When it hits town June 4 to 14, the Magnetic North Theatre Festival will bring some of the country’s most exciting new plays to our city. At the same time, it will also serve definitive notice that something big is happening on Vancouver stages. Over the past few years, a wave of renegade troupes here has been pushing boundaries and inventing new ways to tell stories—through multimedia, site-specific, and movement-based approaches. The fact Magnetic North chose this location amounts to major recognition from the rest of the country.

The annual event takes place in Ottawa every two years; in the in-between years, Magnetic North heads to the country’s theatre hot spots as destinations for its productions and speakers events. It also brings in hundreds of play-hungry theatre presenters from across Canada and the globe, looking for edgy new plays to bring to their venues.

“We want to be where the action is, and the action is in Vancouver,” says artistic director Ken Cameron with conviction over the phone from his home base, Edmonton. From there, the playwright-director, who has worked both as head of the Alberta Playwrights’ Network and assistant director of acclaimed company One Yellow Rabbit, oversees the six-year-old festival. “Vancouver is really one of the most dynamic theatre scenes in Canada—and this was not always the case.”

In a lively discussion that reflects his unique role of taking the pulse of theatre across the country, Cameron argues that Vancouver was, for much of the ’90s, mainly a Hollywood North. It was a place where actors and other artists had to devote their attention to the lengthy commitments of film and TV productions. But something started happening five or seven years ago to revive the theatre scene, and not necessarily because of the slowing of the film industry. “A lot of theatre artists arrived in Vancouver, graduating from Simon Fraser University, UBC, or Studio 58, and a lot of these people decided that their medium of choice was theatre, not film and TV,” says Cameron. “These new people decided to focus their energies on theatre, and in doing so they decided to explore the boundaries of what theatre is and what could be done differently.”

The result was the emergence of groups like the Electric Company, Boca del Lupo, and Felix Culpa, all of whom appear in Magnetic North’s Hive2 program. It revisits Hive, an almost legendary sellout event in 2006 that allowed audiences to direct themselves through small theatre works that repeated throughout an evening, all centred around a party hub. This time out, each of the 11 companies creates a performance at Great Northern Way Campus’s Centre for Digital Media, which will allow more shows and more space (June 5 to 14).

At about the same time as Vancouver’s scene was blasting off, Magnetic North was forming as a way for the country’s theatre artists to promote touring (in the face of budget cuts to travel programs at the federal level) and also generate excitement about contemporary Canadian theatre. Wherever it took place, it would bring in productions from across Canada to show not only to the people who might book them here and around the world, but also to the artists and audiences in the host city. “It’s so that community can see the work that they’re doing in a national context,” Cameron explains. “It’s really important for artists to see the work of other artists.”

Cameron’s programming in Vancouver has been more than a little influenced by the adventurous tastes he has noticed in audiences here. “When I look at what’s on stages in this community, from the Vancouver Playhouse down to the indie community, as well as when I see PuSh [International Performing Arts Festival] and Chutzpah! [Festival], I see an appetite in the community for the new and the eclectic. So, as a programmer, I can say, ‘Wow, I can do anything!’ ”

The resulting 10 productions on the Magnetic North program could not be more disparate. The wide range includes Loft by Montreal’s 7 Fingers, a circus-theatre work (June 6 to 8 at the Arts Club Granville Island Stage); Toronto-based Theatre Rusticle’s April 14, 1912, a tale about the Titanic that fuses dance and theatre (at the Scotiabank Dance Centre June 9 to 13); and, also from Toronto, Passe Muraille’s blood.claat, a piece infused with Jamaican dub poetry about a woman coming of age (June 4 to 9 at the Firehall Arts Centre).

As well as presenting recent plays that have been a hit elsewhere in the country, Magnetic North also commissions new work. The Playhouse Theatre Company and the Savage Society are collaborating on the much-anticipated Where the Blood Mixes, by First Nations playwright Kevin Loring. It follows the story of a woman who returns to her reserve after social services has taken her from her father (June 11 to 14 at the Roundhouse Community Centre).

But the festival is about much more than its productions. During its 11 days, it will be abuzz with a Magnetic Encounters series that includes a festival lounge, artists debates, and hands-on workshops. Among the highlights: a celebrity-speaker program at Performance Works that features everyone from Canadian icon Gordon Pinsent (June 6) to Sandra Oh (June 7), and a Tea With the Artists series at the same venue that finds director Sarah Stanley sharing conversations with festival artists on several afternoons from 3 to 4 p.m. (Check out www.magneticnorthfestival.ca/ for more events and schedules.)

“When I attend other festivals, I often view a lot of those ancillary events as just that—ancillary—but at Magnetic North I really see them as integral,” says Cameron. “They’re about providing the audience with a snapshot of Canadian theatre.”

Now the only remaining challenge is getting that audience out to see a festival that has never hit town before. Still, true to its name, Magnetic North has a pull based on its growing reputation for strong work.

“It is hard to re-establish an identity everywhere you go,” Cameron admits, “but because the festival’s been around for six festivals so far, the theatre community in Vancouver knows it intimately, and their excitement is able to blaze out to the wider audience.”