We are the only company in Calgary that uses the arts exclusively to foster social justice, through a balance of community engagement and professional art work. We are both a multi- and interdisciplinary performance company, based in alternative theatre practices. We use film/video, visual arts, digital arts, literary arts, dance and movement, and other media in most of our projects; and, in many cases, we combine those different arts practices into new modes of cultural production – all so that as many diverse people as possible can engage in the arts, in ways that embrace our differences.

Our main community purpose is to support marginalized people to use the arts as a vehicle of radical social change. Our main artistic purpose is to promote the creation, presentation, and dissemination of marginalized Canadian artists and their work, and to increase appreciation for diverse artists and for our specific cultural practices.

Stage Left is a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), having been endorsed by Augusto Boal as such in 2005. We run a full-time TO practice, making use of all techniques in Boal’s repertoire, and adapting them to satisfy specific community objectives. We’re proud to be a hub for TO activity and training for all levels of experience, for a range of diverse communities, and for creative cultural competency.

Stage Left is also Canada’s leading contributor to the global disability arts and culture movement – a movement of disabled artists whose artistic objective is to represent the lived experience of disability as complex, dynamic, and infused with a range of experiences that include hopes and dreams, self-worth and autonomy, sexuality and relationships, and social barriers to disability. Please visit our disability art website at www.balancing-acts.org or take a look through our past work and disability arts festival pages on this site.

We are designing a new website and therefore only doing news-related updates to this old site. We have no idea how long it’s going to take us to get the new site up, but we’re looking forward to launching it (we think it’s pretty good!) In the meantime, we are busy as usual.

Registration is now open for Applied Arts, our annual Theatre of the Oppressed training workshop. We are soliciting proposals from professional disabled artists for a Balancing Acts Commission. We’re running Popular Theatre workshops for Action for Healthy Communities in July. We’re running a self-advocacy through the arts summer camp for Autism Aspergers Friendship Society in August. We’re coordinating summer arts programming for the In-Definite Arts Society’s Art Works! program. And we’ve launched our new, two-year program called Improving Alberta’s Handicap. This program is designed to mentor disability service providers in supporting their “clients” to use the arts to advance the Social Model of Disability. Our Theatre of the Oppressed workshops with Xris Reardon of Third Way Theatre in Australia were very successful. As a result, Xris and Michele, our Artistic Director, are creating an International Theatre of the Oppressed Radical Women’s Network and are planning a series of 2010 workshops in Melbourne, Calgary, and Vancouver. We’ve completed OUTSpoken:  LGBTQ Youth Put the Politics Back in Pride.

Stage Left uses the arts to integrate, not assimilate, marginalized people and artists into the creative, artistic, and social life of our community by providing safe and accessible space in which we can explore, define, and celebrate our culture; develop confidence, imagination, and artistic expression; contribute to the culture of our community in meaningful ways; and express both individual and collective identity.

We also use the arts to support marginalized people and artists to establish a visible presence in the larger community, increasing awareness of specific issues and fostering an appreciation of diverse cultures through the presentation of authentic, dynamic, and non-sentimental images of personal experiences.

We engage in arts-based change processes that explore personal and social concerns and that enable us to imagine, actualize, and rehearse radical changes within the individuals and social structures that are part of those concerns. We work primarily with those whose lived experience includes social injustice. Together, we try to move beyond token change so as to genuinely affect personal and social transformation, and to foster social justice.

We are a grass-roots arts-based community engagement and social action company, taking seriously our service to the communities who work with us to overcome social injustice.

We have an extensively history of making art (and using it to change the world for the better) with people with physical, sensory, learning, and/or developmental disability, brain injury, chronic illness, and/or mental illness; queer youth; street-involved youth; politically motivated youth; culturally diverse youth; Ethno-cultural communities; First Nations; and other marginalized communities and our true allies.

Stage Left has developed a highly specialized, interdisciplinary performance practice through which marginalized people can gain access to the professional performing arts. Our model is a combination of Popular Theater and Theatre of the Oppressed genres with interdisciplinary Performance Creation techniques. The Stage Left model is highly centered around the participants – we do not use actors to tell a community about its own experiences; instead, we engage the community itself in a creative, dynamic, and radical process of discovering, representing, and transforming its own experiences.

Popular Theater
Popular Theater is a performance-based instrument for change that provides a voice through which to teach and affect people. The many forms of Popular Theater used by Stage Left include Agit-Prop, Workers' Theatre, Gorilla Theater, and Theater of the Streets.

Theatre of the Oppressed
Theatre of the Oppressed is a form of popular theater of, by, and for people engaged in the struggle for liberation. The specific forms of Theatre of the Oppressed practiced by Stage Left include:

• Image Theatre, where participants sculpt pictures onto their bodies to represent and transform situations and relationships;
• Forum Theatre, where the audience is invited on stage to solve the problems represented in a community's personal story (racism, bullying, violence, discrimination, abuse, etc...);
• Cops-in-the-Head, where the internal voices that tell us we can't do things or that we're not good enough are brought to life, challenged, and banished from our heads;
• Rainbow of Desire, where complex relationships are deconstructed so as to not only eliminate what we don't want from our lives, but to embrace what it is we do want.
• Invisible Theatre, where issues-based scenes are performed in public so as to stimulate dialogue around a particular issues (e.g. sexual harassment) without the public knowing the scenes have been staged; and
• Legislative Theatre, where theater techniques are used to collect sociopolitical opinions from the public and those opinions used to support collaborative reforms in public policy and/or legislation.

Performance Creation
Performance Creation is an alternative theater practice where the artists involved in the process develop performances out of their own explorations and present them in non-traditional ways. Unlike more traditional forms of artistic endeavor, performance creation includes a variety of disciplines (theater, dance, film, etc.). As a form of artistic expression, performance creation also challenges traditional concepts of regionalism and multiculturalism; it utilizes/explores new artistic practices; and it redefines traditional relationships between the artist, management, the presenter, the media, and the audience. Stage Left plays an active role in the Performance Creation Canada (PCC) network. Read more about PCC here.

Arts-Based Community Development
Stage Left uses a participatory, performing arts-based community development practice to provide people with constructive, creative, and solution-oriented avenues of self-expression. We use the performing arts to build consciousness and to mobilize people. And we use a dynamic reflection/action model to encourage people to examine their relationships to self and community, and to bridge the gaps between individual concerns and larger social structures. As a result, Stage Left is much more than a performing arts company.

We use the arts to provide accessible tools through which to foster a sense of creative expression and personal empowerment. The Stage Left model offers increased opportunity for self-advocacy, creative exploration, and direct representation of personal concerns and social justice issues. Stage Left, then, practices a solid balance between artistry and activism, enabling both personal and social awareness and transformation.