Stage Left Productions is strongly committed to educating others on how to use the arts to affect personal and social transformation, and to foster social justice. To this end, we facilitate and/or host a large number of workshops and projects that provide skilled instruction in specific artistic disciplines and/or that integrate the arts into community and social justice practices. In all cases, we offer our work on a sliding scale - even for free, for good reason and out of true necessity, or on a barter system. We feel it's our responsibility, as social justice advocates, to work against the corporate capitalist system by not letting a lack of funding prevent critical change processes from moving forward. For more information on any of our training opportunities, please email us.

We have four main training programs:

(1) Applied Arts Theatre of the Oppressed Training
We offer an annual, week-long immersion in Theatre of the Oppressed practices, for all levels of experience, as a means of learning to use the arts as an effective community engagement and social justice tool. To this end, Applied Arts offers both theoretical exploration and practical immersion in all Theatre of the Oppressed methods, but with a particular focus on Image and Forum Theatre and in the context of effective community organizing. We also offer Applied Arts workshops throughout the year at the invitation of community partners. Please visit our Current Work page for information on the Applied Arts workshops we are running at any given time in any given place!

(2) The ActiveArts Program for People with Disabilities
ActiveArts provides comprehensive theatre education and production/performance opportunities to disabled communities and artists each year. ActiveArts has both community art and professional art streams. Community art participants are supported in using the arts as a means of self-advocacy and to strengthen the skills necessary for meaningful community inclusion, in practicing the ability to articulate and advocate social concerns, and in sharing personal experiences with the larger community through creative outlets. ActiveArts also offers support to professional disabled artists in advancing their careers. We provide disabled artists and arts organizations with mentorship/ apprenticeship and professional development support around adapted performance disciplines, adapted performance methodologies, playwrighting, production, dissemination, multi and interdisciplinary practice, organizational development, fund development, and marketing/promotion. We also advocate nationally for recognition of disability arts as a distinct artistic practice that is about far more than gaining access to Canada's traditional arts ecology or normalizing the difference of disability.

Our ActiveArts Youth Program is called Transitions. 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. In 2010, Transitions has two components: (a) a continued partnership with the Autism Aspergers Friendship Society and (b) a new initiative for youth with Spinal Cord Injury, made possible through the Alberta SCI Active Living fund from the Alberta Paralegic Association.

(3) Arts in Action for Diverse Communities
We offer programming for diverse community groups in a broad range of community arts methods and professional arts disciplines. These workshops and/or projects satisfy the specific interests of the communities requesting them. They are effective in supporting diverse communities to discover how they are best able to mitigate challenging personal and interpersonal concerns, and to engage in individual, social, and structural change processes. Our goal in all Arts in Action projects is to transfer our learned knowledge to the community we are in service to and to work with them to learn how to adapt what we do to their specific cultural practices (rather than insisting, through cultural imposition, that they adapt their traditions to our work).

Arts in Action has thus far successfully supported the social justice goals of many diverse community groups by providing experiential exploration of exceptionally difficult issues and creative immersion in radical change processes. Explorations have included healing from sexual, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and/or physical abuse and other forms of violence; living with the legacy of historical trauma, colonization, and disenfranchisement; managing the personal and social stressors of refugee, immigration, and integration processes; challenging discrimination/ oppression in all its manifestations on both individual AND structural levels (classism, racism, sexism, LGBTTIQ-phobias, disableism, ageism, etc.); overcoming internalized oppression; and so on.

Arts in Action has also proven a highly successful model for the development of creative cultural capacity tools, for human rights education, and for meaningful community engagement.

(4) Arts-Based Grassroots Community Research
As part of our continued learning and development, we are continually engaged in research processes that address specific applications of community and professional arts practices.

Our community arts exploration is currently focused on adapting Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) methods for use with people with developmental or intellectual impairment, with physical impairment, and with mental health considerations; how to successfully use actors in TO without alienating or silencing the community being served; attentiveness to cultural ethics in TO practice; and why TO has moved so far from its roots in North American/Western applications. In other words, we are deeply concerned with discovering, with the support of diverse community groups, the unique ways to bring the work to the community in meaningful ways rather than make the community come to the work in ways that negate their differences or make meaningful engagement impossible.

Our current professsional arts research is focused on figuring out how to modify traditional arts practices in ways that fully integrate unique cultural approaches. In this, we are developing and/or documenting new modes of artistic production for diverse professional artists who do not want to assimilate into the mainsteam or normalize their difference in society.

These investigations are extensive, long-term processes and we're writing up our discoveries as we can (and in-between the huge volume of programs that we run each year). Our goal is to ultimately create "manuals" in each research area and disseminate them throughout the international Theatre of the Oppressed/community arts, professional arts, and social justice networks.

In all of this, we make a distinction between what we refer to as "earned knowledge" and "learned knowledge". Earned knowledge is what we carry with us through a life time of personal experience with dominant and entrenched individual, cultural, and social paradigms. "Learned knowledge" is what too few of us have the privilege to gain access to through traditional academic education. Both serve specific purposes, but we feel that, way too often, learned knowledge is used to silence or "trump" earned knowledge.