10 Years of Theatrical Thrill-Seeking

Help us raise $10,000 in our 10^th year!

It’s hard to believe, but Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre – Calgary’s scrappy, badass, site-specific theatre for thrill-seekers – is celebrating its 10^th year! That’s a decade of wild performances in unusual spaces: dances in coffee shops, gladiator battles in a boiler room, robot invasions in warehouses and a bearded lady in a storage cage.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked with more than 350 artists, occupying elevators, +15 corridors, bars, museums, parks, landmarks and the Town of Vulcan. Our eclectic offerings have included Freak Show (in five different iterations!), Wanderlust, Shhhh!, Across the Tracks, i-ROBOT Theatre, Super 8, Money Theatre, Shortcut to Nirvana and Eavesdrop: The Coffee Shop Show. We’ve mentored emerging artists at the IGNITE! Festival, taught children to cut hair, presented two editions of Calgary’s Queer Arts Festival, hosted the Swallow-a-Workshop Series and participated in nine adrenaline-fuelled editions of the 10-Minute Play Festival. It’s been a jam-packed decade!

This milestone is a chance to reflect on the adventures we’ve enjoyed so far, and to look forward to our next decade of wild, weird, surprising and challenging work. And we need your help. To lay the groundwork for our next 10 years, we need to raise $10,000, and we hope you’ll donate $10 – or more! (That's just the cost of two lattes - and you'll be eligible for a tax credit!)

Your donation will help turn the page to the next chapter of Swallow-a-Bicycle’s evolution. We’re currently in development for two new shows: Gargantuan, a mask fable that explores our complicity in global challenges, and The Clothing Project, which digs into ideas of fashion, conformity, individuality and taboo. We’ll continue to curate and mentor the Site-Specific Series at the IGNITE! Festival of Emerging Artists, supporting the next generation of artistic shit-disturbers. And we’re embroiled in Incubating Innovation, an intensive program of New Pathways for the Arts, exploring how a theatre company founded and operated by two straight, cisgender, able-bodied white men can operate responsibly in a space of equity and diversity.

The world is changing – in ways that are sometimes great, and often pretty messed up. We’re changing, too. We want our art to reflect and interrogate the world around us, ask hard questions and push back against forces of ignorance and division. Your support will help us do that.

Our name is derived from an Arthur Miller quote that – gendered language aside – resonates as strongly now as ever before:

“You know, a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them.”

We’ve taken our share of whacks, and there are more on the horizon. So let’s get to work. Thanks for sticking with us for the past ten years; here’s to ten more!