It’s a Calling

I had a personal inclination towards wanting to feel a part of communities that are helping and caring. As I grew with theatre skills, I realized theatre can be a tool for social change.

It’s been a little more than 10 years that I’ve been at Inside Out, and the company has grown in really wild and amazing ways. There’s been a lot of growing up for ourselves and investing in developing deaf and disabled artists who are often shut out of traditional theatre training programs or systems for developing artists. We really had to fight to be seen as professional. It’s not charitable for you to come and see our shows; we’re doing excellent work. Part of that was finding other professional theatre companies to partner with and kind of getting some of their credibility. It goes both ways.

Around 2017, theatre companies across Canada were suddenly like, “We should make our work accessible.” We started our Good Host program, offering ASL interpretation, described audio for blind audience members and relaxed viewings for people with sensory issues or autism to theatre companies across the city. We’re making theatregoing more accessible to all these different Calgarians who didn’t have this opportunity before. It’s also a way for us to say to our theatre community, “We have some expertise here, and we are able to provide that for you.” We’re a valuable fixture of our theatre community now.

Our new venue, The Erratics Indie Arts Club, is both a space for us and a home base for indie and emerging theatre companies in Calgary. Through COVID and other things, we’ve lost some of the smaller spaces that indie companies worked out of, so we want to explicitly dedicate this space to that subset of the community.