The First Stone

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, a.k.a. Belladonna the Blest, is an emcee, playwright, agitator, and practitioner of humanitarian arts. Her main body of work, the 54ology, includes Cake, Sound of the Beast, A Man A Fish, Salome's Clothes, Gas Girls, Give It Up, The Smell of Horses, Bilguisa Speaks Up, Diggers, Conjugal, Hunt/Peck, and The First Stone. She is a contributor to The Only Good Indian (Jiv Parasram, Tom Arthur Davis/Pandemic Theatre), Forbidden (Afarin Mansouri/Tapestry Opera), and Oubliette (Ivan Barbotin/Tapestry Opera). Other theatre works include Reaching For Starlight, They Say He Fell, and The Final Inquiry. She is co-editor with Yvette Nolan of Refractions: Solo (2014) and Refractions: Scenes (2020) and editor of Indian Act: Residential School Plays (2018), all published with Playwrights Canada Press.

Maddie Bautista is a Bi, Saudi Arabia-born Filipina sound designer and composer. You can catch Maddie creating and shaping sound in iconic theatres across the country--from composing original music in the earliest stages of new work development, to tuning systems with live musicians and large casts. She has created music and sound designs for over 80 productions and counting across Canada, for theatres such as the Stratford Festival, Alberta Theatre Projects, the Grand Theatre, Theatre Aquarius, Soulpepper, Tarragon, and more. After the sun goes down, she moonlights as half of xLq with Jordan Campbell--a queer pop performance duo who tours across the country with their daring, interactive theatre and bizarre, grungy drag.