Well-deserved a-Dora-tion

For the second consecutive year, Winnipeg’s Dasha Plett is nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award for outstanding sound design.

The 2026 field of nominees, announced Monday by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts, was drawn from eligible theatre, dance and opera productions in the Ontario city.

Last year, Plett — a co-founder with Gislina Patterson of local performance collective We Quit Theatre — was nominated for her work on Roberto Zucco, a production by the pre-eminent downtown Toronto queer theatre Buddies in Bad Times.

This time around, the theatre artist is nominated for her work on Take Rimbaud by playwright-performer Susanna Fournier, a “performance poem imagining the worlds of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, Sappho and post-art school malaise,” per Buddies in Bad Times.

Plett highlighted the contributions of the show’s design team — Nicole Eun-Ju Bell, Ting – Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart and Darren Shaen — “for proving the unstoppable power of a design team when they enjoy each others’ company, have each others’ backs, and are supported by a fearless production manager — Rebecca Vandevelde, my hero!”

Take Rimbaud, which wrapped on May 23, was mounted in partnership with the Howland Company. It’s also nominated for direction, performance by an ensemble, scenic design and outstanding new play in the independent theatre division.

From June 13 to 14, Plett — who’s worked with local companies including Prairie Theatre Exchange, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Theatre Projects Manitoba — will lead a sound design for beginners workshop at Prairie Theatre Exchange, focusing on the industry-standard tool Qlab. No prior experience with the application is necessary.

Registration for the workshop is through pte.mb.ca, with scholarships available to promote financial accessibility. The deadline for applications is June 8, with scholarship requests due June 5. The pay-as-you-wish option allows participants to pay either $100 or $150 to participate, with available scholarships allowing for free or heavily discounted admission.

In addition to her work as a sound designer, Plett performs experimental audio across Canada under the moniker Princess Dasha. The next opportunity to catch a P.D. set is on June 17 at the Handsome Daughter (61 Sherbrook St.) as part of the ongoing underground sound series Drift Sequence.

Glory — We Quit’s 2025 docu-dance extravaganza about Playboy and Free To Be… You and Me — will have its Ontario première in January at Buddies in Bad Times, the theatre announced Tuesday.

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In the Dora’s theatre for young audiences division, Manitoba’s Julia Ulayok Davis and Marsha Knight are both nominated for outstanding individual performance for their work in Red Sky Performance’s She Holds Up the Stars.

Written and directed by Sandra Laronde, based on her novel of the same name, She Holds Up the Stars featured Davis in the lead role as Misko, a young Indigenous girl searching for her mother’s truth, with Knight as Kokum. The production had its world première April 13 at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall.

Knight, an actor in Winnipeg for more than 30 years, is a longtime theatre educator whose recent standout performances on local stages include roles in Trish Cooper and Sam Vint’s The Comeback and in Article 11’s Rise Red River, a groundbreaking, multilingual collaboration staged in 2024 with PTE and Théâtre Cercle Molière.

Like Knight, Davis has flexed her comedy muscles on Poplar River comedian Paul Rabliauskas’s CTV sitcom Acting Good — now airing its third season with Anishinaabemowin dubbing on APTN.

On Rainbow Stage, Davis, a Grant Park High School graduate, has starred as Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Anna in Frozen.

After a run in Winnipeg last fall at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, the performers of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s show, The Mush Hole, are nominated for outstanding performance by a young audience’s ensemble.

In the opera division, Manitoban librettist Vern Thiessen is nominated as part of the creative team behind Canuck Cantatas — a triptych of mini-operas nominated in the outstanding new opera category. Thiessen’s contribution — which saw the Manitoban playwright collaborate with composer Danika Lorèn — was The Close Encounters of Faith Friesen, following a woman working the nightshift at a remote radio station.

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Though Manitoba productions are ineligible for the Doras, a geographically focused awards show since 1980, Winnipeg audiences saw the local stagings of Crow’s Theatre’s five-time nominee Rogers v. Rogers through a Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production earlier this season.

Playwright Michael Healey’s corporate saga is nominated for outstanding production, new play, scenic/projection design, lighting design and sound design in the general theatre category. Based on the book of the same name by Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, the play ran on the John Hirsch Mainstage from Feb. 18 to March 14.

The playwright who adapted Andre Alexis’ bestselling novel Fifteen Dogs for the stage, Marie Farsi is nominated for outstanding creative direction in the musical theatre category for her work on After the Rain, a co-production of Tarragon Theatre and the Musical Stage Company.

Fifteen Dogs — a partnership production of RMTC and Alberta Theatre Projects — premières on March 3, 2027, at the Tom Hendry Warehouse.

The winners of the Doras will be announced on June 29 at Toronto’s Meridian Hall.

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