team | lead facilitator. |
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Michele Decottignies
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Michele is a multiple award-winning artist, educator and advocate, with 30 years experience in the professional arts industries. In 2003, after 15 years of working in technical, administrative and artistic roles with major theatre and film companies in Alberta, Michele founded Stage Left Productions to house her daring blend of professional arts production with social justice praxis. She has since made Stage Left a leading contributor to Disability Arts in Canada, a global Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed and a leader in intercultural collaboration, cross-cultural solidarity and arts equity education.
Within the professional arts ecology, Michele has pioneered highly accessible and creative approaches to arts equity education. Her practice is unique: It pays equal attention to the barriers experienced by all equity-seeking communities and attends to inequities embedded in all three spheres of influence (personal, social and structural). She pays particular attention to needed political, cultural and emotional safeties, and her approach goes far beyond those divisive frameworks of "us versus them" – toward cross-cultural solidarity and collective impact.
Through Stage Left's globally-esteemed Theatre of the Oppressed practice, Michele has successfully facilitated over 300 arts equity workshops in Canada, the USA and Australia – for disparate clients ranging from remote First Nations to self-advocates with intellectual disabilities to the Canada Council for the Arts. Her current arts equity work includes attending to the continued evolution of The Deaf, Disability & Mad Arts Alliance of Canada and delivering the support services offered by The Calgary Collective for Equity & Diversity in the Arts. Her most recent arts equity consultating and facilitation includes:
(1) Supporting the development of PACT's national arts equity education program, ALL IN, and facilitating foundational arts equity workshops for their regional cohorts across Canada;
(2) Developing arts equity training workshops, assessment and implementation tools, and sector-wide supports for public arts funders, including Calgary Arts Development, the BC Arts Council, and the Canadian Public Arts Funders (CPAF).
(3) Introducing National Arts Service Organizations (e.g. Canadian Dance Assembly, Opera.ca and Orchestras Canada) to Stage Left's Canadian-specific Arts Equity Framework; and
(4) Collaborating with Drs Lynden (Lindsay) Crowshoe and Cindy Jardine to decolonize Theatre of the Oppressed techniques so as to make them more effective tools of Indigenous Health, Truth & Reconciliation, and collective, community-based recovery from intergenerational and inherited traumas associated with contact and colonization.
As an under-educated, working class, lesbian feminist artist/ activist with several invisible disabilities, Michele's practice is necessarily concerned with the development of artistic and cultural practices that foster rather than negate diversity. Her art work is multi- and inter-disciplinary, collaborative and radical using the arts to challenge dominant social paradigms that render difference invisible and undesirable in society.
Within the professional arts ecology, Michele has pioneered highly accessible and creative approaches to arts equity education. Her practice is unique: It pays equal attention to the barriers experienced by all equity-seeking communities and attends to inequities embedded in all three spheres of influence (personal, social and structural). She pays particular attention to needed political, cultural and emotional safeties, and her approach goes far beyond those divisive frameworks of "us versus them" – toward cross-cultural solidarity and collective impact.
Through Stage Left's globally-esteemed Theatre of the Oppressed practice, Michele has successfully facilitated over 300 arts equity workshops in Canada, the USA and Australia – for disparate clients ranging from remote First Nations to self-advocates with intellectual disabilities to the Canada Council for the Arts. Her current arts equity work includes attending to the continued evolution of The Deaf, Disability & Mad Arts Alliance of Canada and delivering the support services offered by The Calgary Collective for Equity & Diversity in the Arts. Her most recent arts equity consultating and facilitation includes:
(1) Supporting the development of PACT's national arts equity education program, ALL IN, and facilitating foundational arts equity workshops for their regional cohorts across Canada;
(2) Developing arts equity training workshops, assessment and implementation tools, and sector-wide supports for public arts funders, including Calgary Arts Development, the BC Arts Council, and the Canadian Public Arts Funders (CPAF).
(3) Introducing National Arts Service Organizations (e.g. Canadian Dance Assembly, Opera.ca and Orchestras Canada) to Stage Left's Canadian-specific Arts Equity Framework; and
(4) Collaborating with Drs Lynden (Lindsay) Crowshoe and Cindy Jardine to decolonize Theatre of the Oppressed techniques so as to make them more effective tools of Indigenous Health, Truth & Reconciliation, and collective, community-based recovery from intergenerational and inherited traumas associated with contact and colonization.
As an under-educated, working class, lesbian feminist artist/ activist with several invisible disabilities, Michele's practice is necessarily concerned with the development of artistic and cultural practices that foster rather than negate diversity. Her art work is multi- and inter-disciplinary, collaborative and radical using the arts to challenge dominant social paradigms that render difference invisible and undesirable in society.
