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A manipulated image with a woman sitting in the foreground wearing glasses, with her hands held up as if gesturing while speaking. This image is superimposed over the image of a woman extending in a moment of dance.
G.I.G. (the Getting In Group) Photo By Ali Nedjati
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Programs

Program Outline

All specific programs will be promoted with full details through Picasso PRO's homepage.  

Foundation Work: Movement, Voice and Actor Training 

New artforms and genres will be anchored in foundation work to extend and maintain skills, flexibility, strength and experience acquired through prior work. All workshops will include body, movement and voice elements. 

Open Studio Series 

A series of day-long foundation sessions will be offered during summer 2006 with a focus on first-time, youth and emerging artists with disabilities, introducing participants to the basics of stage-based performance in a fully accessible environment. 

Workshops: New Genres and Forms 

Largely untapped in our ventures to date, Picasso PRO will develop workshops around comedy-writing, ‘stand-up/sit-down’ solo performance; clown; chorus singing and live ensemble music. The energy and camaraderie inherent in ensemble and humour-based expression promises to add a welcome layer to dramatic and dance-based work. Skills development in these fields also provides new career options to the participants.

In a sunlit rehearsal space, a man is seated behind a folding table. He gestures to three women standing, facing each other, speaking in an empassioned moment of a scene.

Storytelling Workshop for Deaf Performers, 
"The Tell-Tale Heart", 2004
Left to Right: Anselmo Desousa, Donna Mae McCauley, Kathy Gendron; Keelin Carey 

The Business of Being an Artist 

A number of half-day clinics will be offered to address the philosophical, career and business aspects of the performing arts led by top specialists in the field. All clinics will address their themes in relationship to the access needs and concerns of artists and arts practitioners with disability.

The Directors Series 

This experimental series will expose artists to a diversity of theatrical forms, styles and stagings, script-based and non-traditional, while familiarizing directors with the joys and challenges of working with mixed ability casts. Directors will be chosen for their imaginative, professional, communicative skills and interest in working with disabled and /or Deaf artists. Three directors with distinct approaches to the stage will each have a chance work through a scene with the same ensemble of actors.

Positive Action Apprenticeships

Two artists/arts practitioners each year will be selected to partake in apprenticeships (Positive Action Training) based on the model used in the UK. Each artist/arts professional will be partnered with one or more mentor in a hands-on program leading to professional and vocational advancement. The Project Manager, in consultation with qualified peers, will develop a healthy selection process for selecting the Apprentices. 

‘Dinner For Five’ Series 

This series of radical roundtables based on the successful PBS television series “Dinner for Five” is the brainchild of Kazumi Tsuruoka, performer, and longstanding member of the Toronto disability-arts scene. A series of three roundtables will bring interesting, iconoclastic and passionate individuals from all quarters together over dinner, to discuss topical and provocative issues of the day through the ‘prism’ of disability and culture. One or more dinner may be held in front of an invited audience; all will be documented. 

Web linksA manipulated image with a woman sitting in the foreground wearing glasses, with her hands held up as if gesturing while speaking. This image is superimposed over the image of a woman extending in a moment of dance.

The Picasso PRO web-page and links will be managed by Rose Jacobson in collaboration with Executive Director Sharon Poitras who will act as Liaison for Communications and Marketing between Picasso PRO and regular EST activities. 

Showcase 

In the tradition of EST, a Showcase is the final goal for Year Two of Picasso PRO. It will harness the collective skills and imaginations of many artists from the project, onstage, behind-the-scenes, in publicity and in management. The Showcase will be the only Picasso PRO Presentation with any emphasis on public performance although all workshops and presentations will enjoy an audience by invitation or in some form. 

Foreground: Helen Posno, 
Background: Spirit Synott

Picasso PRO and Equity Showcase Theatre gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation