Faces of Fire, the popular interpretive theatre piece that toured the mountain parks this summer, has won a Heritage Tourism Award from the Banff Heritage Tourism Corporation.

Mountain World Heritage Interpretive Theatre or Mountain W.I.T. won for the most innovative commitment to national park and world heritage site awareness.

“It’s wonderful,” said Parks Canada’s Sue Wolff, who is the producer and manager for the heritage theatre program. “The whole initiative has been quite successful.”

Starting with the very first production “Rockies Revealed” in fall 2002, all three Mountain W.I.T. have won awards. The troupe’s previous show “Water on the Rocks” won both the Banff and Jasper Heritage Tourism awards, Banff’s in 2003 and Jasper’s version one year later.

Faces of Fire was performed this past summer by Laurie Schwartz, Ian McRoberts and Thomas Usher. The actors also wrote the script for the interpretive play, which took audiences through one dramatic day during the 2003 fire season, while explaining the biology of fire and forests. Current plans call for the play to be remounted for another summer run in 2006, Wolff said.

“It’s a show that you can travel all over the mountain parks with,” she said.

Schwartz and Usher both worked on Water on the Rocks as well, and that show is still performed by the Mountain W.I.T. group at conventions and conferences. Schwartz is currently working on a new piece to mark the Alpine Club of Canada’s centennial celebrations, Wolff said. The one-person show should be ready sometime next year.

McRoberts, currently in his second year of a Bachelor of Fine Arts in performance at Ryerson University in Toronto, was very pleased that he had the opportunity to be part of a production like Faces of Fire.

“As a young actor it was very exciting to get involved in this in the first place,” he said. The heritage award has recognized an important initiative in Mountain W.I.T. McRoberts believes.

“It makes me feel very proud...the initiative in general deserves recognition for what it’s doing for theatre and interpretation.”

The touring shows produced and performed by the heritage theatre group have been the catalyst for changes to interpretation practices in the mountain parks, McRoberts said.

“It seems to be shifting a paradigm in terms of interpretive theatre in the Parks.“

Wolff agrees, saying that Parks is quite happy with what Mountain W.I.T. has produced in its three years of existence.

“They seem very pleased that this program reaches a slightly different audience than regular interpretive programming,” she said. “When you look at interpretation, you have a spectrum of ways to display it, and theatre is at one end of that spectrum.”

The award-winning nature of their shows also gives other Parks interpreters a standard to aspire to, Wolff said.

“It’s provided a bit of a bar for the Parks Canada interpretive staff to reach towards. It’s really important for Parks to be at the leading edge in terms of interpretation.”