Michael Springate

Michael Springate wrote and co-produced Acts of Imagination and Small Currents, and is the lead writer for The Most Beautiful Women. His concerns are resonant characters in a contemporary landscape, created by capturing the turmoils and joys of inner lives in an informed historical context.

His writing for film is informed by his extensive work in dramatic form, his training in the visual arts, and his history of collaboration with contemporary composers

He studied at the Montreal Museum School of Fine Arts before founding The Painted Bird Ensemble, an interdisciplinary company that investigated new ways of creating narrative within formal musical structures. The company mounted such works as  Scat, Twelve Tones, Improvisation in Sonata Form #1 and #2, and Fugue.

It was during his tenure as Artistic Director of Playwrights Workshop Montreal that such now well-known writers as Thomson Highway, Connie Gault, Kent Stetson and Don Druick developed their early work. As Artistic Director of Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg he developed new works by Margaret Sweatman, Carol Shields, Patrick Friesen, Ian Ross and Bill Harrar among others. Later, as Artistic Director of Factory Theatre in Toronto, he presented new works by Andrew Moodie and Tom Walmsley.

For live performance, Michael has written a series of works, including Historical Bliss, Dog and Crow, Kareena, Freeport Texas and, most recently, Küt: Shock and Awe.  His writing has been produced by such diverse groups as Necessary Angel in Toronto, Carbonne 14 in Montreal, and Craning Neck in Vancouver. He has been published by Guernica Press (Montreal),  Vitchisney (Kiev), Image Littérateur (Los Angeles) and Korean Literature Today (Seoul), among others.

Michael has a long history of collaborating with composers, including Glenn Buhr, Michael Matthews, Daniel Koulack, Greg Lowe and Ari Snyder. He was invited to be part of the New Music Festival of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, performing with jazz pianist Marilyn Lerner and bass clarinet Lori Freedman on a presentation of his poetry cycle, The Geese Sonnets. Also with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, he performed the text for Coming Together by Frederic Rzewski. His own piece, The Consolation of Philosophy, a re-interpretation of the work of that name by Boethius (480-520 CE), was presented as an oratorio at the Toronto New Music Gallery in a composition by Helen Hall. He is currently writing the libretto for a chamber opera composed by Vancouver composer Alfredo Santa Ana.

He studied painting and drawing at the Montreal Museum School of Fine Arts and has an MFA in interdisciplinary performance from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.