Stage Left is a multi- and interdisciplinary performing arts company, working in solidarity with other marginalized people to foster social justice. Collectively, we present dynamic, authentic, unromanticized images of the individual, social, and structural struggles that we experience in and through our communities. We collaborate to forge intercultural solidarity against oppression as a whole through the fusion of art, identity, and politics. Our political vision is to support marginalized communities to use the arts as a vehicle of radical social change. Our artistic vision is to offer marginalized Canadian artists culturally-respectful creation, production, dissemination, and professional development programming. Our primary goal is to affect personal and social transformation through an innovative blend of grassroots community engagement processes with professional artistic practices.

"Art is but one of the many ways to apply critical analyses, expand the space of dialogue, and build relationships between struggles." (Beehive Design Collective)

Stage Left fills a unique niche within Canada's arts ecology:  We are radical artists and activists. We are personally, not just professionally, located within marginalized community groups and deeply connected to the interrogative politics of intersectional identity, diversity, and social justice. We are equally accomplished in community engagement and professional arts practices, and we relentlessly strive to ensure that both strongly adhere to our vision. We shape the artwork to the people, rather than shape the people to the work - making our practice welcoming, accessible, culturally-respectful, and anti-assimilationist. We apply our anti-oppressive practice to ourselves too, not just others. We use an intercultural model within our interdisciplinary arts practice. Our practice successfully serves and supports a variety of diverse communities and artists. We work with a team of national collaborating artists and disseminate our work locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. We are Canada's leading contributors to the global Disability Arts movement, we are a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed (one of only six in the world), we are a model of excellence in Artist-Community Collaboration, and we were active in the development of the Performance Creation Canada network.

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." (Bertolt Brecht)

We are currently in the process of getting established in the Bow Valley, with a base in Canmore, while we continue to work extensively in Calgary and Edmonton - and also throughout Alberta, all over Canada and the US, and internationally (to a lesser degree).

We're launching our new website in December, 2011 (and we're seriously excited about it, after all this time!). In the meantime, our company literature has been updated on this site, as are our Training and Current Work pages. All other literature is out of date. Please don't cite it.

Stage Left provides an imaginative, dynamic, and truly radical approach to critical social engagement. We use the arts to integrate marginalized people into the cultural fabrics of society. We use the arts to affirm our diverse identities, to embody our collective cultural knowledge, to represent our socio-political knowledge, and to strengthen the ingenuity and tenacity needed in making changes within ourselves and the oppressive social structures that limit our potentials.

We work primarily with those whose lived experience also includes social injustice, moving beyond token change and middle-class activism to affect personal and social transformation and to foster social justice. We therefore have an extensively history of making art - and using it to change the world for the better - with people with physical, sensory, neurological, learning, and/or intellectual impairment, brain injury, chronic illness, and/or mental illness; queer/ LGBTTIQ youth and adults; homeless and/or street-involved youth; politically engaged youth; girls and women; Ethno-cultural communities; First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples; and other marginalized communities and our true allies (those who actually do good as opposed to those who are do-gooders).

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

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 unique artistic practice that has the advancement of radical social justice as its core integrity. The foundation of our practice is this thing called Praxis:  Critical reflection on the world in order to take action to transform it.

Pedagogical Foundations
Stage Left's practice is informed by social change theories and processes that include Popular Education, Radical Feminism, Critical Social Theory, Structural Social Work, Anti-Oppressive Practice, Locality Community Development, Harm Reduction, and grassroots Social Action. These pedagogies infuse and inform all of our artistic approaches to social justice.

Artistic Foundation
All of our work is a combination of Popular Theatre genres (e.g. Theatre of the Oppressed, Agit-Prop, Gorilla Theatre, Theatre of the Streets, Workers' Theatre), Political Theatre, Documentary Theatre, Performance Creation, Digital and New Media, Multidisciplinary Production, and Artist-Community Collaboration with anti-oppressive, arts-based change processes. We actively embrace diversity within an artistic practice that advances socio-political interrogation and public engagement through creative intercultural interaction.

"Dare to be happy." (appropriated and reclaimed from Volkswagen commercials)

Community Foundation
Stage Left's practice is centered around the people we collaborate with. We do not rely on mainstream, traditional arts processes that devalue or further marginalize our "otherness" through cultural imposition and unmediated but largely unconscious privilege. Nor do we engage mainstream, professional actors to "inform" a community about its own experiences. No. Instead, we engage other marginalized artists and community members directly in a radical process of further discovering, representing, and transforming individual, cultural, and social realities through art.

Radical Art
Stage Left produces and presents dynamic, original performances that disrupt traditional, entrenched systems of artistic production, radically shifting the way we all relate to, think about, and work/live together. Our productions are intended to open people's minds and hearts to new possibilities in life for personal and social transformation. They immerse artists and audiences alike in affable approaches to social justice. They support us to discover how easy it actually is for us all to change this world for the betterment of all living things - simply by challenging the status quo. We therefore provide production, presentation, service, hosting, and training programming that is as culturally-respectful and anti-oppressive as possible in each and every moment of our lifework.

"Radical art must transcend merely talking about politics; it must change its own way of production, distribution and presentation."
(Jasmina Založnik)

To date, we are most known as Canada's leading contributor to the global Disability Arts movement, for our Theatre of the Oppressed practice, for our Artist-Community Collaborations, and for our Performance Creation work:

Disability Arts forms an integral part of disability politics and contributes to the expression of disability culture. This artistic practice is based on the unique movements, sounds, thoughts, and perspectives of disabled artists - patterns that cannot be authentically replicated by non-disabled artists. It is informed by disabled people’s experiences, values, and beliefs, and by a sense of identity as collective members of a distinct community group with a distinct culture and unique experiences as the recipients of social prejudice. Disability Arts is a unique production modality, that is primarily concerned with representations of individual disabled identity and collective disability culture, rather than with gaining access to traditional arts practices. Disability Arts is distinct from "the arts and disability". Please visit our Balancing Acts site to learn more about all we've contributed to the national and global Disability Arts movement. And take a look at our DisArtsCanada.org site to learn more about the Canadian Disability Arts ecology.

Stage Left was endorsed by Augusto Boal as a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed in 2005. Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is an arsenal of creative interactive engagement for people immersed in the struggle for liberation. The specific forms of TO that we use include Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Cops-in-the-Head, Rainbow of Desire, Legislative Theatre, and Aesthetics of the Oppressed. We collaborate with TO artists/organizations and community groups locally, nationally, and internationally. We've completed about 300 TO projects to date, with many diverse community groups - from a highly politicized anti-oppressive foundation. We continue to run a full-time TO practice, making use of all techniques in Boal’s repertoire, adapting them to satisfy specific community objectives, and merging them with professional arts practices and social action. We also provide affordable, accessible, politicized TO training for people with varying degrees of experience, for a range of diverse communities, and for creative cultural competencies.

"Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just wait for it.” (Augusto Boal)

Stage Left's Artist-Community Collaboration processes are guided by ethical relationships and horizontal learning. We share as much of our artistic knowledge as possible with community participants, through anti-oppressive experiential process. The community shares as much of their cultural and creative knowledge as is appropriate with us. Together, we use our collective knowledge to express shared identity as Others, unique cultural experiences, and socio-political interrogation through dynamic performances that don't so much "give voice" to others, but moreso insist that Others' wisdom is listened to, carefully considered, and justly acted on - all through fully accessible, highly original, totally engaging art work.

Performance Creation
Generally speaking, Performance Creation is an innovative mode of multi- or interdisciplinary artistic production, where original work is collaboratively developed and performed by the artists who create it. Performance Creation reinvents traditional relationships between performer, producer, playwright, director, and designer. Performance Creation also redefines artistic processes and presenting modalities. Performance Creation Canada is a nationwide network dedicated to the nourishment, management and study of Performance Creation in Canada, and the ecology in which it flourishes. Stage Left's Artistic Director was the co-producer, with Michael Green and One Yellow Rabbit, of the inaugural 2004 Performance Creation Canada meeting in Calgary.

Through all of this work, Stage Left has so far immersed more than 50,000 diverse people in the arts; facilitated at least 300 arts-based community-engagement projects; developed more than a dozen original multi- and interdisciplinary professional productions; shot and edited nine original short films; produced ten disability arts festivals in two cities in eight years; founded and chaired a national presenters' network and co-coordinated a national artists network; facilitated Theatre of the Oppressed training and programs across Canada and in Australia, with Marc Weinblatt, Xris Reardon, Skye Maconachie, Kerri Mesner, and Charlene Hellson; designed several websites; published articles about our work in a few prestigious journals (Canadian Theatre Review, Medical Education), a couple of books (Perform/abilities: Disability Theatre in English Canada and Untold Stories: Disability History in Canada), and been featured in a variety of print and broadcast media, such as CBC TV's program, Moving On; and has been honored with about ten different awards, including an Award of Excellence from the Premier's Council on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, a Moondance Columbine Playwrighting Award, a Calgary Award for Arts & Culture, a Calgary Professional Arts Alliance Award, and a Mount Royal University Legacy Award for Arts & Culture.

"C is for cookie. That's good enough for me." (Cookie Monster)