We are proud to stand with the 35//50 Initiative. We recognize our artistic community has not reflected the wonderfully diverse makeup of Treaty 6’s greater community. Change must come, and we passionately commit to being a part of that change.
Our sincerest thanks to the 35//50 Initiative committee for calling on us, and for providing our community a clear, concise roadmap. Together, we will enact change, measure progress, and better hold each other accountable.
Catch the Keys Productions is an ad-hoc collective voluntarily run by co-Artistic Producers Megan Dart and Beth Dart. Creatively, we are project based and focus on the development and production of new immersive and site specific work. Collaborators, performers, designers, technicians etc. are contracted on a per project basis when funding allows. Until 2017, Catch the Keys was also an independent event production company working with corporate clients in realizing their arts-based events. Under this missive, we contracted a robust roster of artists in multiple disciplines. While we are no longer pursuing corporate events as part of our work, we do still engage in community-based opportunities that allow us to showcase local artists (for example, the curation and production of Late Night Cabaret and the Wine Tent Music Series with the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival).
We believe in creating safe(r) spaces where artistic risk flourishes. We value equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. We believe in creating and upholding an open, supportive, receptive, and collaborative creation process. The work we engage in is empowering, provocative, and impactful. The work we explore is at times dark, joyful, painful, thrilling, and playful. We honour the vulnerability of the artistic process, but not at the risk of those who make it, those who deserve to be in the room but aren’t, and those who never had a chance to get in the door in the first place.
We are invested in our community, and we aim to work with community to realize the goals of the 35//50 Initiative. We acknowledge racist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist systems of oppression are intertwined, and have unjustly advanced non-racialized groups in our community. We’re here to do the work, no matter how uncomfortable that work might be (especially as two white cis straight-passing women with immense privilege). By the 2025 season, we aim to provide quality paid positions in our project-based work to at least 35% IBPoC and 50% women and non-binary folks.
While we strive to introduce new collaborators to our process at the start of every new project, we acknowledge that we often return to some of the same collaborative relationships. It’s time we examine how we engage with new collaborators, and how we can better offer quality opportunities to a broader base of artists in our community.
As independent artists, we are fiercely committed to mentorship and community engagement. We will bring that same enthusiasm to our projects under the Catch the Keys banner.
Going forward, we will transparently report on how and who we have engaged in our creative undertakings. We commit to reviewing and reporting on our creative activity from 2015 – present, and will make this information available at the close of the 2020/21 season.