Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Stage Left Productions
Stage Left Productions is an interdisciplinary performance company dedicated to collaborative arts forms, community theatre practices, disability art, and social activism. Based in Canmore, Alberta, Stage Left is led by Michele Decottignies, who co-founded the company in 1999. Incorporated as a non-profit in 2003, Stage Left’s output is multifaceted and includes production, presentation, education, advocacy, and organizational support work.
Stage Left has a distinctive style that fuses popular theatre (e.g., Agit-Prop, Guerilla Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed), multimedia, and verbatim techniques within an intercultural, anti-oppression, anti-racist, and decolonizing framework (Johnston 31). Mercy Killing or Murder: The Tracy Latimer Story (2003), based on the 1993 real-life pre-meditated murder of 13-year-old Tracy Latimer, is a germinal and critically acclaimed work that centres people with disabilities and innovated disability aesthetics (Johnston 31, 173). Stage Left has created more than thirty original digital projects and twenty Epic theatre productions, including Notwithstanding: 100 Years of Eugenics in Alberta (2005); Same Difference (2008); Women’s Work, four tenth anniversary shows (2013); and Le Crip Bleu (2019). Stage Left also presented Balancing Acts (2002 - 2009), a multidisciplinary arts festival by and about people with disabilities. Featuring international and homegrown work (some commissioned, as with JD Derbyshire’s Funny in the Head and Alan Shain’s Time to Put My Socks On), the festival involved more than 1200 artists and was the longest-running event of its kind, establishing Stage Left as “Canada’s leading contributor to the global Disability Arts and Culture Movement” (Johnston 29).
Stage Left is an International Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed, utilizing Forum Theatre with historically marginalized communities and non-profit organizations to create change (e.g., the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation, engaging rural Albertans in international development; the Autism Aspergers Friendship Society, providing a platform for people with disabilities; and the University of Calgary’s Medicine Department, improving doctors’ cultural competency around Indigenous health). Stage Left also engages in capacity building and organizational support for equity, diversity, and inclusion. The company has presented hundreds of equity workshops; it established the Deaf, Disability and Mad Arts Alliance of Canada, “a collective of long-established, disability-identified artists who came together in 2012 (Decottignies);” and it founded the Calgary Congress for Equity and Diversity in the Arts in 2015 to establish arts equity as a core value in Calgary’s arts scene.
During the pandemic years (2020-22), Stage Left co-produced The KIT Podcast, “an Indigenous-oriented audio/visual podcast showcasing stories and strategies for maintaining wellness in a post-pandemic world.” In 2023, the company celebrated twenty years and programmed a retrospective entitled Step Right Up! Presented digitally, the conference commemorated Canadian disability arts “firsts,” and included presenters Lyle Victor Albert, Rachel da Silveira Gorman, Ruth Stackhouse, and more. The closing CripTeases Cabaret featured live solo performances and a presentation of Alain Shain and Karine Rathle’s Closet Freaks. Currently, Stage Left is working on Interrupting Toxic Stress, an Indigenous youth knowledge exchange platform, and Metaxis, a Legislative Theatre Assembly for Truth and Reconciliation.
Sources:
Calgary Congress for Equity & Diversity in the Arts. “Welcome.” February 24, 2024. http://cceda.weebly.com
Decottignies, Michele. “Disability Arts and Equity in Canada.” Canadian Theatre Review 165 (2016): 43 - 47.
Johnston, Kirsty. Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.
Stage Left Productions. Website. February 24 2023. https://stageleftists.weebly.com
Step Right Up!. Website. February 17, 2024. https://steprightup.weebly.com
The KIT (Keeping It Together) Podcast. Website. The University of Calgary. February 24, 2024. https://www.kitpodcast.ca
Written by Rebecca Burton
Last updated 2024-02-28
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