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Our History
¿SANCTUARY? (8) (a Forum theatre play with the refugee community originally co-sponsored by Amnesty International) grew directly out of a POWER PLAY workshop. It played in Vancouver and toured BC in 1989/90 to wide acclaim. Headlines has taken the Forum Theatre events that come out of a POWER PLAY and put them on television as they take place -- live interactive TV courtesy of Rogers Community Cable. These shows broadcast live throughout the British Columbia Lower Mainland including Delta, Tsawwassen, North and West Vancouver and Victoria. In 1989, Headlines was the recipient of two awards: a "Jessie" -- from the professional Vancouver theatre community -- for Innovation in Theatre, and the "Hometown USA Award" -- the company won this from over 1800 entries from all over North America -- for Innovation in Television for the live broadcast of ¿SANCTUARY?. In 1990, the company expanded to include new POWER PLAY facilitators as the community demand grew. In that same year, Headlines also moved into the Vancouver School System as the resident theatre company of the Vancouver School District and set up an ongoing program of POWER PLAYS on race relations in Senior Secondary Schools. In 1990/91, Headlines was asked to set up ongoing programs of race relations POWER PLAY workshops on a national level. This involved doing workshops in eight cities across Canada, and then training facilitators from each community in a two week long "skills transfer" session in Vancouver. Headlines felt that this was a very important project and decided to put other larger projects on hold for a year in order to complete it. (Except the ongoing POWER PLAY work, of course.) In September of 1991, Headlines was honoured with the tenth annual Annual Human Rights Award presented by MOSAIC, a non-profit society helping immigrants and refugees adjust to life in Canada. It was the first time the award had gone to a cultural organization. In 1991/92, Headlines extended the POWER PLAY work by developing two large Forum Theatre projects. The first was with the Urban Representative Body of Aboriginal Nations on issues of family violence called OUT OF THE SILENCE(9), which ran at the Waterfront Theatre. The second was on the issue of "our aging parents", called THIS IS MY LIFE?(10) which also ran at the Waterfront Theatre. During the 91/92 "season", we continued our race relations work in the Vancouver schools and developed short projects in the general community with the Native Outreach program at South Vancouver Neighbourhood House, SUCCESS (our first Forum performed completely in a language other than English), and Willingdon Youth Detention Centre. In 1992, in cooperation with the BC Association of Indian Friendship Centres, OUT OF THE SILENCE(11) toured the province of British Columbia. The tour culminated in a province-wide satellite broadcast on the Knowledge Network which included on-air interventions from the viewing audience. The broadcast reached into approximately 100,000 homes. The video is now being used as a healing tool by many communities throughout Canada. The tour was followed by a series of training workshops in which we visited six Aboriginal host communities and taught Theatre of the Oppressed skills to family violence workers who are using these skills in their continuing community healing work on this issue. Meanwhile, the company's POWER PLAY work continued throughout BC.
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