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Jeff Wheaton has been chosen as the Atlantic Filmmaker Cooperative’s Filmmaker in Residence for 2012-13.

Throughout the coming year the Halifax filmmaker will be working on his residency project, a documentary entitled HIVE. His film will explore the relationship between a beekeeper and a colony of bees, and the deeper implications of this relationship on the world around us.

While the threat of declining bee populations and its impact on our global food supply has become a hot topic in the news, HIVE will take a more poetic approach to the subject. As an urban beekeeper himself, Wheaton proposes an exploration of bees that is personal and contemplative, a film that poses more questions than it answers.

Wheaton has worked as cinematographer for Jason Eisener, Andrew Bush, Cory Bowles, and Megan Wennberg. He has shot music videos for Jill Barber, Jenn Grant, Ghettosocks, Rebecca Higgs and Ryan MacGrath. He has been chair of the board of directors at AFCOOP for three years and mentored projects with the Viewfinders Kids Film Festival and has directed the films Le Chien, Enough, the Lullaby of Mike Bossy and Construct + Conflict, spanning comedy, drama and experimental documentary.

Now in it’s fourth year, AFCOOP’s Filmmaker in Residence program is designed to provide a Maritime filmmaker with support and resources to create a film while involving the community in the process.

After nine-and-a-half years, Live Art Dance general manager Gay Hauser is leaving the organization.

Paul Caskey will transition from the role of artistic director to executive producer.

“While Gay leaves behind incredible shoes to fill, I am inspired by this new responsibility and look forward to the opportunities ahead,” says Caskey in a news release.

Brigitte Aucoin joins Live Art as administrative assistant. Aucoin brings a strong working knowledge of the local dance community and arts and culture sector.

Live Art begins its 30th season on Sept. 27 with Le Carre des Lombes at the Sir James Dunn Theatre in Halifax.

Nova Scotia playwright Wanda Graham’s play, Kill Zone: A Love Story, has been selected for presentation at the Women Playwrights International Conference in Stockholm this month.

Over 600 plays were submitted from around the world in competition for presentation at the conference. Seven were chosen from Canada, including Graham’s.

Kill Zone looks at the effects of contemporary military service on one soldier and his family. Twenty minutes of the play will be presented in English by Swedish professional actors for this international gathering. Graham is going and will be able to see a “gallery” of 99 other excerpts from new work by women.

Globe and Mail critic J. Kelly Nestruck calls Daniel MacIvor’s new comedy The Best Brothers, with Nova Scotia actor John Beale, “one of the most beautifully bittersweet plays MacIvor has written.”

The play, at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre until Sept. 16, is about two brothers caught got up in settling their mother’s estate and a dog. MacIvor is the serious, married brother; Beale, in his Stratford debut, plays the gay, nomadic brother.

Nestruck, who reviewed the play in The Globe and Mail on July 16, gave the play three and a half stars.

Two Halifax companies are at Toronto’s SummerWorks Performance Festival this month.

Halifax’s 2b theatre company has two productions at SummerWorks, the largest juried theatre festival in Canada, focusing on new Canadian works.

When it Rains, which premiered in 2011 at The Bus Stop Theatre, Halifax, is in the National Series with six performances, Aug. 9-19, at the Factory Theatre.

The show, created and directed by 2b’s artistic co-director Anthony Black, is a play in the form of a live-action graphic novel about two couples, love and loss. In the cast are Samantha Wilson, Conor Green, Francine Deschepper and Marc Bendavid.

2b also brings The God That Comes, a work-in-progress collaboration between 2b’s artistic co-director Christian Barry and Juno Award-winner Hawksley Workman, to the festival for a one-night preview on Aug. 11 at the Theatre Centre. The God That Comes, a concept album for the stage that tells the story of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, has a Halifax performance in the spring of 2013.

Halifax’s Kazan Theatre is taking its production of I, Animal, by Daniel MacIvor, which premiered at Eastern Front Theatre’s Supernova Theatre Festival this May. Three characters talk about love and loss under the same full moon. The play is directed by Richie Wilcox, and features Antonio Cayonne, Stewart Legere and Kathryn MacLellan and is at the Factory Theatre Mainspace on Bathurst Street, Aug. 9-19.