Past Performances

Around 100 years ago, Nellie McClung joined other Manitoban Women in a Mock Parliament asking the question “should men vote?" Most Albertans and other Canadians know Nellie McClung from after she moved to Alberta and became one of the “famous 5”, the women who challenged the idea that women were not considered persons under the law. Having experienced a different side of this legacy, a young Manitoban questions the common narrative and wonders why the rights of so many marginalized women are still sacrificed in order to promote it.

In 2017, Swallow-a-Bicycle ran a performance incubator called Discomfort Lab, as a way of testing our company's mandate of supporting work which engages in 'productive discomfort'. We gave artists space, money, and time. We endeavoured to hold space for uncomfortable conversations. The overwhelming feedback we got from Calgary's performance community was: YES TO THIS. MORE DISCOMFORT PLEASE.

An X-rated narrative that is part storytelling, part photo-essay, part rope bondage demonstration, How to Self-Suspend is an interactive performance about how trauma shapes the choices we make, and how the choices we make reflect (and can perpetuate) trauma.

Winners and Losers is one part game, one part conversation that leans into our universally flawed human logic, and the desire to win at all costs.

Digital Folk is a video game + costume party + music and dance performance + installation built around the desire to revisit how communities gather to play music, dance and tell stories.

As darkness falls, cSPACE King Edward – a century-old school building – will light up with ten provocative performance and art happenings, transforming into a vibrating hive mind of floating bodies, rigorous discomforts and fearless ideas.

It's been an intense - and, in some ways, disheartening - few months for Calgary's theatre scene. Let's take a breath, take a step back, and talk about it. Calgary Theatre in Flux: a forum about our future is an attempt to zoom out and look at our current situation in context.

A house is built every day outside of the Pumphouse Theatre, and a myriad of homebodies host and entertain inside its walls. Though friendly and chipper, things aren't always smiles and polite talks. Cracked mirrors, scratched-out photos, and other little secrets hide in the cracks of this makeshift sanctuary.

Between November 4, 2015 and February 29, 2016, Canada resettled more than 25,000 Syrian refugees, following the outbreak of civil war. But what if war arrived much closer to home? What if Calgary became a warzone, and we were all forced to flee our homes and become refugees?

At the 2018 IGNITE! Festival of Emerging Artists, Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre's Provocation Series invites artists to escape (or subvert) the theatre, engage the public realm and ask bold questions about art and society!

For one week, Matthew will only consume and create art with water donated by the residents and businesses of Sunalta in Calgary. He will document the process with video and audio recordings. There will be a number of installations around the IGNITE! Festival to showcase the exploration, culminating in a final performance piece titled SOAK.

Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre presents: Wastelands part of the Provocation Series at Sage Theatre's 2018 IGNITE! Festival of Emerging Artists June 5-9, 7:00 pm Meet at West Village Theatre, 2007 10 Ave SW $15 - Buy...