played alongside theatre companies from the United States, the Czech Republic, Poland and Bulgaria.

The Santa Barbara News-Press declared that the “meaning of ‘tragedy’ in Juliet & Romeo leans closer to that of a modern news story: a bloody, senseless mess and a waste of two lives, too far from any sense of normalcy to even garner hope”, and wrote that “Cuk’s Mercutio…is moving”.

Artistic Director Andrew Cuk will often use traditional classics as entirely new works.
photo by David Bazemore

France Roy in Juliet & Romeo (2005)
photo by Shani Komulainen

In addition, the Santa Barbara Independent saw the high points of the production “included Cuk as the many-faced apothecary with stepladder legs, and Lowe as Juliet’s mother, disowning her daughter in a cockney accent while smoking a cigarette spiked on the tip of a sword”.

In August 2008, the company premiered Quixote in Montreal. Based on the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes, it garnered excellent reviews. The Hour called it “fresh” and “ambitious”, while the Mirror admired “the freedom the company felt in trying everything as they explored the possibilities of the iconic story”. Calling the piece ambitious and crazy, the Mirror concluded the work was “worth experiencing—and in a word I wouldn’t normally use in writing about theatre, the show was mental”.

“Quixote” was the featured  production for 2008.

January 2011 is Sala XVIII. Notorious erotic sculptures and images from Pompeii are locked away in a restricted room, Sala XVIII, in the Naples museum. A contemporary Canadian opera singer with a hidden agenda comes to town, where he stumbles upon the dark carnal secrets of his ancestors. Sala XVIII journeys between three time periods to reveal the erotic that is locked away in our minds and hearts.