About

Your companion through the climate crisis. Slow art & community on Unceded Coast Salish lands.

The Only Animal (TOA) is an interdisciplinary arts company whose mission is to bring art and artists to the heart of the climate crisis. Our current projects explore how place-based creativity can set the stage for climate care and sensitize relationships between people and place. We prioritize long-term and porous relationships with the public and our artist collaborators, shifting what we do in response to local curiosities and needs.

How we got here

Founded in 2005 by Kendra Fanconi and Eric Rhys Miller, The Only Animal started as a way to change the world through the creative disruption of everyday life with large-scale site-specific theatre events. ‘Other Freds’ was a clown show with a cast of 135, boats and a bicycle ballet on False Creek. Our play-in-a-pool, ‘The One That Got Away’, won the Audience’s Choice for the best show in the 10-year history of Canada’s Magnetic North theatre festival. ‘NiX’, a theatrical fantasy built of snow and ice, was part of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad and initiated our work with the natural world as our primary media.

Our youth climate education program, ‘Generation Hot’, combined climate literacy, creative tools and mentorship for climate theatre creation. Community-engaged practice in DTES started with projects like ‘Out on a Limb’ and ‘2nd Story’.

Our Mainstage work into art for social change began with ‘Tinkers’, the first adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and part of a ten-show series to save an endangered, old-growth forest. In 2018, we co-created the world premiere of ‘Slime’ by Bryony Lavery, with the Banff Centre which featured the voice of 100 animals threatened by the climate emergency. Over 15 years we created over 30 shows which were nominated for 40 Jessie Awards – winning eight, including Outstanding Production and three Significant Artistic Achievement awards. We embrace the values of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, especially as it relates to Climate Justice.

Between 2020 and 2023, with funding from the Vancouver Foundation, The Only Animal created the Artist Brigade, a movement that supported 100 artists with climate resources, finances, field trips, workshop experiences, community building, and the commissioning of eight artists to create climate pieces based on their unique lived experience.

Our values

• Urgency
• Solutionary
• Action
• Creativity
• Boldness
• Generosity
• Earth Care
• Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility
• Aligning with the Science
• Carbon budgeting
• Buy Nothing New
• No-Fly Company
• Local Focus
• Global Responsibility