Current Work

Here are some quick links to our community art work, our professional art work, and our other work updates.

Our Community Work Updates

(1) Applied Arts:
In 2010, we are offering three Theatre of the Oppressed week-long training workshops as part of our regular Applied Arts programming. Each workshop is co-facilitated by our Artistic Director, who has now completed over 200 TO projects in the past 10 years in all TO applications, and a Stage Left team member or community partner. Please note that we ONLY work in communities outside of our own region at the invitation of, and in partnership with, that community.

(a) Applied Arts Canmore runs from August 16 - 20. This is Stage Left's annual TO training workshop and is running in Canmore, not Calgary this year. It is co-facilitated by Michele and Stage Left Associate Artist Charlene Hellson. Download the registration package here.

(b) Applied Arts Australia runs in October in Cairns, Queensland, with Skye Maconachie, an Aussie who has been part of Stage Left's team since 2006. The registration package will be posted in the summer.

We've also developed an Applied Arts workshop that is specific to the use of Theatre of the Oppressed methods with people who have disabilities. It is being launched at Arts Engage! in Halifax and is described below in ActiveArts.

For the World Forum Theatre Festival in Vienna, that was held in late 2009, Julian Boal invited Michele, our Artistic Director, to support his presentation of a paper that speaks against the use of TO in ways that support and uphold the globalized capitalist corporate economic/political free market that is the basis of most oppression on our planet. The paper was very well received!

Out of the World Forum Theatre Festival came the development of a TO women's network. It is now on-line at http://toandfeminism.blogspot.com

Stage Left is in the process of further developing its role as a Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed. We are hard at work with academic, activist, and community partners to devise some mechanisms through which we can disseminate more of the knowledge we've earned over the past ten years, though the more than 200 projects we've now completed with diverse communities.

(2) Arts in Action
(a) Action for Healthy Communities in Edmonton has again invited Stage Left to support their programming for diverse community members. We are doing Theatre of the Oppressed and other Popular Theatre workshops for their Youth Skills, Youth Jobs program and for their ESL/immigrant/newcomer high school populations.  

(b) The Arts in Health program is being devised with many of our community partners. We are working together to create Forum Theatre cultural competency supports around providing mental health care to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people who are struggling with pervasive mental illness; for health care workers who are supporting women who have experienced sexual violence; for health care workers who support members of the LGBTTIQ community; and around healthy sexuality for youth.

(c) The Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership has been consulting with Stage Left on the use of Aesthetics of the Oppressed to further engage participants at their annual symposium, which is in October.

(3) ActiveArts
(a) Applied Arts in the disability community. We are piloting a new training workshop on the applications of the Stage Left model to work with people who have a disability, which is inclusive here of intellectual/developmental impairment, physical disability, sensory impairment, mental illness, chronic illness, etc. This workshop, being run at Arts Engage! in Halifax in June, is in response to the huge volume of requests for information that we get each year about how to adapt Popular Theatre and Professional Theatre practices in ways that make them accessible and meaningful for disabled people.

(b) Our partnership with Autism Aspergers Friendship Society continues with Transitions V and other youth action programming. Transitions is a self-advocacy program through which disabled youth use performance modalities to speak for themselves, to address concerns in their lives, and to advocate for their rights as members of the disability community.

(c) We are running a new project called the Arts Access Initiative, thanks to the support of the Alberta Paraplegic Foundations' Solution's Fund. As part of this Initiative, we are running a Transitions program for youth with spinal cord injury. We're also running a performance laboratory that examines the ways in which our arts-based community engagement model can be adapted for individuals with spinal cord injury so that the work is both fully accessible and meaningful. And, we are offering accessibility audits to professional performance companies in Calgary.

(d) We have been approved for a second year of Improving Alberta's Handicap programming. Improving Alberta’s Handicap (IAH) promotes equality for disabled people on individual and institutional levels by advancing the Social Model of disability and integrating it into disability service provision. IAH uses Stage Left’s arts-based community engagement and/or professional arts production processes to enable service providers to support their “clients” to develop and disseminate their personal stories of living with a disability, within a social justice context.

This year, we continue to provide mentorship and support to disability service providers on the integration of the Social Model of disability into their organizational ethos and to engage disabled people in the use of the arts, especially Theatre of the Oppressed methods, to advance social justice. In this, we are working with Autism Aspergers Friendship Society to provide arts-based youth leadership and youth action supports; with the Adult Aboriginal Mental Health Team to develop cultural competency tools in mental health service provision for First Nations, Metis, and Inuit clients; with mental health service providers on documenting the journey around new diagnosis for youth and new mothers; with a network of professional disabled artists to develop and disseminate literature on the disability aesthetic - the artistic representation of a unique subculture - and on mentorship for emerging artists; and with our Artistic Associates to publish our knowledge on the use of the arts to reduce stigma and foster social justice for disabled people.

Our Professional Work Updates

The Hate Show
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that The Calgary International Children’s Festival has commissioned us to create a performance for their 2011 event. We’re developing The Hate Show for them over the next two years, with the support of Artistic Associate Jan Derbsyhire. The Hate Show combines Invisible Theatre, Forum Theatre, Collective Creation, and Performance Creation processes into an interdisciplinary, interactive performance that engage teenagers in critical discussions about hate in our community – and about what they can all do about it.

Time To Put My Socks On
A co-production with Alan Shain,Time To Put My Socks On is an interdisciplinary performance creation production - a romantic comedy, from the guy’s point of view! Time To Put My Socks On combines elements of political theatre, dance, film, comedy, and story-telling with the aesthetics of disability to bring you an hilarious and deeply poignant exploration of a disabled man’s relationship with his abled-bodied partner. Issues of masculinity, sexuality, independence, and freedom from convention converge in a raucous one-act that provides deep insight into the lived experience of disability.

The Book of Jobes
As part of the Balancing Acts Commissioning Project, Stage Left is providing creation, development, and production support for Edmonton playwright Heidi Janz's newest show, The Book of Jobes. This show tells the story of Rachel Jobes, a disabled scholar who loses her identity, but not her life for some reason, after a violent attack in her home. Based on Ms. Janz’s lived-experience, this play deals with the archetypal question: “Why do bad things happen to ‘good’ people?” and the related question of whether or not suffering can, in any sense, be “redemptive”? It also explores the sense among many in the disability community that the Judeo-Christian concept of disability summarily dehumanizes people with disabilities by viewing them exclusively as either objects of God’s wrath, or objects of other people’s charity, with no kind of agency/responsibility of their own. Finally, this play considers notions of individual identity and community identity, and the ways in which these notions of identity clash and interact with one another.

The Balancing Acts: Calgary's Annual Disability Arts Festival
Balancing Acts has come to a close. Our last installment of the world's longest-running disability arts festival was in December, 2009. We are now working on a new presenting model, which will enable us to expand our professional presenting into the larger realm of "politicized art/art as cultural resistance" rather than the exclusive domain of disability arts. Our new presenting model will kick-in starting in 2011.

Check out the Balancing Acts archives, and our work as Canada’s leading contributors to the global disability arts and culture movement, at www.balancing-acts.org.

Radical Disabled Artists' Network
We are working with several colleagues across the nation on the development of an artists-run network in professional disability arts. This network is intended to be a vehicle for disabled Canadian artists to share information about our artistic practices across disciplines and across the nation. It's primarily a place for the exchange of knowledge about the disability arts aesthetic - which we frame as the use of the arts to examine the socio-political context of personal and cultural identity so as to advance a creative vision of social equality that embraces the difference of disability, rather than normalizes it or renders it more undesirable than it already is within mainstream society.

Our Other Work Updates

New Team... New Opportunities
Our Associate Artistic Director, Nicole Dunbar, left the company at the end of 2009 to travel and then to pursue a master's degree. We wish her all the best and welcome our new Artistic Associates. Rather than replace Nicole with one full-time Associate Artistic Director, we've opted instead to work within a larger collaborative framework by creating a team of Artistic Associates from across Canada. This approach is not only more reflective of our core values (collaboration and diversity!), it's also enabling us to offer more service in more places to more diverse communities.

This team approach is also going a long way to attending to our Artistic Director's wellness. After an intense period of physical and mental health challenges at the end of 2009, Michele has been able to get well and to map out a new strategic plan for Stage Left's next three years. Michele is working with the team, and with our Board, on bringing Stage Left back to it's roots - which involves less professional art work exclusively with disabled artists to make room for more work with other diverse artists that Michele and the team are both personally and professionally tied to - including the LGBTTIQ community, working class activists, radical feminists, and Aboriginal communities.

Stage Left is also in a slow process of moving our home-base to the Bow Valley. Michele now lives in Canmore, and is gradually moving Stage Left and its services with her to the mountains. But we'll still work in Calgary and other Alberta places - as well as continue to work across Canada and abroad.

Advocacy
We continue to provide professional services to emerging and established artists and arts organizations.

We are hard at work on a number of arts-based community research initiatives and on publishing and disseminating our findings. We will soon be making available information on the disability aesthetic; on adapting Theatre of the Oppressed for people with developmental disabilities, with mental health challenges, and with physical disabilities; and on the many applications of the Stage Left model.

We are proud to announce that UBC Professor and Researcher, Kirsty Johnston, is including a chapter on Stage Left in a book she is writing on disability and theatre in Canada.

Alan Shain and Michele prepared a presentation on our interdisciplinary approach to the development of Time to Put My Socks On for the Canadian Disability Studies’ Association's annual conference.

Michele continues to sit on a Canada Council Advisory Committee.