Revolutionary Play

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, cultural, 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/ trade/ exchange system. We feel it's our responsibility, as social justice advocates and especially as a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed, to work against the corporate capitalist system by not letting a lack of funding prevent critical change processes from moving forward.

Our Revolutionary Play workshops and initiatives have included arts-based explorations of 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, disablism, ageism, etc.); overcoming internalized oppression; and so on. Our workshops have also proven a highly successful model for the development of creative cultural capacity tools, for human rights education, and for meaningful community engagement around critical social justice issues.

Please note that we no longer run open-registration classes as part of our ActiveArts Program for People with Disabilities. Our current focus is instead on professional development and arts training for emerging and established marginalized artists, arts-based anti-oppressive activist training, and continued advocacy through artist-led community research labs, papers, and presentations. We therefore now have five main training initiatives, under the rubric of our consolidated training programs that we call Playbooks:

(1) Applied Arts
We continue to 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, in a variety of other cities and even countries. Please note, however, that we ONLY work in communities outside of our own region/ country at the request of, and in partnership with, that community - by invitation rather than invasion!

(2) Beyond Tolerance
Beyond Tolerance workshops support the social justice goals of many diverse community groups, from the inside out, by providing a creative forum for respectful, experiential exploration of exceptionally difficult social issues and immersion in radical change processes. The primary focus of Beyond Tolerance is on using Theatre of the Oppressed to examine intersectionality and identity politics, to interrogate shifting points of privilege and oppression, and to forge intercultural solidarity against oppression as a whole.

Yet, Beyond Tolerance does not minimize the impact of Otherness, nor negate the complexities of identity formation and intersectionality. Beyond Tolerance focuses on how oppression divides us against each Other AND it focuses on how humanity binds us to each Other, and all living things, as an interdependent whole. Acknowledging, striving to understand, and daring to name the ways that we all perpetuate various forms of oppression in activist and human service spaces, plus choosing to be responsible when we can be and accountable when we can't (yet) be, is an integral focus of Stage Left's arts-based, anti-oppressive practice.

(3) Bridging the Gaps
Bridging the Gaps is our newly formalized mentorship and apprenticeship program for marginalized artists and arts organizations. Through this program, we provide short-term mentorship and long-term informal apprenticeship in creation, development, production, presenting, dissemination, administration, fund and organizational development, marketing and promotion, and so on. This program is intended to fill the gaps between formal, but inaccessible, arts training schools/ programs and necessary professionalization processes for marginalized artists. In all of this work, we strive relentlessly for culturally-respectful methods and accommodations in all approaches to artistic engagement.

(4) Collective Knowledge
As part of our ongoing learning and development, we are continually engaged in community-based research processes – instead of hegemonic, academic research processes.

Our research is currently focused on finding more ways to adapt Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) methods for use with people with developmental, intellectual, physical, sensory, or neurological impairment; 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 and their/ our collective knowledge, 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 our differences, that inadvertently perpetuate oppressive paradigms, and that make meaningful cross-cultural engagement impossible.

Our current professional arts research is focused on figuring out how to modify traditional arts practices in ways that fully integrate and represent 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, highly collaborative processes. We disseminate our discoveries as we can (in-between the huge volume of programs that we run each year). Our goal is to ultimately create community-based "manuals" of sorts 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 "collective knowledge" and "learned knowledge". Collective knowledge is what we earn through a life time of personal experience with embedded hegemonic individually, socially, and structurally oppressive paradigms. "Learned knowledge" is what too few of us have the privilege to gain access to through traditional "higher learning" within the academy. Both serve specific purposes, but we strongly believe that, way too often, learned knowledge silences, invisiblizes, and/or "trumps" collective knowledge.

(5) The ActiveArts Program for People with Disabilities
As noted above, we no longer run open-registration classes as part of our ActiveArts Program. We do, however, continue to provide Transitions programming to disability service providers who want to introduce arts-based self-advocacy to their youth members. In Transitions, youth with disabilities learn to use performance modalities to speak for themselves, to address concerns in their lives, and to advocate for their rights as members of society. We also continue to provide disabled artists with professional development mentorship and support, within our Bridging the Gaps program detailed above. We also continue to advocate nationally for recognition of Disability Arts as a distinct artistic practice that is about far more than gaining access to Canada's contemporary arts ecology or normalizing the difference of disability.

For more information on any of our training programming, please email us.