One Year Later: The Shakesperience 2024 Documentary

It’s the first night of Shakesperience 2025.

This year feels different. It feels good. People remember what I made. People remember me. A first-year student tells me the documentary was the reason they decided to join Shakesperience this year. I breathe a sigh of relief.

No cameras for me this year. Just a pen and paper. And some artwork I’ll make when I get home. Shakesperience looks very different through this lens. Finding new ways to document has been both healing and reflective in equal measure.

My wonderful professors sit next to me and ask me how I was able to pick out such detailed footage in my filming process. In awe of my ability, my eye. They ask how I could see such microscopic, glimmering moments and catch them.

My answer is autism.

The same thing that often hinders me in the neurotypical world can be channelled into something useful or even generous. Transmuted into a tool. A precious creative asset. I can even make something beautiful out of it. Out of that pain.

So, when people watch the documentary, they are watching Shakesperience through my eyes; through the neurodivergence I see the world with.

You are watching Shakesperience but experiencing it through me, in a way that is enhanced, curated, and lovingly stitched together.

The documentary is not about me, and yet it IS me. It comes through and from me. A version of me is imprinted on it forever, just like it is forever imprinted on me.

Do you get it?

Now that time has passed, I can digest it more. I can enjoy it more. When I watch it now, the taste isn’t stale and familiar anymore, but nostalgic in a joyous way. And there are things I wish I could talk about—things I wish I could’ve said before about this big thing I made and had to set aside to process later.

Later is here. And I have things to say.

A Funny, Wobbly, Precarious Beginning.

I remember coming home from Shakesperience 2024 and staring down the barrel of so. much. footage. I remember being stuck in a paralysis about it for about five days.

I had no idea where to start. I was living deeply into that question. I did not know what the answer was, but I couldn’t shake the gut feeling that I knew where that answer was.

It was somewhere in the footage from our final banquet. And I finally found it.

“A funny, and wobbly, and precarious beginning”.

The storyline flowed ridiculously easily after that. I wanted to start at the ending banquet. I did not know why I wanted to then. I know now.

It’s because it shows the power of Shakesperience, with its end result: an integrated, intergenerational group bonded with joy. It sets the tone.

It puts community building first and establishes that throughline. When we revisit it at the end, it holds a deeper resonance, because it’s been simmering for an hour.

If there’s one thing I would love for people to see and understand about this creation experience I went through, it’s this:

Absolutely everything was both intentional and intuitive.

I chose the typewriter effect for all the text because it felt like me—a student taking notes in a new class, in a new ecosystem—digesting this environment through a camera lens.  The quotes from the shows we saw were deliberately chosen as introduction clues to the themes of the following chapter in the film. The music was sliced and chosen with incredible intention. The clips were chosen based on what just fit.

I remember that process being incredibly clear. It was incredibly clear what pieces flowed together smoothly and what clunked and stumbled along. It was truly as if the documentary had a life of its own. As if I was co-creating with it.

As if this was the only way it could exist.

I was tasked–and trusted–with bringing this art into reality, but I know that I was not the one driving the boat at all times.

You can call me “the editor” all you want (or even worse: “the director”), and I respond to this with a question: How could I have possibly planned any of this?

None of it was scripted. I just followed instinct. I picked up my camera when my gut told me to and put it away under the same command. I am still baffled at how perfectly it all just fit together. I am in a constant state of wondering: what if I hadn’t caught that one shot? That vital transitional thread?

That clip of Dr. Riddell saying “A funny and wobbly and precarious beginning”?

My only conclusion is that something bigger than me must have been orchestrating it all.

I couldn’t watch it for a long time.

This was the biggest creative project I have ever taken on in my life.

It stretched me so far and thin that I participated in my own version of “negative capability”.

By carrying intense amounts of both love and disdain for it for a long while.

In that, I loved it so much that I let it consume me. The only disdain that followed was simply a symptom of self-abandonment. The kind that shows up when you’ve been ungrounded for too long. When something inside you is pounding fists against the earth, calling you home–and you start to resent the thing that’s keeping you away.

Before writing this, I hadn’t watched the documentary since it premiered on November 12th, 2024.

I couldn’t look at it. I was sick of it.

To this day, I can still recite the whole thing. The audio lives in my head… maybe forever. It’s imprinted on me.

I’m okay with that.

Editing Hell and Intimacy.

I know I spent around 400 hours editing. I don’t know if there is a more intense way to consume an experience so intimately. I have a unique microscopic view of the gestures and voices of the people who narrated our story. How they speak, laugh, emphasize, process. It’s drilled into me.

I can akin it to painting someone. That is to say, “I know you in a way no one else has gotten to notice”. I know you because I know the exact shape of your eyes. Or precisely how the light falls on your cheek.

I feel as though I know that trip on an acutely intimate level that no one else got to experience. This is a precious thing.

This is a realization grown in hindsight. In post-reflection. The kind that comes weeks and months later after you’ve pored over colour balances and audio enhancements and clip slicing and subtitles and music selection and rewire after rewire until it all clicks just right together.

It’s a quiet revelation and elation alone in a basement on hour 8 of your 46th editing day.

So yes, I have the privilege of knowing this trip intimately—after the fact.

In the moment, I was living Shakesperience through a viewfinder. And when I wasn’t filming, I was thinking about what could be filmed next.

I went into that experience fully believing I would walk out with a fun, light-hearted, easy, 5-10 minute highlights reel.

That changed within the first 10 minutes of hearing our professors speak on our first day.

That changed when I was sitting in a closed bar at nine o’clock in the morning, listening to two of the most hypnotizingly wyrd and wonderful women I’ve ever met in my life talk about beginnings. And Hamlet. And King Lear.

And Dr. Murray reminds us of “the moment just before the curtain goes up in a theatre”.

Suddenly, I realized that the people around me could see what I see.

Space, Time, Stumbling, Growth, Love.

Coming back to Shakesperience for a second time, I can reflect on how much more messy and emergent I felt last year. I was stumbling as gracefully as I could in this brand new environment and ecosystem, while feeling the potency of this project heightening with each day of the trip. I was carrying this growing dream in my camera bag, filled with the gut-knowing that I had stumbled upon something extremely powerful.

I didn’t know exactly how it would manifest, I just knew I had to keep filming.

I cannot thank my professors enough for holding me in that process of unfamiliar footing, unsure of what would come out of it, but letting me try.

Letting me stumble, letting me figure it out. Holding space for my growth without an ounce of hesitation, expectation, pressure or judgement.

Having a year of time and space in between now and then has allowed me to fully realize what a profound act of love that was.

To let someone grow freely, without moulding or conformity. I am so deeply grateful to my professors for taking a chance on me and trusting me with such a beautiful, important task.

To trust me with this story. Their story.

It was an honour then, and it’s an honour now.

Finally breathing it in.

I released the documentary and dove into finals. Then into new video projects, a theatre production, university applications, more finals, more video projects, to finally crashing and settling back home in Montreal for the summer.

Then came travelling, preparing for an overseas move, then a train.

One that brought me all the way back to Stratford, Ontario, for Shakesperience 2025.

I still found myself periodically reaching for a camera I had not packed. Like I still had that instinct. It took time to reintegrate into that space—not as an observer, not as a documentarian, but simply as a person. As a true participant. As simply me, and that it would be enough.

Now, I can finally look at the documentary without scanning for new edits or worrying if everything came together. For the first time, I can actually watch it.

I never really had a chance to breathe it all in before.

These are the thoughts I had as a first-time watcher:

My favourite part is “King Lear and Negative Capability”.

I wish I had a better microphone.

I would have moved the note of the Festival’s 2024 theme just a bit higher.

I need to learn to be quieter behind a camera when I’m filming.

Wow. I really love what I made.

I think I can hold it a little more proudly now.

I miss this cohort.

I would add more beats of silence now.

“A World Elsewhere” is hitting very differently now.

I still breathe a sigh of relief when it ends.

The Forest of Arden & The Terrifying Importance of Being Seen.

November 12th, 2024.

All of a sudden, this thing that had been so, so intimate to me—this thing that represented so much of me–this thing that was me—in every decision, in every fibre of its being—was no longer just mine. It was out in the world.

It was now something that anyone could watch. And there I was, in a room with over sixty people gathered at the student bar in Bishop’s University to do exactly that. They were watching it. Watching me. And I could watch them watching me. And they could all see me in a way no one has seen me before.

I don’t think I was prepared for how terrifying that would feel.

I got up to speak—and I have no memory of what I said into that microphone. I hope it was coherent and at least a bit smart. I couldn’t fully process that everyone there had shown up to see something I made. I loved it and hated it at the same time.

It was a beautiful night. It was an uncomfortable night. It was a nerve-wracking night.

I hardly ate. I hardly breathed.

I was counting down the seconds to that final credits screen.

Because once we got there, it meant the story had been told.

It meant that I had made a documentary, and it turned out okay.

And people liked it. And people wanted to see it. Something I made—something that was me—was important. Real. Tangible.

That my way of seeing the world was accepted. Valid. Worthy of being witnessed.

And people wanted to witness it. And people didn’t roll their eyes or regret the hour they sat together on a Tuesday night at The Gait, thinking about all the better things they could be doing in that moment.

Until that final screen appeared, it felt like the documentary was still fabricating itself in real time. Like the fate of both it–and I–were suspended in that liminal space of becoming.

It was both everything and nothing until we reached the end.

And I was one of the only people in that room who knew how it would end.

So many people showed up.

So many people I didn’t even know. I very often stared in disbelief at the number of people whose eyes were glued to the screen. I fervently watched everyone watching it.

Prepared to meet faces of boredom or disinterest and ready to shoulder that ego-hit and embarrassment. But I didn’t have to.

I wish I could say I stood taller that night–chin up, soaking in the light.I wish I had known how to bask in the moment, instead of shrinking away from it.I am still learning how to give my heart and soul to a project without attaching my worth to it.

I am still asking: how does one balance the terrifying vulnerability of creating soul-baring art with the overwhelming compulsion to make that art anyway?

Compulsion. That was at the core of this process. It was an unstoppable, forceful river.

The documentary made itself through me and took a piece of my soul with it.

It then handed that piece over to humanity.

I don’t know if it’s even possible to create something true without laying yourself bare in between the jaws of vulnerability.

Maybe, with time, the world won’t feel so jaw-like to me when I show my soul to it.

How do you even cope with the baring of the thing most intimate to you?People might cry. They might applaud. They might hug their loved ones. They might be changed. But they also might not.

The act of offering in itself is always a risk.

This year at Shakesperience, we saw As You Like It.

There’s a moment in Act 2, Scene 7, when Orlando fearfully charges into the Forest of Arden with aggression, expecting violence, ready to fight.

Instead, he is met with: “Welcome to our table.”

That was me.

I came into that incredible November night at The Gait with my shields up, not expecting to be met with such love. But I was.

I sat through to that final end screen, fists coiled, bracing for impact.

And I was met with humanity.

People hugged me. Some cried. Some excitedly told me about the tiny nuances they noticed—the ones I had secretly hoped someone would catch. Because I’m so used to being the only one who sees those things. But this time, others could see them too.

And everyone applauded.

And so many people showed up.

For me.

And I am beginning to see this Forest of Arden for what it always has been.

Watch Riley's Documentary Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbWz4ORtAYA