Connecting & Outreach
The Creatus Project featured at The Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2025 Conference
Theatre Agora (Regina, CAN)
This spring, Dr. Julia Henderson was invited to speak on “Active Access Design for Senior Artists” in theatre and our work with The Creatus Project.
CATR 2025
On Interiority: Staging the Liminal.
More information: www.theatreagora.ca/catr-conference-2025
May 26th – 27th 2025
Theatre Agora (Regina, CAN)
The theme of this year’s conference invites us to think about interiority in all its facets, from the personal to the geopolitical and everything in between. We’re not the first to live in challenging times. In an age of hostility, which targets the most vulnerable among us, we have to reckon with the limitations of just empathy.
The conference provokes us to think about the thresholds that shape our experiences and inform our identities, whether political designations of domestic and foreign, relationships of the self to others, or deeply personal negotiations between psychic and emotional interiority and the ways we exteriorize these inner lives on the materiality of our bodies.
Ageing in the Performing Arts Test Kitchen: A Performance
Analysis of Anti-Ageist Active Access Designs
Presented by Dr. Julia Henderson (The Creatus Project & UBC)
The number and quality of opportunities for theatre professionals (performers, directors, stage managers, designers etc.) diminishes as they age, limiting their opportunities for creative expression, their ability to sustain an active and meaningful career, and their opportunities for income and associated benefits such as extended health care coverage. Professionals with disabilities can likewise encounter barriers to access and participation. The intersection of ageism and ableism is still an emerging area of study.
The Creatus Project developed the community-engaged, Canada Council-funded intergenerational Creatus Project to explore these issues, holding that creative approaches have the potential to challenge existing ageist and ableist structures and practices, and open up opportunities for old(er) professionals and performers living with disabilities, and to create intergenerational connections which have the potential to shift the industry over time. This paper represents a performance analysis of a public sharing event devised by the Creatus Project’s Playwriting and Creation working group. “Ageing in the Performing Arts Test Kitchen” was presented at Vancouver’s Performing Arts Lodge.
Using observations of the production, audience feedback, and participant brief reflections, we analyse how the performance employed creative accessibility strategies (including virtual participation), and shared content about ageism, ableism, and potential creative solutions related to design, directing, rehearsing and production, playwriting and devising, and institutional structures within the industry (e.g. unions, grant structures).
We argue that the performance highlighted key issues related to the little-studied intersections of ageism and ableism in theatre, furthered practices of accessibility and inclusion, and foregrounded the importance of intergenerational approaches.