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Current Work
QUICK LINKS:
Diversity in the Arts Program Updates Company Updates
PROMOTING DIVERSITY IN THE ARTS
Our promotion of diversity in the arts, through ongoing activities in outreach, education, and advocacy, continues to be an area of rapid expansion for Stage Left. We are therefore currently enjoying collaborations with several artists and arts organizations who also value and embrace diversity in the arts and in arts practice:
The Mandala Centre for Awareness and Transformation
Marc Weinblatt, of the Mandala Centre for Awareness and Transformation in Port Townsend, Washington, and Michele Decottignies, our Artistic Director, are co-facilitating The Art of the Joker from July 20 – 24 in Calgary. This is a five-day advanced intensive in the art of facilitating Theatre of the Oppressed work, for people who have had significant practical (not theoretical) experience in leading Boal-based work in grassroots community contexts. The Art of the Joker is also being offered as a part of our service as a Centre for the Theatre of Oppressed.
In-Definite Arts Society
In-Definite Arts provides a creative arts program for community artists who have developmental disabilities. With over 30 years of experience, IDAS is using their wisdom to benefit the Calgary arts community as a whole through the development of a dynamic Community Arts Centre in SE Calgary. IDAS has engaged Stage Left to assist them in procuring the funds and community partners needed to bring this vibrant new arts space to life! It is our pleasure and honor to be supporting the development of this vibrant addition to Calgary’s arts community.
Smashing Stereotypes
Stage Left and Smashing Stereotypes Productions, Ottawa artist Alan Shain’s production company, are hard at work on a new play called Time To Put My Socks On. This solo-performance explores disability, masculinity, love, and power and control between a disabled male and his abled-bodied female partner. Stage Left is thrilled to be in co-production on this professional performance creation project. We are collaborating with Alan on the dramaturgical development of the script, character creation, design, directing, and technical production. We are also providing professional development support in the way of company and show marketing, audience development, touring opportunities, and fund development for professional theatre creation and production.
Rachel Gorman
Rachel Gorman is a Toronto dance, theatre, and performance artist who has been creating and performing work since 1999. She is a dynamic member of Canada’s disability arts and culture movement, as well as an equity and disability scholar who recently completed her PhD in adult education at OISE. Her work with artists is characteristic of what she’s about - using theatre to raise consciousness and remake the world. Rachel’s skills in movement, and her political perspective, greatly enrich Stage Left’s understanding of performance methodology, the aesthetics of disability art, and the use of the arts to create linkages between the personal and the political. Rachel is a core member of the production team on Time To Put My Socks On and is guiding the integration of physical theatre, movement, and dance into that show. We are also making plans with Rachel around the formation of an artists’ network specific to professional disability art and culture.
Autism & Asperger’s Friendship Society
AAFS is a disability service provider creating social, recreational, and leadership opportunities for youth affected by Autism and/or Asperger’s. We have formed a highly successful collaboration-based partnership with this grassroots organization around the use of the arts in community inclusion for youth with disabilities. This Transitions Drama Program provides arts training and performance opportunities for youth with developmental disabilities. Transitions is proving to be a highly successful self-advocacy program through which disabled youth learn to use creative avenues to speak for themselves, to address concerns in their lives, and to advocate for their rights as members of the disability community. The 2008 Transitions Program will provide disabled youth opportunities in interdisciplinary performance creation, self-representation through film/digital narratives, and in multidisciplinary storytelling.
Theatre Rien-Pantoute
In 2006, an invitation from Theatre Rien-Pantoute brought Stage Left to St. Catherines, Ontario to facilitate a week-long Theatre of the Oppressed immersion workshop for this ensemble of National Theatre School graduates. Our focus that week was to examine how the aesthetics of Theatre of the Oppressed are divergent from traditional theatre production. Now, in 2008, Theatre Rien-Pantoute has invited us into production on a stunning adaptation of 1984 that will integrate fully interactive Theatre of the Oppressed-based moments into this dramatic exploration of totalitarianism and it’s parallels in modern North American society.
Downstage Performance Society
Our outreach has connected us with the dynamic ensemble that is Downstage, a theatre and performance company dedicated to the production of new and established Canadian work that explores socially or politically-charged themes. Stage Left is supporting Downstage by sitting on their Board of Directors and by providing mentorship in fund development, arts administration, and anti-oppressive practice. We are also making plans for a city-wide campaign that fosters greater awareness of and appreciation for diversity in Calgary’s professional arts outlets.
James Sanders
James Sanders lives and works in Vancouver as an actor, writer, singer/songwriter, motivational speaker, and as a diversity consultant for media production. James is the artistic director of Realwheels, an arts company that produced Skydive, a stunning new play that uses innovative technology to fly the actors around the stage. Skydive premiered at the 2007 PuSh Festival in Vancouver to critical acclaim and will be presented by Theatre Calgary in October. We are supporting James to create greater physical accessibility for artists with disabilities to our arts community, and for visiting artists within Calgary hotel rooms. We are also working with James to create greater awareness of disability arts within our local arts community and audiences as a whole.
University of Calgary Faculty of Social Work
The University of Calgary’s Faculty of Social Work continues to be a generous, community support to Stage Left. This academy fosters social justice through Social Work practice, and demonstrates a commitment to diversity through the warm welcome they extend to Stage Left and many other community groups. Our informal partnership revolves around grassroots resource sharing: we provide guest lectures, workshops, and professional development opportunities and, in return, the Faculty provides rehearsal space, practicum students, linkages to social justice initiatives, and so on. It’s our hope to formalize this collaboration through the development of a Centre of Excellence in Arts-Based Community Development. We’ll keep you posted.
QUICK LINKS:
Diversity in the Arts Program Updates Company Updates
PROGRAM UPDATES
Our 2008 season is focused on “working wisely”. Stage Left has expanded rapidly over the past few years, especially as more and more artists have brought more and more skill and passion to the company. This expansion, while enabling us to serve far more communities, has put some pressures on our organization and its core staff. As a result, we are re-grouping over these next two years to ensure that our expanding programming aligns best with our core values of: “grassroots is the way to go”, “social justice is why we go”, and “community is what we go with”.
Balancing Acts8
Thanks to the support of Calgary Arts Development, Stage Left is proud to present Bold.Brash.Beautiful: The Balancing Acts8 Commissioning Series. Balancing Acts is our annual disability arts festival, where we present over 100 disabled artists to over 10,000 Calgarians, with the support of a great many community partners. This year, we are bringing Balancing Acts back to its roots by commissioning work that represents the most dynamic, challenging, and though-provoking aspects of professional disability art. The Call is open to emerging and/or established professional* disabled artists working in dance, theatre, storytelling, multimedia, and/or visual art. We’ll be sending out the Call for Commissions in late April.
* In keeping with national arts standards, we consider a professional artist to be a person (or company) who has (1) been paid for her/his work, (2) completed basic arts training (but not necessarily through a school), (3) produced an independent body of work, (4) received the recognition of her/his peers through public presentation of work in a professional context, and (5) maintained a professional practice for at least two years.
OUTSpoken
Stage Left is very excited to announce the launch of OUTSpoken, a new program engaging youth who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited, intersexed, questioning, and/or queer (LGBTQ). OUTSpoken challenges prejudice and fosters systemic change by enabling young people to reduce discrimination toward the LGBTQ community on both individual and institutional levels. OUTSpoken engages specific community groups within the larger LGBTQ youth population, in this case First Nations, Metis, and Inuit youth, street-involved youth, young women, and youth of color, in initiatives that foster community capacity building and mobilization, civic engagement, public education and awareness, and institutional change around prejudice against people who identify as LGBTQ.
Thanks to Alberta Community Development Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Education Fund for making this program possible.
ActiveArts Drama Program for People with Disabilities
Stage Left’s ActiveArts Drama Program provides comprehensive performance education and production opportunities to hundreds of disabled people each year. ActiveArts participants are supported in using the performing arts to strengthen the skills necessary for their full community inclusion, in practicing the ability to articulate and advocate their own concerns, and in sharing their experiences with the larger community through creative, constructive media.
Our 2008 ActiveArts programming includes Transitions IV, a partnership with the Autism & Asperger’s Friendship Society (see AAFS above) for disabled youth. We’re also planning some arts immersion workshops for adults with disabilities in the summer. And we’re investigating the possibility of opening the program up to the mental health community as well.
Theatre and Sexuality
Stage Left was recently invited by Calgary Sexual Health Centre (CSHC) to train its team of educators, counselors, management, and administrators in Theatre of the Oppressed methods. We are next collaborating with the team at CSHC to use Theatre of the Oppressed and other arts-based methods to foster safe and authentic dialogue on issues related to sexual health and reproduction in schools.
Women’s Work
As part of OUTSpoken and our collaboration with CSHC, we are running two Theatre of the Oppressed programs specifically for young women who lack the community and feminist support to explore the development of a healthy and full female self. One program will focus on sexual identity and will be open to young women who identify somewhere within the LGBTQ spectrum. The other will focus on the integration of feminist ideology into daily life choices and will be open to young women who identify somewhere within the feminist spectrum (social, liberal, radical, post-modern).
Theatre of the Oppressor
We are beginning to use new approaches to Theatre of the Oppressed practice that support members of privileged community groups to become supportive and appropriate allies to marginalized community groups. These techniques come from the Theatre of the Oppressor techniques developed by Marc Weinblatt and Cheryl Harrison of the Mandala Centre in Washington state. They focus on supporting mainstream community members in learning how to unlock themselves from conscious and unconscious behaviors and attitudes that perpetuate all of the “isms” (racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism/homophobia, etc.).
Diversity and Wellbeing
Stage Left has been invited by the Calgary Health Region to support their annual conference, Diversity and Wellbeing, through Forum Theatre. We’ll be developing a Forum Theatre exploration of “diversity” in health care practice and introducing an energetic and interactive means of community engagement at conferences. And we’re happy to be sharing the stage with one of our favorite disabled artists, Victoria Maxwell.
Hearing Voices
Stage Left continues its collaboration with the Calgary Health Region’s Adult Aboriginal Mental Health Team to further disseminate Hearing Voices, a Forum Theatre play designed to strengthen the cultural competency of health care clinician working with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit populations (FNMI).
The use of Forum Theatre in health care provides a dynamic, visceral and highly interactive opportunity to explore communication challenges that occur between non-Aboriginal clinicians and FNMI clients in a clinical setting. The goal is to discover the ways for clinicians to minimize cultural imposition and create a more culturally safe environment for their clients. Hearing Voices was a showcase event at both Mental Health Awareness and Mental Illness Awareness Weeks and will continue to be used as a cultural competency education tool within the Calgary Health Region as opportunities arise
Action for Healthy Communities
Action for Healthy Communities (AFHC) is the working name of the Edmonton Healthcare Citizenship Society, a non-profit community development organization operating in central Edmonton since 1995. AFHC’s strategy involves working together with residents and self-defined community members, based on such criteria as age, ethnicity, geography, life stage and values, of ten economically challenged and cultural diverse neighborhoods in central Edmonton to strengthen community capacity and build healthier and stronger communities. AFHC has invited Stage Left to be part of their capacity building initiatives through the use of our arts-based community development and social justice model.
QUICK LINKS:
Diversity in the Arts Program Updates Company Updates
COMPANY UPDATES
Stage Left is on a three-year plan. Through the support of Canadian Arts & Heritage Sustainability Program, we were able to spend a couple of years focused on organizational sustainability through the development of infrastructure in governance and administration. Our three-year plan continues to move us forward in these directions, as we attempt to wend our way through the maze of “policy making” without getting swallowed up by bureaucracy or compromising our grassroots values.
Planning retreat
Stage Left’s core staff attended a planning retreat in March that enabled us to set new strategies that attend to the pressing needs of organizational and human resource development, to align our current work more closely with our core values, and to update our company literature to reflect our learning and growth over these past few years. Our current directions are therefore focused on more widely identifying our outreach services to the community-at-large and within the arts community, on clarifying the distinctions between our community arts practice and our professional arts practice, and on pubic education about and advocacy for our social justice goals within and through the arts.
Professional development
Stage Left’s core artists are traveling to New York this May to work with Augusto and Julian Boal at the Theatre of the Oppressed Laboratory. We’ll be taking advanced Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) workshops with the Boals to expand both our understanding of TO and our use of it. We’ll also be collaborating with Augusto and Julian on the formation of Stage Left as a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed. While in New York, we’ll also be conducting outreach to artists who share our values and approach: Sprout Disability Film Festival, Kayhan Irani, The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, and many, many others.
Growing Community
We’re thrilled to have expanded our repertoire of collaborating artists over the past couple of years. Stage Left now has two full time staff – Artistic Director, Michele Decottignies, and Associate Artistic Director, Nicole Dunbar – as well as up to twenty-five part-time staff at any given time throughout the season. We have gained the invaluable support and services of artists who share both our passion and our values, some of whom include: Vern Reynolds-Braun, videography, editing, sound, and film program facilitation; Richard Meetsma, website design and maintenance; Skye Maconachie, program facilitation and producing; Gavin Shaw, technical direction; Rachel Parris, stage management; David Dunbar, videography; Edwin Morales, Forum Theatre; Lynn Sutankayo, Forum Theatre; Erin Legare, Forum Theatre; Naomi Saulteaux EagleSpeaker, program facilitation; and many others.
Thanks to our Supporters
Stage Left extends a sincere thank you to the following funders and core supporters: Alberta Community Development Human Rights, Citizenship, and Education Fund; The Alberta Foundation for the Arts; The Canada Council for the Arts; Calgary Arts Development; Autism & Asperger’s Friendship Society; Smashing Stereotypes Productions; One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre; the University of Calgary Faculty of Social Work; Nucleus Information Systems; and all of the communities we work with in the ongoing quest for social justice.
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