I Am YEG Arts: Harley Howard-Morison

Harley Howard-Morison is a writer of theatre and fiction who loves a good story with characters full of heart, and moments of magic and mythology. His writing often magnifies queer stories in places where queerness has traditionally been minimized, and explores different faces of Albertan identity and class. Harley is also co-founder of Cardiac Theatre, their most recent project KaldrSaga: A New Queer, Old Norse Cabaret will run from May 22 – June 8 at the ArtsHub Ortona. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts feature, we spoke with Harley about how he got involved in Edmonton’s theatre scene, his interest in bringing theatre to unexpected places, and what audiences can expect from this reimagined version of KaldrSaga.

In addition to being a playwright, producer, theatre director and a writer of fiction, you’re also the co-founder of Cardiac Theatre. Tell us about how you got your start as an artist, the Cardiac Theatre collective and the shows you produce. 

I left my family farm after high school, and I moved to Edmonton for school; I did the U of A’s Bachelor of Honours program in Drama. That’s what drew me to town and I stayed. Since school I’ve been an indie artist, and I started Cardiac Theatre, my little indie collective with my good friend Jessica Glover. We’ve done work throughout the last number of years with Cardiac while I was simultaneously working with Theatre Network at the Roxy. I was the Managing Director there most recently and was part of the team that rebuilt the theatre after the fire. I was there when the fire happened, and I was on the team during that process of finding temporary venues before moving into a more permanent space in the old Catalyst Theatre. I feel really proud to have played a role in Edmonton’s arts ecosystem in supporting that space, and I’m really happy to be back to indie producing. 

We did our first show [with Cardiac Theatre] in 2016, and this year is our 21^st production, which is pretty awesome. Jessica Glover and I started the collective trying to tell stories with big heart – and then it just sort of evolved. We started working in found spaces and kept that element, whether it was a site-specific performance or just a small theatre. That became really important to us – to tell stories with big heart in intimate settings. 

Before the pandemic, we set up a big project called The Alberta Queer Calendar Project, which was an initiative where we brought together 13 queer Albertan playwrights to tell their stories in an audio format, like a podcast play. We released one per month in 2020, which we started before the pandemic and then lockdown happened and all of a sudden, we were in the position of not being able to record these live. It became this really distant activity that we, along with everyone else, were learning how to do on Zoom. That project was huge. We had something like 120 artists involved from coast to coast in Canada, including the territories. It was a really lovely project featuring a bunch of new queer writing, lots of which has gone on to productions or be published. One of the writers was recently nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Drama. We had a really good cohort of writers on that project that my team and I were really proud to present. 

After doing that through COVID, it was a lot for a little indie team, and we took a bit of a hiatus. And then as I mentioned, I was working with Theatre Network at the time, and we were ramping up in construction. It was just natural for us to take a step back. Now our approach is project based; we’re not so focused on planning ahead, we’re going down the track of what we’re interested in at the time and seeing how that goes. 

Your upcoming production KaldrSaga: A New Queer, Old Norse Cabaret runs from May 22 – June 8 at ArtsHub Ortona. KaldrSaga had an initial run in 2019 but has undergone a reimagining for the upcoming production. Tell us how the two versions differ from each other, and why you felt like this was the time to revisit the play. 

After that production in 2019 which I directed, I wasn’t done with the story. I felt there was more to scratch at, more to uncover, more to explore. I sat on that for many years and then in the last year or so came back to it and really started to reexamine the work. I changed a lot in six years. The world has changed a lot in six years. It was a really neat exercise, figuring out as a person in 2024 – 2025, what I was now excited about in this project. A big part of it was figuring out what story I want to tell now and how I want to do that. 

This is a story about friendships and it’s about storytelling itself. That’s the through line for me. Drawing together those threads in a stronger way has been what separates this project from the past one. This production is focused on these two characters who are friends, but they’re friends who’ve been through a breakup, they’ve had a falling out. And what I love about where this show is right now is it’s about them putting in the work to get back this friendship that they’ve lost. 

Tell us more about the inspiration for this work, and what audiences can expect from this reimagined performance.

It’s about queer friendship and it’s about storytelling through the lens of Norse mythology, the tales of heroes and gods, and also with a nod to that skaldic tradition where storytellers in Medieval Scandinavia and a little bit earlier would travel from location to location telling stories in public settings. They were quite the characters themselves. They were larger than life figures, really aggressive, and they had rivalries with each other. All of those threads come together in this story and bring it into 2025 with a definite queer foundation. 

Our two actors are amazing. I’ve been joking with the director through this process that this is like the special skills section of their resume. They do it all. They sing folk songs; they give a research presentation; there’s a musical theatre section; there’s drag, puppets, skaldic poetry, Norse mythology, cowboys… it’s really fun. It’s an anthology piece, so there’s four nested stories within the über narrative that the audience experiences throughout the evening. 

We have an amazing team on KaldrSaga. We’ve got these two brilliant actors, Graham Mothersill and Michelle Diaz, who play between them like a dozen characters and do maybe as many accents. Our director Sarah J Culkin is really great at bringing a queer sensibility to the room and to what audiences will see on stage. And then an all-star design team with Kena León doing the sound, and Whittyn Jason doing the production design, so it’ll look and sound really cool. 

What drew you to Norse mythology as a means of telling contemporary queer stories? 

[Norse mythology] has a fascinating history, which I’m interested in separate to this particular story, but I think it was a match for telling this story is because of how it’s been misappropriated over the years. There are a lot of connotations with far-right groups and fascist groups over the last 100 years. Even the work of Wagner has been appropriated into that camp, which is also similarly based on Germanic and Norse mythology. I think it’s about carving out a space and saying, ​“hands off!”. And it’s about exploring the very real threads of queerness that exist in those old Norse examples, I guess at least as we would today call them queer. Stories like how Thor, the god of masculinity and thunder, had to do drag to reclaim his hammer. Just hilarious. This show is kind of a fan fiction‑y take on some of these stories too. It really asks, how do we envision queer people in a world that doesn’t include us? Which is what a lot of queer art is about, and it’s been fun to examine that with Norse mythology. 

What draws you to site-specific theatre, and how do you think performing outside of a traditional theatre space enhances or complements this particular production?

For site specific theatre, I’m really excited by taking an audience somewhere that they haven’t been or maybe they have, but they get to experience that space in a new way, and how that can resonate with the story on a different level. This show in particular is interesting. We did it originally in a bar because that was really the vibe; it was about getting together an audience in the same way that skaldic poets would have had an audience in a tavern in the middle of winter (we did it in January). This show is less about that. It starts as this research presentation that our character Saga gives, so it could be in any number of places that would house the research presentation. And then her ex-best friend Kaldr comes and hijacks her presentation. It’s about taking a space that’s a little bit mundane, where you wouldn’t ordinarily see the magic of theatre happen, and transforming that into a space that transports the audience somewhere else. I love that about site specific theatre, and I think for this show it works really well. 

After KaldrSaga, what are you hoping to explore next? 

After KaldrSaga, I’m focusing on a novel that I’ve been working on for a little while. I just finished a graduate certificate in Creative Writing through Humber Polytechnic and through that program, they pair you with a mentor, and my mentor was the amazing Alberta-based novelist Judy I. Lin. She writes in the fantasy space for young adults, and that’s where my novel that I’ve been working on under her mentorship is taking place. That’s a big project I’ve got cooking, and then I’m also working on a play called Red Meats set in an eastern Alberta butcher shop in the middle of the snowstorm. So yeah, taking a wild left turn from KaldrSaga.

About Harley Howard-Morison

Harley Howard-Morison (he/​him) is a queer, ex-farm kid and Alberta-based writer of theatre and fiction. Mostly, he writes about faeries on the prairies with a trashy sense of humour. In 2016, he co-founded Edmonton collective Cardiac Theatre to focus on stories with big heart in intimate settings. His writing for theatre has been seen (or heard) with Cardiac Theatre, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, Common Ground Arts/​Found Festival, and Alberta Playwrights’ Network/​Script Salon. As a producer, he co-created The Alberta Queer Calendar Project, which featured 13 radio plays by queer, Albertan playwrights in 2020, and worked with Theatre Network to rebuild Edmonton’s Roxy Theatre. He holds a BA (Hon) in Drama from the University of Alberta and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing from Humber Polytechnic.