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Geoff McMurchy & Lori Hamar - Wingspan Three Based in Victoria, Geoff McMurchy is an exceptional dancer, choreographer, and sculptor. He has performed throughout Canada and Australia and is the founder of Kickstart - the first Disability Arts Festival in Canada. Lori Hamar is a founding member of Motivity Modern Dance, Suddenly Dance Theatre, triPOD dance collective, and currently works with tailspin, a project aimed at developing mixed ability dance and performance in Victoria. Wingspan Threeis an innovative, striking, and passionate piece exploring the complexities of the human condition through integrated dance performance. Featuring a series of short vignettes, WINGSPAN III weaves through the intricacies of yearning, companionship, and transcendence. Don’t miss this Calgary premiere!
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Victoria Maxwell - Funny, You Don't Look Crazy?! Victoria Maxwell is one of North America’s most sought-after solo artists on the lived experience of mental illness. Her critically acclaimed one-woman show, a true-life story about accepting and living with a psychiatric disorder, tours internationally to sold-out audiences and rave reviews. Funny, You Don’t Look Crazy?! captures the experience of romantic relationships and the world of work while in the midst of untreated bipolar disorder, after diagnosis, and the psychiatric ward. Follow her mad dash from acting with John Travolta to Safeway cashier to wearing hospital greens and back to the stage again. This is Maxwell’s second installment of her bipolar escapades follows the immense success of Crazy for Life.
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Spirit Synott – Moving Still Moving Still expresses Synott’s roller coaster ride over the past few years - one marked with loss and change in her life. Full of grace, passion, and quiet elegance this performance is not to be missed!
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Heidi Janz - /Voices at Dying, Dying to be Heard/ Heidi Janz is a writer/playwright based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work focuses on exploring the experiences of people with disabilities and making these experiences accessible to larger audiences consisting of both people with disabilities and the temporarily able-bodied (TABs). In her “other life,” Heidi is a Post-Doctoral researcher in Disability Studies at the University of Manitoba and a Visiting Scholar with the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre at the University of Alberta.
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Cheryl Marie Wade - Body Talk One of the most influential leaders of the disability arts and culture movement, Cheryl Marie Wade is an award-winning playwright, poet, performer, film-maker and disability rights activist. Also known as the ‘Queen Mother of Gnarly’, Wade has developed numerous groundbreaking and provocative works that blend political satire, spoken word, performance and visual art to reveal multiple meanings of disability from the inside out. Constructing thought-provoking images through the merging of various artistic mediums, Wade provides a strikingly new perspective on disability, driven by unapologetic truth-telling and evocative metaphors of disability. Unflinching and exceptionally powerful, Wade takes audiences on her personal journey of transforming from an identity of “damaged goods” to “the woman with juice.” She celebrates life’s erotic possibilities as experienced through “a body different” and creates sensual pieces that explore the fusion of sex and disability, a theme largely untouched within the sphere of disability arts.
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Charlene Hellson - Unpacking the Backpack Calgary, Alberta Solo-performance Unpacking the Backpack is an Aboriginal interpretation of Peggy McIntosh’s Unpacking the Knapsack of White Privilege. It was written, and presented as a theatrical monologue for the conference, Culture and Mental Health Practice: Honoring Our Differences. This monologue examines, through the oral tradition, the historical, political, and contemporary impact upon the health of Aboriginal people in Canada. Brimming with powerful imagery, compelling symbolism, and gripping honesty, Hellson gives a stunning and unforgettable performance that offers new insight into what can contribute to mental health challenges for Aboriginal people.
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Percy Paul - Flight from Darkness With roots in a remote community in northern Saskatchwan, Percy Paul found himself at Princeton, working alongside one of the world’s leading authorities on string theory, black holes, and quantum field theory. But all this changed when he turned 28. Percy became an alcoholic in an effort to cope with his extreme mood swings. After a failed suicide attempt, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flight from Darkness focuses on the life of Percy Paul, from his dazzling rise and fall as a brilliant mathematician to his continuing journey with bipolar and his struggle to realize his full potential.
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Heart 'n' Soul - Celebrity Shotgun Based in the UK, this vibrant and raucous company known as Heart’n’Soul, teamed up with world renown disability artist, Mat Fraser, to collectively create a short film about a relationship gone array. Created and performed by artists with learning disabilities.
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People First - Self-Portraits These five video self-portraits represent each People First members' personal response to institutions. Written and directed by the members themselves in collaboration with Josee Boulanger and Erika MacPherson. Self-Portraits is part of a full-length documentary with the National Film Board to be released in March 2008. "We are self-advocates fighting for the right of all people who are labelled with an intellectual disability to live in the community, NOT IN INSTITUTIONS!" www.freeourpeople.ca
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Inside Out: Sign Theatre Project - Art Through Sign Inside Out: Sign Theatre Project is an exciting addition to Inside Out Integrated Theatre Company's repertoire. A group of emerging artists perform a series of vignettes using mime, physical comedy, and ASL poetry cumulating in a creative, non-verbal theatrical performance symbolizing the power of silence.
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Stage Left Productions - Captain Courageous! Calgary, Alberta Film James Doyle’s life as he sees it is juxtaposed against society’s perception of him as a tragic, courageous hero. The social and charity models of disability collide as James reflects on flashing moments of an 18 year old car accident that keeps James secondary to the powerful and dominating image of Captain Courageous!.
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Stage Left Productions - Masking & Unmasking Self, School, & Society Calgary, Alberta Performance Creation in Mask A community of emerging young artists with disabilities comes together to articulate and advocate their concerns and share their experiences through mask-based performance. A partnership with Autism Aspergers Friendship Society, Transitions III is an arts-based, self-advocacy program through which disabled youth use performance disciplines to speak for themselves, to address concerns in their lives, and to advocate for their rights as members of the disability community.
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Stage Left Productions - A Day in the Life of... Calgary, Alberta Film As part of the Transitions III partnership program between Stage Left and Autism Aspergers Friendship Society, six youth with disabilities take charge of the camera and create a short film about day to day life in their community. Exploring who they are and what they care about, A Day in the Life of… tells the honest and thought-provoking story of a vibrant youth community they way they want to be heard.
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