Conrad Alexandrowicz is a
director,
writer, and
choreographer, as well as the
artistic director of
Wild Excursions Performance, the performance company he founded in
1995 as a vehicle for his works of theatrical dance. He was born in
Ottawa,
Ontario,
Canada, second son of Sylvia Mary Kissock and Adam Alexandrowicz. His brothers are named Stefan and Adam Jr.
Starting his dance career in Toronto, he performed with a number of Canadian dance companies, principally Dancemakers, which he joined in 1982, and where he began to produce his own work, much of which featured original text. He left the company in 1987 to choreograph, direct, and perform independently. That same year, he was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts' Jacqueline Lemieux prize. To date, he has created over forty-five dance and physical theatre works, some of which have been presented across Canada, and in New York City, France, and the United Kingdom.
In 1994, he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he founded Wild Excursions. His widely successful one-act play for two men called The Wines of Tuscany was produced three times; in Vancouver; in Calgary, Victoria, and Edmonton; and at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. The Wines of Tuscany won Jessie, Dora, and Sterling Awards. Some of Alexandrowicz's other credits include the satirical cabaret about women, dance, and patriarchy, called Dance, Little Lady!, and the full-length plays, Passion: Elysian Fields, co-produced with Touchstone Theatre, The Erotic Curve of the Earth (2000), and The Singer Falls Silent (2003).
He recently completed an MFA in Directing at Edmonton's University of Alberta, partly funded by a scholarship, and partly by the Dancer Transition Resource Centre. He decided to get his master's degree in directing for a number of reasons, namely recognition as a director of others' work, and as having for his own work a strong theoretical grounding in theatre history and critical theory. As a director, writer, and choreographer, he continues his explorations into theatre and dance, and that mysterious territory where they overlap.
In the autumn of 2003, Conrad Alexandrowicz is a guest instructor at Simon Fraser University, teaching a class on new dance composition, with a strong focus on narrative development.