Aviva Armour-Ostroff
Actor, photographer and director Armour-Ostroff likes to mix things up. She spent several years running the monthly Lab Cab at Factory Theatre, in which established and newbie artists offered 10-minute excerpts from works-in-progress without worrying about pressure, hassles or reviews.
Then, in 2006, she had enough of the monthly format and stepped even further outside the performance box. The first Lab Cab Festival spread into all the spaces at Factory: washrooms, hallways, staircases, green room, lobby areas as well as the theatres. But that wasn’t the festival’s only innovation. She invited creators to present brief pieces in artistic areas outside their regular comfort zones, so that an actor could try dancing, a theatre writer could experiment with film and a comic could present a photo collage.
