Arkady Spivak was recently cited as a 2020 Canadian Arts Hero by the Globe and Mail. He founded Talk Is Free Theatre in 2003, which tackles the cross-section of repertoire, in traditional and immersive mediums. Since TIFT’s founding, Spivak produced 101 works in Barrie, Canada, and toured nationally and internationally. TIFT won a prestigious Dora Award for its co-production of Assassins. In the fall of 2018, Spivak produced the largest theatre experience in the world, entitled The Curious Voyage. It was the 3-day long journey, in which each patron became the protagonist of their own story, and was transported, quite literally, from Barrie and London, UK. Commissioned by the National Arts Centre, TIFT’s COVID artistic response was an imaginary wedding, Something Bubbled Something Blue, in which the party wore human size rideable balls over their formal attires. The work has been viewed on Facebook over 2,000,000 times.
Spivak has served, a number of times, as a Juror for the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and for Theatre Ontario’s Professional Theatre Training Program. Spivak is a volunteer mentor for Business and the Arts, working with a number of emerging and small-scale organizations. He’s a recipient of the inaugural Barrie Arts Award and Contributions to Tourism Award.
For the past 10 years, Spivak has mentored a number of emerging artistic leaders, formally through year-long mentorships as well as informally. He has initiated a number of special initiatives with the goal of strengthening the theatre ecology, such as the recent Artist BIG. This first-of-its-kind pilot initiative, launched last year, offers minimum Basic Income Guarantee to 40 artists for three years to create work at an established, regional company (TIFT) but without artists having to comform to an institution’s needs or parameters, and examines new structures for how theatre-making can be better supported.