A lot of great work has crossed Calgary stages throughout 2009 and not all of it by established companies. This past spring, in particular, every time I turned around there was a show staged by a new, or relatively new, theatre company.

There was Forte Musical Theatre Guild’s but this IS my day job, which was remounted in December. Forte looks like it will be around for the long-term, adding another dimension to Calgary’s theatre scene with a focus on staging new musicals. Then there was the Two Sheds Theatre Troupe’s inaugural offering of Neil Fleming’s Honesty. This group’s focus is on serving a heaping helping of comedy. While not entirely new on Calgary’s arts scene, Trepan Theatre returned with a piece of physical theatre in Matadora. And then there was the The Shatspearean Players with their mandate to present Shakespeare’s lesser-known works.

These smaller productions, combined with all the play readings and new-work events taking place around Calgary — including Downstage’s first-ever Uprising festival — cemented in my mind that Calgary rewards individual initiative in theatre. There is always an opportunity to have the public see your work, as long as you have the drive to make it happen.

One of the main theatre stories of 2009 has to be Ground Zero’s and Hit & Myth’s production of Evil Dead: The Musical. To be frank, this was not my favourite show of the year. Far from it, in fact. But, then again, I’m not a “deadite.” It was, however, a theatre event like no other. Everyone was talking about it. People who never go to the theatre went. And the show, with its infamous “splatter zone,” became a point of reference in conversation. Leading up to the blood and gore of Evil Dead, Ground Zero and Hit & Myth prepared audiences with another graphic, bloody show in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It’s not every day you see a body being cut-up onstage against a backdrop of blood-spattered walls. Ground Zero and Hit & Myth continued their love affair with blood even in its fall production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, when one of the characters got a bloody nose. All-in-all, these two companies, under the direction of Ryan Luhning and Joel Cochrane, certainly made their presence felt in 2009.

Sage Theatre continued to impress and established itself in my mind as being Calgary’s most exciting theatre company, continually staging challenging, provocative and gripping work. Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, about a child killer and the mother of his victim, stands out, as does Sage’s most recent production, Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched — a show so dense in ideas and poetry I had to see it twice.

Alberta Theatre Projects continued to explore new ways to tell stories onstage, ranging from NiX, a show that took place in a huge ice dome at Olympic Plaza (not good), to its collaboration with the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan (better), to this fall’s one-woman masked show, I, Claudia (best).

My No. 1 pick of 2009 also comes from ATP: the Electric Theatre Company’s Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge. The play examined Muybridge’s life and the contributions he made to photography with his sequential images of animals and humans in motion. Studies in Motion was a perfect hybrid of innovation — extensive movement and audio-visual elements — and the tried-and-true — a strong, gripping story. All-in-all, it was an outstanding artistic production, and my favourite of 2009.