Posted August 19, 2026

Behind the Scenes – Sick + Twisted Theatre

Debbie, you’ve been the artistic director of Sick + Twisted Theatre since 2015, when you founded the company with Dan Augusta and Angela Chalmers. The impact of S+T’s work has been felt not only in Winnipeg, but across the country and internationally. Can you tell us why it was important for you and your colleagues to create a platform for disabled artists?

I had been a theatre artist for a number of years before I became disabled. And when I became disabled, I thought there was no place for me in professional theatre. I didn’t know any other disabled theatre artists. And I went through a number of different stages of that discernment, but one thing that really changed my thinking was going to see Cirque de Soleil and then going into a restaurant afterwards. When I went into the restaurant, I was on forearm crutches, and everybody in the restaurant was suddenly on high alert; they were moving their bags out of the way and just making way for me to get through on my crutches. And I realized that they were watching me move the way I had been watching the acrobats—that on-the-edge-of your-seat, worried-someone’s-going-to-fall way. 

So I decided that the way I move is actually pretty compelling and watchable, so why shouldn’t I be on stage? And then it made me start questioning why disabled people have been kept out of professional theatre for so long. It made me start looking at the stories we tell and what stories are missing. What stories are we not telling? What is the truth that we’re afraid to confront right now as a society, and can I write about that? That was always my approach as a theatre artist. So that just gave me a lot of information and gave me a mission to explore this lived experience through theatre. And I knew Dan Augusta, who was an aspiring theatre artist and Ang Chalmers, who had been away from theatre for a while, but wanted to get back into it. And both of them identified as disabled, and they seemed like really good artists to get involved with. 

The philosophy, values, and goals for the theatre are articulated beautifully on the Sick + Twisted website. One of the statements in the Aesthetic/Curatorial Framework is: “We believe that there are deep universal truths of the human condition hidden behind the veil of disability.” Could you elaborate on that?

I don’t know about you, but for me, my most profound experiences as an audience, or as a reader or listener, happen when someone articulates something that I know to be true deep down inside that I could never articulate for myself. Those moments when you recognize yourself in someone else’s writing or expression and it gives you a language to describe something true that you could never confront or recognize on your own. I feel like that’s the thing we’re always looking for as artists, that thing that you can only find that when you go deep, when you strip away all the pretense and all the shame and fear that we all as individuals encounter through our lives, and go into those emotions and find what’s at the core of it. And what’s at the core of my shame is probably a lot like what’s at the core of somebody else’s shame; at the core of my fear is what’s at the core of somebody else’s fear. And until I’m willing to go there, I can’t actually find those things. And so I really think that the experience of living with a disability exposes you to a kind of vulnerability that you can’t hide, that allows you to explore ideas that you otherwise would never attempt to explore. 

Could you tell us about one or two S+T projects during your tenure that stand out for you?

We produced five Disability Cabarets. We would send out a call for submissions to anyone who identifies as disabled to send us something that they wanted to explore as a short piece. And then we would pair every person with a mentor, a professional theatre artist who had some relationship with disability, either a lived experience or a shared experience, someone who shares their life with a person with a disability. And then we would mentor the person to develop their piece, but we would also mentor them as artists. And I gave everybody three rules: 

1. You weren’t allowed to complain about how hard it is to live with a disability because nobody cares. 
2. You’re not allowed to “raise awareness” of your particular condition because that’s a PSA. 
3. And you have to remember that you are there to serve an audience, and you have to give them something that they need. 

So merely expressing yourself isn’t enough. You need to actually think about what your audience needs. Those three rules unleashed this kind of visceral truth from all these artists. 

Up until our first cabaret, there hadn’t been a disability theatre performance practice in Winnipeg out loud. And so I think most people thought that disability performance practice was mostly therapeutic recreation for people with disabilities. Audience members were expecting to come to support the performers, to be an indulgent audience—and that’s not what they were there for at all. I think people were quite shocked and moved by what they saw, and it was certainly not what they expected. I mean, people said, “This isn’t what I expected,” and “It’s way more than what I thought could ever be possible.” So I feel like that was a big standout project.

The other one was the first time we did a big show, a musical; we collaborated with an ad hoc company called AA Battery to produce The Threepenny Opera. And we had an integrated cast of disabled and non-disabled artists working together. And because we were working from a disability framework, we made sure that everybody was able to articulate their access needs and that the scheduling was respectful of people’s real lives. We worked at a pace that recognized that disability happens, and we can’t always move at the ableist world pace. And I feel like it brought out the best in the non-disabled performers—they had never had the opportunity to work in this way and were amazed at how much easier it was to work, how much more efficiently the work got done, if you respect people’s actual needs. It’s easier to just show up and do the work if you’re not trying to protect yourself within it. And it built this ensemble within the company because we were all actually looking out for each other. And that translates on stage to this really beautiful ensemble work that you can see—the actors are working together in a much more integrated and holistic way than in any other company. 

How did you come up with those rules for the cabaret participants?

I just knew what I didn’t want to do. I knew what work we didn’t want to do. And the rules were all about “Don’t do that.”  

Most representations of disability are created by people without disabilities, for people without disabilities. When a non-disabled director or writer is writing something for a disabled person, they don’t know what the experience is. So as a disabled person, it’s kind of like being a woman, like growing up as a woman in a world that objectifies women’s bodies; you learn to objectify your own body before you have a woman’s body. And it’s the same kind of thing: I had learned how to look at disabled people in a way that objectified them. And once I had a disabled body, I saw that that wasn’t true and that didn’t represent my truth. And so I was able to challenge those representations of disability. 

You were a founding member of Shakespeare in the Ruins, as well as an artistic associate at Prairie Theatre Exchange for a number of years. How was the Sick + Twisted experience different from your previous work with theatres? What should people thinking of applying for the leadership role at S+ T know?

I think my work with Shakespeare in the Ruins taught me a lot and gave me the tools I needed to start this company. I learned how to write grants really well. I learned how to do budgets really well. So those two things are really important if you want to run a company. 

What should people be thinking about in applying for the role? I had to unlearn a lot of what I learned, because theatre is a very ableist form of art. In theatre, you show up for work when you’re sick or you’re going through a crisis: you just show up, you suck it up. So I had to unlearn all of that to run Sick + Twisted. You need to work at a different pace and offer tons of grace to your collaborators.

But the dirty truth of running a company like this, making processes accessible for people with disabilities, especially episodic disabilities, is that the people leading the process must not fall apart. You have to have endless grace for the people around you, while holding yourself to a more stringent standard.

Debbie, you’re also, of course, the author of several acclaimed plays including How It Ends, Sargeant & Victor & Me, and Head (published by Scirocco Drama.) And congratulations are in order, because you’ve just won the Harry S. Rintoul Award for Best New Play in the Winnipeg Fringe for your solo show, Happy Valley. What can you tell us about that play?

In the fall of 2025, I performed in a piece called The Only Good Indian at Theatre Projects Manitoba. 

(Editor’s note: The Only Good Indian is a theatre framework created by Jiv Parasram with Tom Arthur Davis, in which a performer strapped into a suicide vest explores where our similarities begin and where they end, forcing both performer and audience to ask themselves: What would I die for? The project is designed to allow a variety of performers to use their own lived experience to explore themes of occupation, colonialism, and thanatopolitics.)

After writing my version and performing it, I really wanted to do it again, to recycle that material into another format. I applied to the Fringe so that I would have a deadline. (If I didn’t have a deadline, I wouldn’t actually do it.) 

Since I’ve been running Sick + Twisted, I feel like I’ve been supporting everybody else’s artistic expression for a long time, and I was really, really hungry to write and to express my own truth. I wanted to do that deep excavation work of writing that is so fruitful and difficult and enjoyable. It’s like a hard job that’s really satisfying. I love it. 

Happy Valley, the name of the piece, is the neighbourhood where my dad grew up outside of Falconbridge; just a dirt road and twenty-two houses. And because it was in a mining town, the pollution from the mine would settle in Happy Valley. The snow would turn red in the winter. My grandma would talk about rinsing the pollution off the vegetables in the garden. It was a really, really polluted place. And my dad had health issues throughout his life, his brother did as well. There are a bunch of people that he grew up with who had neurological conditions. And so I sometimes wonder if my MS is because my dad grew up in Happy Valley, if it’s some sort of intergenerational pollution trauma. 

I have this strong belief that our bodies are the land, that it’s not a metaphor, it’s a fact: everything about us comes from the earth and goes back to the earth. So how can we pretend that we’re not part of the land? I’m always interested in how our bodies and the land intersect. Then that leads to an exploration or sort of a comparison, I guess, of climate change and disability and where we sit within that. So that’s kind of what the play is about, about how our bodies are the earth, how we treat the earth, how we treat our bodies, and climate change and disability. I feel like it’s something I want to develop further.