Stage Left Productions
Stage Left Productions is an interdisciplinary performance company dedicated to collaborative arts forms, community theatre practices, Disability art, and social activism. Self-described as “a grassroots, Popular Theatre company of diverse artists and non-artists/catalysts of change who create pathways to systemic equity – in and through the arts,” Stage Left’s activities “promote equity & diversity, provide support services for still-excluded artists and community groups, and produce radical forms of Political Art.” Based in Canmore, Alberta, the company is active in Calgary, as well as provincially, nationally, and internationally. Stage Left’s output is intercultural and multifaceted, encompassing Guerrilla theatre actions, production, presenting, training, education, advocacy, and organizational support work.
Company Origins
Stage Left was established in 1999 by a group of individuals including Michele Decottignies, a lesbian activist-artist with mental and physical disabilities who serves as the current Artistic Director. Decottignies has a BFA and is a graduate of Technical Theatre Arts Program at Calgary’s Mount Royal College. Interested in “changing the world by creating community through performance,” Decottignies founded a theatre company and adopted Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, which became a cornerstone of the company’s practice. With its various productions, Stage Left has forged a distinctive aesthetic described by scholar Kirsty Johnston as “a combination of Popular Theatre genres, Political drama, Documentary theatre, Performance Creation, Digital media and New media art, Interdisciplinarity Production, and Artist-Community Collaboration with anti-oppressive, arts-based change processes.”Stage Left incorporated as a Nonprofit organization in 2003. In its early years, the company operated primarily through project grants and working collaborations/partnerships, which in turn influenced and shaped funding opportunities. Decottignies explains the approach in a 2010 interview: “We identify programming needs from long-standing and continued engagement with specific communities. We work with our partners to figure out how best to offer programming that may meet those needs. We apply for funding to support that programming.” In 2012, the Canada Council for the Arts “officially recognized the arts and disability sector as a new field of exploration,” and Stage Left started receiving multi-year operational funding to help support and sustain its activities. By that time, the theatre had become “Calgary’s most accomplished performance company engaging exclusively in artist-community collaboration and in professional production with marginalized artists.
Theatre of the Oppressed
Augusto Boal’s popular theatre techniques are an important aspect and hallmark of Stage Left’s activities, from the company’s inception through to the present day. In 2005 the organization was officially endorsed by Boal as an International Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed in Canada. Taking theatre to the people, Stage Left often collaborates with historically-marginalized groups, such as Indigenous Nations; people of colour; folks with mental and physical disabilities; LGBTTTIQ+; and at-risk youth. As Decottignies explains in a 2005 profile article, Stage Left’s mandate is to craft a “professional artist-community collaboration” performance model that will “integrate marginalized people into the creative, artistic, and social life of community by providing safe and accessible space in which they can explore, define, and celebrate their culture; develop confidence, imagination, and artistic expression; contribute to the culture of community in meaningful ways; and express both individual and collective identity.” Moreover, the company uses “the arts to enable marginalized people to establish a visible presence in the larger community, increasing awareness of specific issues and fostering an appreciation of diverse cultures through the presentation of authentic, dynamic, and non-sentimental images of personal experience.”By the early 2000s, Stage Left was facilitating different streams of activity grounded in Theatre of the Oppressed and other popular and political theatre practices, such as Active Arts for people with disabilities and Acting Out for LGBTTTIQ+ youth. Engagement with First Nations communities has always been central as well, as demonstrated by a 2004/05 joint initiative with Dr. Lindsay Crowshoe intended to improve doctor training and cultural competency for Aboriginal healthcare. The Medical Education journal reports that Forum Theatre was utilized for first-year students “to connect mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally with the content and begin to develop an appropriate approach towards interacting with Aboriginal patients.” Forum Theatre is an interactive technique in which various problematic scenarios are played out on stage, facilitated by a ‘joker’ or emcee figure who encourages audience members to stop the action on stage, replay it, and insert themselves into the scene in an attempt to find an acceptable resolution for the issue at hand. Three “real-life” scenarios were developed as part of this “comprehensive curriculum project,” which was designed to place “human relationship and understanding at the heart” of medical training, and to “address both a gap in Aboriginal health and a gap in student understanding in Aboriginal and medical cultures. The medical students found Forum Theatre to be “a very effective way of engaging the class in conflict resolution strategies,” and as Crowshoe notes, it is a useful way “to strip away the layers of prejudice and political correctness and start getting at the real issues and truly begin opening up dialogue.” Implementing Forum Theatre practices for medical training is “ground breaking” work, ensuring that Indigenous health issues and curricula are not “an addendum to mainstream medical education,” but rather incorporated “as an integral part of medical education."
The efficacy of this work is evident in the ongoing relationship of Stage Left and Dr. Crowshoe, who have continued to partner on various projects over time. In 2018, the University of Calgary’s Indigenous, Local, and Global Health Office partnered with Stage Left and a team of doctors, including Dr. Lindsay Crowshoe, on a knowledge exchange platform aimed at enhancing “Indigenous youth capacity to understand, articulate, and address toxic stress as well as to influence policy and services affecting their wellness.” Entitled Interrupting Toxic Stress in Indigenous Youth: A Social Congress for Indigenous Health, Stage Left and Dr. Crowshoe once again utilized Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to engage Indigenous youth, and “to invite civil society partners to become more aware, engaged, and networked in identifying options available to prevent and mitigate toxic stress impacting Indigenous youth and communities.”
In addition to educational training, Stage Left uses Theatre of the Oppressed for different kinds of advocacy work. In 2006, the company partnered with the Autism Aspergers Friendship Society to create a Forum Theatre piece involving youth with disabilities, many of them on the Autism spectrum, that was performed at Stage Left’s Disability Arts Festival. The presentation is described as “a brief skit that brought the audience a sense of what it would be like to be a high school student living with the challenges of a disability. The skit highlighted what it would be like to be "different"; the frustration of having learning challenges, the anxiety of dealing with issues of peer acceptance and bullying, and struggles with special needs assistants and teachers who, at times, do not understand.” Audience members were able to stop to the play and insert themselves into the action to find alternate solutions to the problems presented. As one witness remarked, “What was most remarkable with the performance that night was the engagement of the audience. Some of the audience members who joined on stage, themselves had a disability. The play fostered a profound sense of empathy and understanding, while empowered many with ideas on how to cope with a disability themselves, or how to make life better for a disabled person in our community." Moving beyond the usual theatrical paradigms, this groundbreaking work of Stage Left’s created theatre by and for people with disabilities.
That same year, the company was also commissioned by the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation to work with immigrant populations “in rural areas of Alberta in international development issues and global citizenship.” Stage Left created We Are Global Citizens!, a Forum Theatre piece that provided “a safe space for individuals to share, discuss, and learn about the concept of global citizenship and to examine the impact of their own actions on our global community.” The ACGC’s Art Aware! conference kicked off with a performance of the piece, and Stage Left wrapped up the event with a Popular Theatre workshop about arts-based community development. Forging new collaborations, the conference also included a “Painting Our Change” mural workshop, the final products of which toured to high schools as an art exhibit along with subsequent productions of We Are Global Citizens!, presented in Edmonton, Smoky Lake, Fort McMurray, Jasper, Brooks, High River, Three Hills, Kathryn, Sundre, and Rosebud. This “interactive” play was “extremely well-received” and “proved to be a highly effective tool of public engagement for the Council.”
While Stage Left does not consider itself a TYA company, it frequently works with youth, as evidenced by the high school tour of We Are Global Citizens!, and other productions, such as The Hate Show, an original piece presented at the Calgary International Children’s Festival in May 2011. That play was an intercultural work exploring “how a group of diverse urban teenagers – dis-abled, queer, Muslim, Aboriginal or poor – are forming their identities while trying to fit in with their peers.”
Moving beyond Alberta’s borders, Stage Left has also formed national and international partnerships based on its Theatre of the Oppressed work. The most far-reaching of these was a 2016 Arts exCHANGE Project involving “cross-continental collaboration” between Stage Left and Australia’s Third Way Theatre. The two groups teamed up to offer “equity intervention training” intensives delivered via “embodied learning.”
Theatre of the Oppressed rarely occurs in designated theatre spaces, so it often goes unreviewed and undocumented, and thus, it is worth noting that a company such as Stage Left has collaborated and engaged with thousands of people through its projects over time, far more than a regular theatre company of comparable size.