Patterson leaves Sick + Twisted days behind

Eleven years after getting Sick + Twisted Theatre off the ground in Winnipeg, the company’s founding artistic director is moving on.

Writer-actor-director Debbie Patterson is opening the door for the next person — or people — to lead the non-profit arts organization, devoted since 2015 to producing works by and about people with lived experiences of visible and invisible disabilities.

“I recognized the need and started the company, and I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can go with it,” says Patterson, a nationally recognized performer and arts administrator.

“I feel like I’m a really good builder but not a maintainer, and I feel like Sick + Twisted needs to get bigger.”

The company has launched a search for its next leaders to take on the creative and administrative mantle; the posting intentionally frames it as a search for leadership rather than a specific job title, and stresses the potential for a team application.

Patterson plans to stay on in an advisory capacity to ease the transition.

The company started small, with Patterson linking up with collaborators Angela Chalmers and Dan Augusta, theatre artists with lived experiences of disability.

Supported by artistic associates Trish Cooper, Arne MacPherson (Patterson’s husband) and Andrea del Campo, Sick + Twisted took on a community-focused, volunteer-led approach to theatre-making, producing cabarets and full-scale “cripped” productions of shows such as 2017’s Lame Is…, 2018’s You Are Here and 2019’s Threepenny Opera.

Key tenets of the organization — theatre for anyone with a body, and nothing for us without us — continue to permeate its creative output, which has grown to include holiday pantos, community choirs and artistic workshops around the city.

As an organization, Sick + Twisted has been committed throughout its decade-long run to producing work of artistic merit, avoiding the pull of “inspiration porn” by investing in work that maintains the voice and experience of the artist while challenging assumed narratives about disability.

The organization uses disability “to explore aspects of the human condition we only have access to by virtue of that lived experience,” Patterson told the Playwrights Guild of Canada in 2021. “It’s not about overcoming our disabilities or modifying our practice to accommodate our disabilities. It’s about doing a deep dive into the truth of the experience to see what’s there to discover.”

Other Sick + Twisted work produced prior to the pandemic was 2019’s How It Ends, produced as part of an experimental series at Prairie Theatre Exchange’s called Leap.

For that show, which dealt with the subject of end-of-life care and mortality, Patterson — who has multiple sclerosis — interviewed a dozen people including Winnipeg’s Jim Derksen, a Sick + Twisted performer who had been a pioneering force in the global disability rights movement since the 1970s.

Derksen, who died in 2022, helped develop several organizations including the Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities, going on to consult for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Canadian Council on Welfare, and both the provincial and federal governments.

Aside from its own productions, the organization has also worked toward the inclusion of accessibility measures — audio description, visual aids and relaxed performances — in Manitoban productions by other companies. Many Sick + Twisted collaborators work for Vocal Image Ensemble Winnipeg (VIEW) to provide live audio description for blind or low-vision audiences.

Patterson also frequently gives her time to arts organizations looking to boost their own accessibility and inclusivity standards.

For Patterson, the timing now feels right to pass off the baton.

“It feels like being a mom, raising kids and then they go off to live their life with someone else. But you know, I feel like I’ve built a good foundation and the kid’s in good shape as I want to send them off into the world,” she says.

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Upcoming work for Sick + Twisted includes a collaborative reimagining of an ableist story — not yet announced — with the Manitoba Underground Opera, expected to be staged in 2027.

Patterson — who co-edited with Alex Bulmer the 2026 book Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts — will also be taking the stage during this month’s Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, which begins July 15 at venues across the city.

Set for a performance run at the Rachel Browne Theatre, Happy Valley — produced by Patterson under the banner Cripplethreat — is named for the neighbourhood near Sudbury, Ont., where her father grew up.

“It was where the poor people lived, and all the effluent from the mines would land in the valley,” says Patterson, whose children Gislina and Solmund are both artists and filmmakers. “My grandmother would talk about rinsing the poison off the vegetables in the garden.”

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