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2024/25 REPORT TO THE COMMUNITY
Overdue communications At long last, here's an update for Stage Left's broader community; esp. those signed up for DDMAAC communications. We're an analogue company in a digital age. But that sure doesn't make us any less potent; just less included. An important distinction We remains a disability arts org. But, because we're so deeply immersed in Artist-Community Collaboration with agents of change in the Public Health sector, our approach has shifted away from the art sector's norms of "accessibility" and "inclusion". But we, of course, still attend to all things "EDIA"! An expanded paradigm Except now we're more focused on the disability inequities that exist in the Public Health system, than in the arts sector. Because we're radicals, meaning that we attend to the root causes of oppression – or, in this case, of disablement (aka disability inequity). An institutional platform So we're proud that a core collaborator is currently UCalgary's Cumming School of Medicine (CSM); where our potent Theatre of the Oppressed practice been embraced by faculty, researchers, advocates and the many vulnerable populations they're in service to. We're finally using art to affect personal and social change from both the bottom up and the top down! ADVOCATING FOR INDIGENOUS HEALTH Sharing Community Health Knowledge Our AD and DDMAAC Chair, Michele Decottignies, has been immersing doctors-in-training in Stage Left's arts-based community development practice – and are they ever loving it. We think because it's been shaped by the lived experiences of 30,000+ members of vulnerable populations that we've collaborated with these past 20 years and will be their patients. Taking Action on Truth & Reconciliation From a 20-year collaboration with Dr. Lindsay Crowshoe, Stage Left became a community partner to the CSM's Indigenous, Local & Global Health Office (ILGHO) in 2022, and our (self-taught!) AD is being made an Adjunct Professor in 2025. Her role is to engage allied Health Care professionals in Truth & Reconciliation Calls to Action 18 - 24, through her potent Theatre of the Oppressed practice. Decolonizing Theatre of the Oppressed That partnership is also giving many Indigenous members of our DDMAAC network opportunity to further inform the decolonization of our own Forum Theatre practices. Indigenizing Forum Theatre Practices Through Metaxis: An Arts In Indigenous Health Project, we're next collaborating with Indigenous Youth, Knowledge Keepers and Elders from Treaty 7 Nations to Indigenize that decolonized Forum theatre practice. Five youth interns will co-create Forums on their own reserves, with the purpose of discovering the many ways that Stage Left's Forum theatre process now needs to be adapted to their own community's protocols. All because of an important distinction made by some of our Treaty 8 Nation collaborators, between "dry" and "dried" fish! Out of all of that artist-community collaboration, we're continually being confronted by just how colonial Modern Drama processes and story-telling structures are, and just how deeply Eurocentric the aesthetics of Realism and Naturalism. Sharing Popular Theatre Knowledge So we're drafting an updated Joker's Manual for our international Theatre of the Oppressed colleagues; publishing an academic paper on an Indigenous Psychiatric Forum that Dr. Janet de Groot is leading us on; and are disseminating a précis on The Aesthetics of Social Symbolism. ADVOCATING FOR HEALTH EQUITY Because so much of our artist-community collaboration is with vulnerable populations, the majority of whom are Indigenous and/or racialized, our focus on disability rights has shifted away from "Models of Disability" to "Models of Health Equity". Attending to the Social Determinant of Health So, through DDMAAC, Stage Left will next be promoting a more inclusive framework of "disability" itself, one that centres the Social Determinants of Health instead of identity politics and consequently necessitates a Health Equity focus. Decolonizing Disability We can't wait to share our "Decolonizing Disability Podcast Series: From Disability to Disablement" and our InfoGraphic on Decolonizing Disability. Both are how we're confronting the white supremacy of colonial identity politics while discounting the collective counter-culturalism of disability resistance. Showcasing Non-Normative Aesthetics Out of the live, practice-focused disability theatre symposium we produced in 2023, called Step Right Up, we're next creating a Disability Aesthetics Hub. It's intent is to give inclusive, non-disabled theatre producers access to disability arts knowledge. Because why should we try to fit in when we were born to stand out? |