Since incorporating as a non-profit society in 2003, Stage Left Productions has become Calgary’s most accomplished performance company engaging exclusively in artist-community collaboration and in professional production with marginalized artists. Our primary purpose is to promote the creation, presentation, and dissemination of diverse Canadian artists and their work, to increase appreciation for disparate artists and artistic practices, and to position artist-community collaboration as a valuable and necessary practice within Canada’s professional arts milieu.

Stage Left is also Calgary's Centre for Excellence in Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practices. Because Augusto Boal endorsed Stage Left as a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed, we are working over the next couple of years to develop the Centre and to become a hub for and arts-based community development  activity in Calgary and throughout Alberta.

Stage Left is internationally recognized for our work in advancing the global disability culture movement and through our performance-based social justice work.

A full summary of our Current Work is finally on-line!

The Art of the Joker:  Theatre of the Oppressed Training for Experienced Practitioners runs July 20 -24, with Marc Weinblatt of the Mandala Centre.

Transitions is running again in 2008!

We are accepting applications to our Call for Commissions for Balancing Acts8.

OUTSpoken, our human rights education program for LGBTQ youth, is taking the stage.

We’re in production on Time To Put My Socks On, with Ottawa artist Alan Shain.

We rely on 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 they can explore, define, and celebrate their 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 enable 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 practice a highly specialized, socio-political performing arts model made up of Popular Theater and Theatre of the Oppressed, coupled with interdisciplinary Performance Creation, to genuinely affect personal and social transformation, and to foster social justice, with marginalized communities.

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

Stage Left works extensively with marginalized artists and community members, such as people with physical, sensory, learning, and/or developmental disability, brain injury, chronic illness, and/or mental illness; lesbigay youth; street-involved youth; politically motivated youth; culturally diverse youth; Ethno-cultural communities; First Nations; and other marginalized communities and their allies. We strive to engage marginalized artists and people in an arts-based process designed to explore personal and social concerns and to imagine, actualize, and practice - or rehearse – solutions to them.

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.