Current Work

1.  Some things we are working on now

(1) A return to our roots
2011 has so far been a hugely successful transitional year for Stage Left. 2010 brought us to the end of our existing strategic plan, which opened-up terrific opportunity to reassess our strengths, passions, relationships with the many communities we collaborate with, and our professional development needs as artists ourselves. In this process we've realized that, after eight years of full-time, formal operations and five years of independent work before that, Stage Left is now coming full-circle.

To effectively move from an emerging to established arts organization, we've focused extensively on the Disability Arts and Culture Movement as a whole. Our work in this milieu certainly made the best use of our skills and resources, afforded us the greatest opportunity for organizational growth and sustainability at the time, and supported a wealth of disabled artists, artists with a disability, and integrated arts organizations. In fact, we've managed to contribute more to the Disability Arts and Culture Movement than any other artists or arts organizations in Canada. As a result, we've come to be perceived, wrongly but understandably, as ONLY a Disability Arts organization. But our Disability Arts and Culture work accounts for only half of our annual roster. So we are now focusing way more on our original foundations as a production and presenting company that is attentive to intersectional identities and intercultural solidarities against all oppressions – through excellence in artistic innovation.

Our 2011 - 2013 plan for strategic, sustainable development is propelling us toward a period of intense artistic growth, as we make more use of new/ digital media in production and as a presenting modality in and of itself, merge all of our different production processes into one multi- and interdisciplinary practice, focus our creation work on the intersections that exist between and among people with diverse identities, and forge intercultural solidarity through collaboration with other diverse, radical artists who make use of creative, bottom-up social justice tactics.

These transitions are providing us terrific opportunities to learn a lot more, to re-energize as a company of diverse artist/ activists, to better support the communities we work with in solidarity, to fine-tune our production processes, to reshape our presenting model, and - most importantly - to reach far greater audiences and immerse way more people in the arts as contributors instead of only as consumers.

(2) Disability Arts and the Arts & Disability
Apart from a shift back to our intersectional and intercultural approach, our 2011 Disability Arts work has one main priority guiding it:  A critical need for regional, national, and international discourse about the differences between "Disability Arts" and the "Arts & Disability". By lumping together a multitude of disparate artistic practices and cultural considerations into this one thing called the "Disability Arts and Culture Movement", we've certainly supported the inclusion of artists with a disability into Canada's arts sector. BUT... that Movement as a whole has unfortunately, in many ways, stymied the continued growth and advancement of the unique artistic practice that is Disability Arts. So, we've mapped out our 2011 Disability Arts work in a way that enables us to leave the Disability Arts and Culture Movement behind. We are now going forward by focusing exclusively on our own practice, instead of continuing to support so many others in developing and furthering their own!

As it currently stands in Canada, Disability Arts is one of the only locations of disability-led activism that challenges the hegemony of "normalization" that is rife in mass culture and that dominates disability service provision and bioethics. Disability Arts instead promotes collective disability identity and pride as a counter-cultural revolution to the mass/popular culture of conformity and "coolness" at all costs. Disability Arts is an innovative mode of artistic production that advances the Social Model of Disability, is an integral part of disability politics, and is primarily concerned with distinct representations of collective disability culture, rather than with gaining access to conventional fine or performing arts practices. Artists who work within the Disability Arts milieu proudly identify as "disabled artists", instead of "artists with a disability" or just "artists, period". We bring our individual experience, and interrogative socio-political analysis of oppression, into the realm of collective culture through an original artistic practice. The Disability Arts practice is based on the unique movements, sounds, thoughts, and perspectives of disabled artists – aesthetic patterns of creation and expression that cannot be authentically replicated by non-disabled artists (but that will most certainly win one accolades for taking on the inspiring role of such a tragically afflicted individual...). Disability Arts articulates disabled people’s experiences, values, and beliefs – what is most often referred to as the "lived experience". Most importantly, however, Disability Arts links the individual lived experience of impairment to a collective culture of disability, as members of an oppressed community group with distinctive experiences of and responses to discrimination and prejudice, a unique ethos, and a particular way of life.

To support greater understanding of and appreciation for the Disability Arts practice, we are working on a series of critical social engagements about the politicized experience of living with impairment:

(a) DisArtsCanada.org
DisArtsCanada.org is devoted to fostering the continued expansion of Canada's professional Disability Arts practice. Our intention is to create greater awareness of, and connections between, the disabled artists, organizations, events, festivals, and associations from across Canada that are working to advance the Disability Arts aesthetic. Modeled directly after Performance Creation Canada and Popstart, DisArtsCanada.org is an artists' showcase, a presenter's database, a research tool, and a networking mechanism for those who are dedicated to the integrity and sustainability of the Disability Arts practice in Canada - and to the environment in which it thrives. DisArtsCanada.org is also a conduit for the international dissemination of much needed critical information about Canada's professional Disability Arts practice and the artists contributing to it. Canada has been a leading contributor to the global Disability Arts milieu, but our contributions are woefully under-represented on the world stage. Not for much longer! We're launching DisArtsCanada.org in December.

(b) The DisArtsCollective Artists' Network
The DisArtsCollective is an informal network of professional disabled Canadian artists who work within the Disability Arts practice (but not necessarily exclusively). The founding members of the DisArtsCollective all embrace a social identity as proudly Disabled and/or Deaf artists - and as artists who are also racialized, LGBTTIQ-identified, poor, young, old, body-variant, emotionally and/or mentally diverse, in a linguistic minority, etc... In choosing to come together (at the risk of the tired, old, ridiculous accusation by the Normalization police that we are "ghettoizing" ourselves), we focus on attentiveness to intersectionality and on forging intercultural solidarity through the radical artistic practice of Disability Arts. We’ve formed this Collective to attend to our Disability Arts practices through collaboration, networking, and advocacy, to share supports and resources, to disseminate our collective knowledge, and to clarify much needed distinctions in Canada between “Disability Arts” and the “Arts & Disability”.

(c) The DisHistory Project
This nationally-based multidisciplinary performance creation project shares untold and invisiblized stories of radical disability rights activism within Canada's social justice history. 2011 marks the 30th anniversary of Canada's Obstacles Report. Unfortunately, 30 years of policy advocacy hasn't really changed much for the disabled in Canadian society. Public buildings and bathrooms are still not accessible. The vast majority of people with a disability still live in extreme poverty. As a class of people, we remain objectified and ostracized by a normalizing society that is actively striving to eliminate the sources of our diversity altogether. And so on.

The DisHistory Project shifts the focus away from "the pseudo-progressive culture of false equivalencies" that has been advocated relentlessly for over the past 30 years by Councils, Committees, lawyers, scholars, and other liberal reformers who believe that the social system that oppresses us can also treat us as "equals" and who think that said equality can be achieved through policy/ legislated/ legal change. Our experience as radical disability rights activists has proven otherwise. So...

The DisHistory Project celebrates radical activism against oppression that targets impaired people in the form of disablism and all its objectification, ostracization, segregation, assimilation, and elimination tactics. There is, after all, a vast difference between equal under the law and equal in society - as proven by 30 years of disability rights advocacy that leaves the vast majority of us who live with impairment firmly within the domain of second class citizens.

The DisHistory Project has two main parts, a live intercultural performance collaboration called High Art and an on-line engagement portal called High Society. Both will be launched on December 10 across Canada and internationally.

(d) High Art:  Drugs, Disability, and Dastardly Deeds
High Art is an hilarious yet harrowing trip through the historical, socially-sanctioned use of legal pharmaceuticals to control and contort the disabled. Not to mention how so many of us have turned to illegal drugs to self-medicate against the dire impacts of oppression in our daily lives. You know, our relentless objectification as down-trodden, helpless individuals who need charity to survive, as tragic heroes who inspire by exceeding the least of society's expectations of us (we actually do survive), as freaks on display for your continued entertainment and fetishization, as retards (that's crazy, hey?!?!?!)... oh, yeah... as stark-raving, maniacal lunatics who shoot on sight, as medical experimentation subjects via eugenics policies like Hitler's Action T4 Program and Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act, and - most recently - as bioethics problems to be cured or eliminated from society altogether.
 
Talk about a trip!
 
Come smoke out with us.
December 7 to 10 at 7:00pm each night
in the In-Definite Arts Gallery
 
Go ahead, inhale. We dare you!

(e) High Society:  Daring Acts of Defiance by Disabled Radicals
High Society is an on-line portal of radical activism against disablism in Canada. A huge part of disability rights history has been invisiblized by the socially acceptable, liberal vein of human rights advocacy. In a world where dissent has been criminalized and activism positioned as a negative social disruption, instead of the valid form of people-led democratic intervention that it is, radicals have become further marginalized by mainstream media, charity-based human service providers, and post-modern/ post-structural academically-based discourse that too easily turns us against each other instead of against the system that oppresses us all. In a world where human rights legislation in Canada enables white people to charge people of color with hate crimes, human rights advocates are clearly too scared to risk alienating the masses of "high society" in the interests of a social justice movement that ameliorates oppression itself - the actual cause of all these inequities in human and civil rights:

Liberals in their meetings utter bold worlds; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement which has tremendous implications, but only if read between the lines. They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit. The Radical does not sit frozen by cold objectivity. He sees injustice and strikes at it with hot passion. She is a person of decision and action. Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. (Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals)

Activism as a whole has been de-radicalized to be more palatable to the people, especially in Western society. Those of us who are radicals have been marginalized by this modern, neoliberal current of advocacy. But, "disabled people have fought back. We have locked down. We have occupied. We have marched. We have organized. We have won battles. And we can keep fighting until we get what we need." (If I Can't Dance Is It Still My Revolution?)

But who actually knows about our amazing contributions to human rights and anti-oppressive activism in Canada? Whether or not the mainstream embraces our activism we can still forge solidarity around it, as an integral part of our continued, collective liberation from disablism, class warfare, medical/ bioethical experimentation, and other forms of oppression we are also up against.

Have you made a spectacular spectacle of yourself in the interests of disability politics? 

We hope so!

We are seeking radical disability rights activists who engage in direct social action that advances the civil and human rights of impaired people to live free from oppression. We invite you to contribute to our on-line portal of radical disabled activism, called High Society:  Daring Acts of Defiance by Disabled Radicals.

You have stories to tell. We want to help share them with the world. We'll pay you. And credit you appropriately. We won't even try to own or steal your intellectual property if you choose to submit it. You can do so by emailing us a brief description of your untold stories of radical disability activism! Then we'll take it from there. NOTE:  The deadline to get all these stories ready to launch is November 15. So we need to hear from you well in advance of that. The launch will happen nationally on December 10. You can be part of it too. We'd like that. It's time we connected. It's long over-due, in fact.

(d) Balancing Acts Archive
We are archiving the multitude of our contributions to the Disability Arts and Culture Movement at www.balancing-acts.org. It too will be launched in December. December 10, to be exact.

(e) A Wider Reach
We have also been given terrific opportunity to reach a wider audience with much needed information about our specific Disability Arts practice. Dr. Kirsty Johnson has included a chapter and some comparative analyses of Stage Left's Dis Arts work in her new book, Perform/abilities: Disability Theatre in English Canada.

Drs. Nancy Hansen and Roy Hanes have invited Stage Left Associate Artist, Alan Shain, and our Artistic Director, Michele Decottignies, to contribute an article on our Disability Arts practice, examining our co-production, Time To Put My Socks On, as a representative example of DisArts in function and in form. Their book is called Untold Stories:  Disability History in Canada.

We have also finally acquiesced to the pressure to make use of social media to connect with our many stakeholders. This, however, is much to our chagrin over the privacy and intellectual property rights violations that run rampant throughout these monopolized and insidious "tools", and over the ridiculous emulation of mass cultural popularity as a driving force of "social interaction" that primarily happens through electronic devises. SIGH. We will nevertheless soon be creating Facebook pages and YouTube channels for all of our continuing projects (and putting statements of reluctance on them all the while). But you will NOT find us on twitter. We prefer to receive our tweets directly from the birds who make them in nature.

Less reluctantly, however, we are also putting up blogs for our continuing projects. We have come to appreciate that blogs are affording many Others an opportunity to make personal and political connections with other Others who have been so marginalized from each other. These kinds of connections actually save lives and energize political movements, so we'll take them where we can get them. Plus, for those of us who can't or won't access the academy, blogs are proving a way for us to disseminate our own knowledge - without hegemonic approval or interference! But we still believe that ACTIONS speak louder than BLOGS. So we will for sure continue our direct social action instead of only writing about it.

All of this new media will also be officially launched on December 10, at OtherFest.

(3) A new presenting modality
In lieu of Balancing Acts, Stage Left has now devised a new presenting event, called OtherFest. OtherFest is intersectional and intercultural, it makes use of new media in artist presentation, and it is decidedly grassroots/ DIY - all in the context of creative approaches to radical socio-political revolution.

OtherFest:  Art. Identity. Interrogation.
Where Art and Social Justice Collide

OtherFest promotes intersectional and intercultural solidarity through radical art that disrupts the status quo in everyday life - individually, collectively, and systemically. OtherFest is a fearless celebration of radical counter-cultures and a forum for revolutionary art that unites us against inequity and oppression. OtherFest provides an audacious platform for artist/activists who advance the connections between art, culture, social life, and political change. OtherFest showcases progressive experiences of the socially outcast, offering creative resistance to a mass culture of capitalist coercion, corporate consumption, and compulsory conformity.

"No act of dissent can stand so strong as that which counts the musicians, writers, painters, dancers, actors, and performance artists within its ranks." (Dissent Arts Festival) 

OtherFest:  Art by Others. Not just about Others.
Because the personal is political, and art is a weapon of social change.

(4) On-line Engagement
In keeping with the integration of new media into our production and presenting modalities, we are making better use of on-line engagement in representing and disseminating our work. Apart from the work detailed above, we are also launching a new website for our co-production with Associate Artist Alan Shain, called Time To Put My Socks On, as well as the long-overdue revised and revamped Stage Left website. These sites will be officially launched at OtherFest in December.

(5) Community Engagement
We continue our successful partnership with Action for Healthy Communities (AHC) in Edmonton. AHC has again invited Stage Left to support some of their programming with diverse community groups. We are using Theatre of the Oppressed, and other Popular Theatre tools, in their Youth Skills, Youth Jobs employment program, to provide psycho-socio-political intervention against employment barriers for disparate youth. And we are also using the Stage Left model to support immigrant and refugee youth in AHC partner schools to form intercultural connections and peer supports.

We are continuing our work as a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), by making regional, national, and international connections to, and forging solidarity with, other radical jokers – artist/ activists who are personally and politically tied to the work instead of only professionally, those who work with others instead of for them, and who know the difference between oppression and hurt feelings...  other Others who also working to return TO to its roots as a tool of liberation in the amelioration of oppression itself.

(6) It takes a community to raise a social justice movement
We've had the good fortune to solidify our relationships with some pretty terrific artists, with whom we are currently in the process of expanding and solidifying the Stage Left team:

Erin Majestic Legay is a working-class genderqueer who creates radical, reflexive, and transformational relationships with her body, herself, and her ‘communities' - in ways that are aesthetically bad ass and revolutionary! Erin joined our creation team earlier this year, and played the lead character, Jess, in The Hate Show.

Christopher Dovey is a long-standing cultural worker, active in the Alberta New Democrats, labor organizing, and anti-oppressive activism in general. He's also one of the few in Calgary who refuse to own or even use a car! Chris has worked with Stage Left for several years now, in many of our adapted Forum Theatre performances. He's now also taken on a role on our Board of Directors as well as providing producing support around OtherFest.

Nicole Dunbar, Stage Left's former Associate Artistic Director, returned to Stage Left this spring to work with us on The Hate Show - as both a co-creator and an actor.

Alan Shain, Stage Left's core Associate Artist within our Disability Arts practice, also took on a role in The Hate Show, is working with our Artistic Director on all of our current Disability Arts initiatives, and is co-coordinating the DisArtsCollective with us. Alan is also the co-creator and lead performer in High Art:  Drugs, Disability, and Dastardly Deeds.  

Kerri Mesner, joined us early in 2011, as a Resident Artist. She co-facilitated our Theatre of the Oppressed work in Action for Healthy Community's Youth Skills, Youth Jobs program. Kerri’s work combines queer theology, a body of theological work combining the insights of queer theory with contemporary (and often postmodern) theological thought, with the pedagogical insights of Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed,” as well as other anti-oppressive pedagogies.

Charlene Hellson, is working with us on OtherFest. Charlene is a proud member of the Blackfoot Confederacy, a proud mother of two artistic daughters, and a proud granny to the newest spitfire Hellson to join this world. Charlene is involved with her community personally, professionally, and artistically - promoting awareness, understanding and healing.

Richard Meetsma, who takes care of all of our on-line outreach and engagement, is hard at work on all of the websites and other on-line tools we are about to launch in December.

(7) Stage Left does it again!
Congratulations to our founder and Artistic Director, Michele Decottignies. Michele was the recipient of a 2011 Mount Royal University Legacy Award, given to an alumni for excellence in Arts and Culture.

2. Some things we're finally finished working on

(1) Performance Creation
The Hate Show was commissioned by Kate Newby, for the 25th Calgary International Children’s Festival that ran in May. The Hate Show combined all of Stage Left's different artistic practices into one interactive, intercultural performance that challenged Calgarians to engage in critical discussions about hate. This commission enabled us to figure out how to merge all of our culturally-specific production modes (Performance Creation, Artist-Community Collaboration, Theatre of the Oppressed, specifically Invisible and Forum Theatre, Political Theatre, and Documentary Theatre) with new media into a single interdisciplinary production. The creation process was certainly more successful than the execution of it! But we learned a lot about the integrity of our model and about the impact of "the system" on innovative artistic expression. We forged some serious solidarity with diverse and marginalized community groups in the city. We connected with some terrific performing and production artists in Calgary. And we stimulated critical dialogue about issues that have been silenced for far too long. Here is some feedback from community members:

"The Hate Show is a masterpiece, this is the most avant-garde think I've ever heard of happening in Calgary, it's genius, it's smart, it's hilarious, and whoever wrote it should win some kind of prize. I love it." (Zachery Volpe, guest artist in one of The Hate Show's Invisible Theatre scenes)

"As a performing artist working within the Disability Arts aesthetic, it was a gift to be able to simply play my life, through a politically savvy scene around me simply needing to use the toilet in a public building. It was refreshing to be able to move beyond the audience's need for autobiography and socio-political explanation." (Alan Shain, lead artist in one of The Hate Show's narrative scenes)

“Thought provoking, interesting, heart wrenching!” (anonymous audience feedback)

“It made me squirm, in really important ways.” (anonymous audience feedback)

“Stimulating, bloody, and hope inspiring. It reassures me that Calgary has this underground army of cool people who work really hard to make Calgary awesome.” (anonymous audience feedback)

Apart from The Hate Show, our Performance Creation work also immersed us in a project with youth and adults with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI), our Arts Access Initiative, which was supported by the Alberta Paraplegic Foundation's Solution's Fund. Together, we developed an original creation, called Access Denied, about barriers to social inclusion for those with SCI.

(2) Community engagement
Through the Arts Access Imitative, was also ran a Transitions program that introduced arts-based self-advocacy to youth with SCI through Forum Theatre engagement, conducted a performance laboratory to examine the ways in which Theatre of the Oppressed can be adapted for individuals with SCI, in ways that ensure that the work is both fully accessible and still meaningful, and we offered accessibility audits to professional performance companies.

We ran a private Applied Arts Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) training this year, instead of the open registration workshop we normally run each summer. This choice was to provide more focused mentorship in TO engagement to those artists, activists, and community organizations we've been partners with for many years. This training, while purposefully exclusionary, enabled us to create less dependency on Stage Left's artists as more and more of our community partners initiate TO projects of their own.

We completed all of our work on our Improving Alberta's Handicap (IAH) project. IAH promoted equality for disabled people on individual and institutional levels by advancing the Social Model of Disability and integrating it into disability service provision. IAH used 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.

We ran two installments of our new workshop series, called Beyond Tolerance. Beyond Tolerance workshops immerse cultural workers, community organizers, artists, activists, human service providers, educators, scholars, researchers, and health care practitioners in adapted Theatre of the Oppressed explorations that attend to intersectional identity and intercultural solidarity. Beyond Tolerance is built off of the work we've experienced with Marc Weinblatt and Cheryl Harrison of The Mandala Centre for Change – both are pioneers in the development of Theatre of the Oppressor methods.

We also tested out our devised use of Cops in the Head and Rainbow of Desire as a means of examining the impacts of our own privilege within the service we provide to those who are oppressed. University of Calgary Social Work Professors Rachael Crowder and Linda Fehr invited us to their U of L campus to immerse some BSW learners in applications of the arts in Structural and Clinical Social Work.

We supported Associate Artist, Alan Shain, in performing his original solo-performance, Still Waiting For That Special Bus, in Brooks, Alberta as part of the Newell Community Action Group’s 30th Anniversary Gala.

Stage Left Associate Artist, Jan Derbyshire, was invited to perform Funny in the Head in Dublin's Gay International Theatre Festival in May, where she kicked ass! Funny in the Head wowed audiences and got Jan nominated for two Festival awards:  The Oscar Wilde Award for Best New Writing and The Doric Wilson Intercultural Dialogue Award.

We had some opportunity to support some work in the Bow Valley. Our Artistic Director provided technical support to artsPeak, a festival of local artists, in June. She was also invited to sit on the Town of Canmore's Arts Centre Taskforce. Now we are collaborating with local artist, Ric Proctor and the Canmore Creation Collective, on the development of an original play about the history of Canmore's Opera House - and all it represents within the Bow Valley (and Calgary too, since the original Canmore Opera House is now in Calgary's Heritage Park!).