For Ilana Khanin, experimental theatre begins with a willingness to let go of certainty. “You should show up to the first rehearsal knowing exactly what you’re going to do, with the whole piece mapped out,” she recalls a director once telling her. “And then as soon as you get there, forget everything.”
That philosophy sits at the centre of You Must Change Your Life, the Toronto artist’s new self-produced work arriving at Alumnae Theatre this month. Created from rearranged texts by the late experimental playwright and director Richard Foreman, the production embraces instability, intuition, and discovery as part of its very structure. Rather than offering audiences a conventional narrative with tidy resolutions, Khanin is building a piece that invites spectators to experience theatre differently.
“I hope that it’s a time to sit with different ways of perceiving time, or perceiving people on stage, or feeling through a production,” she says over a conversation on Zoom. “I hope that people have different experiences—and I’m sure they will, because on a daily basis, even I’m resonating with different things in the text.”
The materials and the variables
Foreman, founder of New York’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is known for intellectually dense and formally disruptive productions that challenge traditional storytelling. Before his death last year, he made his notebooks publicly available online, and encouraged artists to freely adapt and repurpose the material.
Khanin has dreamed of working with those texts for more than a decade. And the world has caught up with her. “Over the past few years in Toronto, I’ve had so many conversations with theatre artists—and non-artist theatre goers—who are craving experimental work that plays with form and disrupts narrative structures,” she says. “It felt like the right moment.”
You Must Change Your Life features performers Thea Mae Hesler and Annie Hoeg, alongside a small ensemble cast. Hesler previously worked with Khanin as a swing in I Was Unbecoming Then, which earned widespread attention in Toronto last season, and won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award for best director of a musical. Hoeg, meanwhile, is a longtime collaborator from Khanin’s years in New York. “I had a hunch that these two people from my two different lives—one in Toronto, one in New York—that there would be something in their two performances, together, that would be interesting,” she notes.
The experiment
For Khanin, the goal is genuine exploration, not simple novelty. “When experimental work feels most alive is when there’s a real experiment,” she explains. “I’s not necessarily about a particular aesthetic or a kind of design. It’s actually about building the rules of the world you’re making on stage—in this production—and not knowing what that will be. You’re questioning the conventions that have been set out.”
This openness extends to the rehearsal room itself. Rather than imposing a fixed interpretation on Foreman’s writings, Khanin and her collaborators are testing fragments of text, observing how they resonate with performers, and remaining receptive to what unexpectedly surfaces: “We’re seeing how they fit together, how they feel. Do they feel alive in the moment? Is there some kind of connective tissue between these things that maybe isn’t apparent at once, but somehow there’s some kind of logic?”.
For Khanin, the process is unique … and bespoke: “I think it would be different with a different set of actors. I think it would be different at a different time in my life. I think it would be different if the state of the world was different.” Theatre is alive, not inert: an art form shaped not just by a script, but by the specific people interpreting it.
The experimenter
Based in Toronto, Khanin has developed a reputation for formally adventurous work that blends music, movement, and unconventional storytelling structures. As explored in a previous Sesaya Arts Magazine profile, Khanin’s work often inhabits the space between emotional immediacy and theatrical experimentation.
I Was Unbecoming Then resonated strongly with audiences despite (or perhaps because of) its refusal to adhere to the traditional musical theatre form. That reception only reinforced her sense that Toronto audiences are eager for work that challenges expectations. “I feel like there’s a real hunger for more of that,” she says. “The more people make the work that they’re craving, the more it grows. So it’s not even about a particular piece necessarily. It’s about the ecosystem of the community.”
Asked about experimental productions that have shaped her, Khanin lights up as she describes a performance called Morphia Series, an immersive dance-theatre work performed for just twelve audience members. At one point during the piece, the audience risers physically moved toward the performer without warning. “It totally blew my mind,” she recalls. “I was ready for anything to happen in that space, except the fact that the audience moved!” What stayed with her from this experience was not just the surprise, but the altered perception it produced.
She also recalls seeing one of Foreman’s productions, in which a voice-over announced “End of play”, halfway through the performance. Some audience members immediately began preparing to leave, only to discover the show was far from over. “You thought, ‘Oh, it’s about to end, oh, it’s about to end.’” What fascinated her was the audience’s shifting relationship to the work itself. “Something was going on that was very real in that room that had absolutely nothing to do with the performance. It really caused people to watch it differently.”.
“You Must Change Your Life”
The desire to create this kind of active encounter, rather than facilitate passive consumption, is central to You Must Change Your Life. Khanin describes the work as “an invitation to be together, and to think about how we can listen differently, and how we can attend to different ways of moving through something together.”
Khanin’s newest experiment will resist quick and easy answers. Instead, it will ask audiences to remain open: to uncertainty, to rhythm, to feeling, and to one another.
You Must Change Your Life runs June 11–21, 2026 at Alumnae Theatre. Tickets and additional information are available at youmustchange.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
