Runaway Moon Theatre Society was incorporated as a charitable non-profit society in 2000 in Enderby BC, under the direction of Founding Artistic Director Cathy Stubington. 

The mandate of Runaway Moon Theatre is twofold: 

a) to produce innovative professional theatre involving puppetry and live actors

b) to create artistic collaboration between professional artists and the general public, thus promoting both appreciation for and active participation in the arts. 

We create and produce plays, projects and events mostly in and around the valley, drawing on audiences and participants from the Shuswap / Okanagan and beyond, and we have also produced work in collaboration with a village in Kenya. We communicate with many community-engaged artists in this province, and are also part of a national network of community play practitioners; our Artistic Director is frequently invited to speak about Runaway Moon’s work. Our projects have been supported by the Canada Council,  the BC Arts Council, Vancouver Foundation, Partners in Creative Development, Hamber Foundation, BCHydro, among others.

The two distinctive features of our productions and projects is the use of puppet theatre in conjunction with community-based art practices. 

Runaway Moon has been exploring and performing our particular style of puppet theatre for over three decades, with roots in Montreal, a series of productions at the Caravan Farm Theatre (1989-98). 

As our productions invite the audience into an imaginary world in which anything is possible, we also explore the bounds of puppetry, along with the magic of site-specific productions. 

In some of our productions, we stick to a traditional puppet theatre model: puppet as the actor, and puppeteer as the invisible manipulator. In others, both puppets and their manipulators come to life. 

The co-existence of puppets and puppeteers on stage offers powerful metaphors, allowing for extraordinary moments of transformation; the miniature world seems to demand a tenderness and sensitivity of both performers and audience due to its inherent vulnerability in relation to us large humans. We have also further heightened this exploration of scale by creating larger-than-life-size puppets, or puppet characters who become live actors, set against site-specific backdrops — our productions have been staged on the banks of rivers, in cornfields, city streets, and theatre lobbies. We work with artists from both rural and urban settings. 

The aesthetics of our puppets maintain a grassroots or homespun look that gives nod to our rural home and roots in folk traditions — we use simple materials and bright colours which also assists us in the community engagement aspect of our work. Music is always performed live by performers. 

Artbridges, a Canadian organization that seeks to nurture community-engaged arts nationwide, defines community-based art as: 

Projects meant to celebrate community, to mark places and events, or to help inform and organize communities. The projects usually involve some kind of collaborative, collective creative process between professional artists and a community

“Not The Way I Heard It”  - the Community Play (1999) set the foundation for Runaway Moon Theatre’s long tradition of producing innovative theatre with live actors and puppets, with professional artists working in collaboration with community members to create productions and community spectacles with visual art aspects that create lasting impacts and connections in the communities in which we work — unique and impactful connections within the community itself, connections to the land and reimagined connections to social issues.

Our themes have evolved over the years from more historical and social to more geographical, and more recently to a more environmental and agricultural focus.