by AMY BARRATT

Ker Wells has a dream. A dream of alternative theatre for the masses. Devised theatre performed in churches and schools and community centres all across this great land - in places like Swift Current, Deep River, Meat Cove…

Okay, Wells's company, Number Eleven Theatre, hasn't yet toured to Meat Cove, a fishing community at the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, but offer them a place to sleep and a space to perform in and the five-piece troupe is there.

Wells, a Prince Edward Islander who teaches at the National Theatre School and is based in Toronto, believes that more theatre companies should tour more often. "Most of the touring that happens in this country is co-productions between, for example, a Toronto company and a Vancouver company," says the NTS grad, who previously co-founded Winnipeg's Primus Theatre. "It shouldn't just be exchanging one subscription audience for another."

Number Eleven Theatre, which brings two original creations to Montreal this week and next, is committed to bringing live theatre to any community that asks. Since mid-January, the troupe has been on an eccentric road trip, straying as far afield as Regina and including stops in Elliot Lake, Deep River and several communities on Manitoulin Island.

"In my experience these audiences are at least as appreciative and open as urban audiences," says Wells.

Founded in 1998, Number Eleven consists of director Wells and four actor-creators: Varrick Grimes, Alex McLean, Elizabeth Rucker and Jane Wells. The company has been performing its collective creation Icaria at every stop along the way. They're also presenting a newer work, The Prague Visitor, in Regina and Montreal only.

In Montreal, both pieces will be performed at the National Theatre School's Pauline McGibbon Theatre, a room with an interesting history. The NTS building on St-Denis at Laurier was formerly a juvenile detention centre, and the high-ceilinged Pauline McGibbon space was a courtroom.

Number Eleven's work is physical theatre that incorporates startling imagery as well as song. For The Prague Visitor, the company underwent intensive training in Eastern European Jewish song and singing technique. The piece is inspired by the work and life of Franz Kafka. It also references an obscure biographer, Pieter Weider, who, in the late '60s, wrote about a girl he had known in school who became a "catcher" of fellow Jews, turning them over to the Gestapo. The Prague Visitor explores, among other things, the "unresolved crush" that Weider had on this Stella.

Icaria focuses on a woman's return to "the exquisite and terrifying wreckage of [her] childhood." The piece creates a world where living and dead can co-exist and Daphne can confront her "dangerously brilliant brother… who dreamed of flight."

Number Eleven currently has a new show in the works titled The Curious History of Peter Schlemiel, based on a German folk tale about a man who sells his shadow for a bottomless bag of gold. Wells hopes to showcase that piece in Montreal next winter. Who knows, it might even crack the elusive Meat Cove market.

ICARIA RUNS MARCH 5, 6, 8, AT 8PM, MARCH 7 AT 2PM AND THE PRAGUE VISITOR RUNS MARCH 10–12, 8 PM, AT THE PAULINE MCGIBBON THEATRE, NATIONAL THEATRE SCHOOL, (5030 ST-DENIS), PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN

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