Facilitators for the OLi-works Shakespeare series
Meg Barker
The founder of OLi-works, Meg Barker has written the existing scripts, and is a voice actor and director for this on-line workshop series under the stage name of Hurwitz.
Meg’s early, extramural training was in youth acting at the Manitoba School for the Arts, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for four years. A move to Kelowna, British Columbia meant a switch to high school drama, and performance of youth plays for five years. However when choices had to be made for university, Meg pursued a career in the natural sciences, social sciences, public policy and international affairs. More about her usual professional background is here. As part of this career path Meg became trained in the facilitation of on-line communities and remains an enthusiast.
As for theatre, Meg continued with this interest in an informal manner outside of work. She was part of the Wakefield Players, a community theatre company in La Pêche, Québec at the time of its founding. Meg also launched an on-line theatre and review club in the mid-2000’s called DaphneUnbound.
To support the development of women playwrights of diverse backgrounds Meg has volunteered as a Board Member of the International Centre of Women Playwrights. She is also a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Meg was able to attend one of the conferences of Women Playwrights International (WPI), when it was held in Mumbai, India, in 2009.
With the launch of OLi-works in 2009, Meg has been providing advisory services to others on performing on-line; including voice training, vocabulary hints, video appearance and making presentations.
Being a prairie girl for a certain stretch of time, surrounded by tumbleweeds, gophers or snow, Meg was led to the creative escapes of theatre, choir and anything that would turn a flat, freezing horizon into a stage for all the world.
Graham Todd
Born in Manitoba, Graham developed his voice for reading out loud to numerous youths who craved the comfort of books and stories.
A veteran of church Christmas pageants and amateur-taped audio dramas, it was in sixth grade, as the eponymous co-star of the long-running production “The Vampire Who Stole Christmas,” that Graham 
stole the show, delighted and terrified the first, second and third graders and discovered his need to invent imaginary characters and pretend to be them. Sublimating this desire for decades, he now embraces these multiple selves under the stage name Greumach Taghta.
In professional life Graham is a consultant and policy analyst of the information, communication and telecommunication (ICT) sector. He is also a coach in oral English and French.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Greumach came to the rescue to perform in the first two on-line plays written by Hurwitz for OLi-works. With a talent for numerous accents and boundless vocal energy, OLi-works is wary of any poachers because Greumach is one very large prairie dog we don’t want to lose.
Helen Wilson
Helen’s first introduction to theatre was in her adopted city of Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada. She performed in high school productions of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Much Ado About Nothing”, “Romeo and Juliet” as well as numerous Gilbert and Sullivan musicals such as “HMS Pinafore”, “The Mikado” and “The Pirates of Penzance”.
In France, she later pursued a fine arts degree in music and theatre, including productions of various musical comedies and tragedies. Someone once told her that she has sawdust in her veins! Further classical
voice studies at the “Ecole Normal de Musique” in Paris led to joining several Renaissance and Baroque madrigal groups including productions of works of Monteverdi, Charpentier, Purcell to name but a few.
Participation in several workshops on script writing and acting nourished her long-standing interest in amateur theatre activities.
After a career in the aeronautical industry as a communication manager, Helen now lives in South West France where she continues her involvement in madrigal music as well as script-writing and amateur theatre productions. She moderates online and offline communication in French and English with a continued penchant for theatre, online and offline. She also provides pronunciation and other coaching services in French and English.
