August YP of the Month

August 14th, 2018

August YP of the Month

Oh my darlings, audition season is just weeks away, and, as has become tradition here at CYPT, our fall show is being written by our 2018 Outpatient Collective.  For those who don’t know, The Outpatient Collective started in 2014, and is made up of artists who have just graduated from grade 12 and CYPT.  This year’s fall show is called Wayward, and one of the writers just happens to be our August YP of the Month!

This young lady actually started with CYPT a LONG time ago, when she was just a wee thing, in one of our touring library productions.  Then we lost touch with her for a while, but she came back and just delighted audiences with her extremely funny performance in 2017’s Grounded and her extremely grounded performance in The Incredible Speediness of Jamie Cavanaugh.  One of the things we love most about her is that she brings a professionalism and joyful energy into every rehearsal room, and we’re going to miss that a heck of a lot. And who is this captivating, courageous, and charismatic creator of characters? August’s YP of the Month is…

 

Eliot Kelly-Frey!!!

Eliot has been acting and an active participant in the theatrical community for as long as she can remember. Being an only child her parents would bring her everywhere, she fondly remembers spending nights backstage at the Alberta Ballet or hanging out at her Aunt and Uncle’s bistro and jazz club. The stage has always been a second home for her, a place to explore exaggerated sides of her personality that she would not be able to outside of a performance context.

Eliot dances in Grounded (2017). Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media.

She first started with CYPT with their traveling poems of Shel Silverstein show when she was 8. She returned to the company in The Incredible Speediness of Jamie Cavanaugh at 2017’s cannonball festival. She again fell in love with being in shows and made such good friends. She was then cast as Pete in the Outpatient Collective’s play Grounded. This comedic character was new territory for her because she had always played very serious characters. This casting pulled her out of her comfort zone, as she is not actually a seasoned southern man, and although being very funny in real life (hair flip) she had not explored it much on stage. Pete has definitely been her favorite character to play thus far and she will admit she still sometimes finds herself walking around manifesting Pete.

Eliot is having so much fun being part of this season’s Outpatient Collective, an opportunity to explore a different aspect of writing. Now that she is graduated high school, she is pursuing a career in music …but acting and all different performance mediums are not off the table in the future. All her theatrical training has given her the confidence on stage and the creative opportunity to develop different stage personas. Most importantly, with sentiment right from the bottom of her heart she would like to thank Kristin, Gillian and Jamie for cultivating a supportive and creative atmosphere for all young artists to flourish. She has found another family with this company that she loves and would like to thank all the friends she has here, they are all wonderfully interesting humans.

Editor’s note: we couldn’t find any photos of Eliot in the Shel Silverstein show.  We think this show was so long ago, photographs weren’t invented yet.  We are now looking through our cave paintings.

“It’s good to be nervous but it’s what you do with the nerves once you’re on stage that matters”

-Eliot Kelly-Frey

Actors perform a scene from The Incredible Speediness of Jamie Cavanaugh at West Village Theatre in Calgary on Wednesday, May 3, 2017. The Calgary Young People’s Theatre production runs from April 27-May 6, 2017. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)

Actors mug for the camera at West Village Theatre in Calgary on Saturday, May 6, 2017. The photo booth was part of a celebration rounding out Calgary Young People’s Theatre’s 25th season. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)

Eliot backstage having fun with hair.

Actors perform Grounded at West Village Theatre in Calgary on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2017. The Calgary Young People’s Theatre production, written by The Outpatient Collective, runs until Dec. 2, 2017. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)

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