French 
English As part of the podcast series, “ArtsAbly in Conversation,” Diane Kolin interviewed Traci Foster, a Canadian-based artist and educator living in Regina in Canada.
This post presents the resources that Traci Foster mentioned during the conversation. The podcast episode will be published soon.
Traci Foster
Traci Foster is a Canadian-based artist and educator who explores and develops her work through a blend of Fitzmaurice Voicework, extended vocal technique, movement, and mask. She is the founder and artistic director of Listen to Dis’ Community Arts Organization. She is also a faculty member of the University of Regina Conservatory of Performing Arts, Youth Ballet of Saskatchewan Summer Intensive, and Regina Public School Board’s Learning Through The Arts Program. She teaches privately and conducts workshops in voice, mask, clown, and bodywork.
Listen to Dis’
Listen to Dis’ Community Arts Organization Inc. equips and enables disabled people to create and participate in art, for the betterment of their health, for recreation, and for the development of themselves as emerging and professional artists. Listen to Dis’ Community Arts Organization serves people of all ages, from adolescents through elders, who live with a range of disabilities, including psychiatric disabilities; cognitive and learning disabilities; physical disabilities; addictions; environmental sensitivities; chronic pain or disease; and physical, mental, and/or emotional disabilities from the adverse impacts of medication.
Us Too! Web Series – Season 1 – Episode 1 – “What is Listen to Dis’?”
The interview opens with an excerpt of this video. You can watch the full version below.
Si vous ne pouvez pas lire la vidéo, le lien ci-dessous l'ouvrira sur YouTube.
Watch Episode 1 – What is Listen to Dis’? on YouTube
The Dripping Honeys
Based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, The Dripping Honeys is the Listen to Dis’ musical ensemble that currently consists of Ammanda Zelinski on lead vocals, Jason Yuen on piano/vocals, Emil Schmuck on harmonica/vocals, Finn Burke on bass/vocals, and Ed Peck on drums/percussion. Ed also acts as the musical director of the group. Started in 2018 as the accompanying band during our Globe Theatre Sandbox Series production of Mine to Have, the group has continued to rehearse and perform together at events such as Best Summer Ever (Saskatoon), The re-opening of Darke Hall (Regina), retirement and senior homes around Regina during the holiday season of 2022, and they did a tour of La Ronge, Pinehouse Lake, and Prince Albert in the June of 2023. The band currently consists of neurodivergent artists. We are proud to show through our programming such as this band that neurodiversity and disability doesn’t prevent people from being professional artists.
Learn more about The Dripping Honeys
The Other Ordinary
An ensemble cast brought together through a University of Regina theatre class imagined into reality by Kathleen Irwin: Devising Inclusive Theatre. This dynamic group of performers became a welcomed addition to the Listen to Dis Community Arts Organization in 2015.
Learn more about The Other Ordinary
Common Weal Community Arts
Common Weal is the only professional arts organization in Saskatchewan committed to socially-engaged practice. The importance of this cannot be understated. They are dedicated to a high standard of artistic merit, in part, so that this practice may be promoted as a legitimate contemporary art form judged by criteria that does not prioritize an object or traditional presentation. As participatory art practitioners, they value the process. The processes of socially-engaged collaboration, including exploration and expression of voice and identity, are as significant (or more significant) as a finished product or presentation. The artists they work with understand the mutual benefit of workshop and residency activity. They are able to contemplate differing perspectives and explore new areas of interest, while expanding their bodies of work and developing their capacity to connect with the public. They believe strongly in the capacity of artists to build authentic relationships with project participants, the impacts of which tend to have a ripple effect for years to come.
Visit the Common Weal Community Arts’ website
The Fitzmaurice Voice Institute: Fitzmaurice Voicework
Fitzmaurice Voicework® is recognized as a global leader in voice training for performance because of its wide-ranging impact on physical and mental well-being, personal and community empowerment, and its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Through deep and practical explorations of the dynamics between body, breath, voice, imagination, and language, the work develops vibrant voices that communicate intention and feeling without excess effort. Fitzmaurice Voicework combines adaptations of classical voice training techniques with modifications of yoga, shiatsu, bioenergetics, energy work, and many other disciplines. This integration serves to harmonize the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the nervous system, and the voice.
Learn more about the Fitzmaurice Voicework
Saul Kotzubei
Based in Los Angeles, Saul Kotzubei offers private coaching and group workshops in voice, public speaking, and presence work in Los Angeles. He is a lead trainer for the two-year Fitzmaurice Voicework Teacher Certification Program and Director Emeritus of the Fitzmaurice Institute. He is a performer with a master’s degree in Buddhist Studies, extensive acting training, and a year studying clown with Philippe Gaulier. In addition to his voice and public speaking coaching, Saul has done a wide range of communication-related teaching and consulting all over the world.
Saskatchewan Arts Alliance
Saskatchewan Arts Alliance (SAA) is an inclusive, member-driven coalition of arts organizations that provides a collective voice for the arts community of Saskatchewan. They know the arts matter. They benefit individuals and communities. Everything is connected. Great art engages and inspires everyone from children with crayons to professionals with multi-media installations; local square dancers to international ballerinas; quilting grandmothers to cutting-edge fashion designers.
Visit Saskatchewan Arts Alliance’s website
We See You, White American Theater
American theater cannot avoid its duplicitousness. The art of theater is composed of what is most natural—breath, bodies, and belief—while the business is built on the man-made—caste, capital, and colonialism. So much so, the word itself is subject to orthographic dispute: the adoption of the high-brow, British “theatre” versus the American-birthed “theater.” Who do we empower with the swapping of letters? It is this contention between power, balance, and ownership inherent to the theatre industry that drove the We See You, White American Theater (WSYWAT) collective to action.
Learn more about We See You, White American Theater
Kyrie Kristmanson
Kyrie Kristmanson is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist and trumpeter. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, she has lived in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and in France. Since appearing at the 2006 Winnipeg Folk Festival at the age of fifteen, Kristmanson has performed widely in Canada and Europe. Her performances have been broadcast nationally in Canada and in France. She received a B.Hum. Honours degree in humanities and music from Carleton University in 2010. She has released three albums as a solo artist, incorporating jazz, folk and classical influences into her musical style. She performs in English and French.
Learn more about Kyrie Kristmanson
Amelia Itcush
Born in 1945 on a farm near Viceroy Saskatchewan, Amelia Itcush received dance training in Regina. A teenage studio photo of her arabesque reveals an effortless sense of line. Amelia was a Canadian modern dance legend. Audience members tell of an unforgettable, riveting presence reminiscent of a wild animal. Spare, long boned, fluid, androgynous, feral, they say. During the 1970’s in Toronto, M. Nehemia-Cohen was a crucial influence; Amelia was eventually the first teacher to be certified in M. Cohen-Nehemia’s Mitzvah Technique. Through Cohen, her work descends from two giants of somatic research, Feldenkrais and Alexander. Like Amelia, these groundbreakers were propelled by injury to overturn existing notions of postural correction primarily through the use of pedestrian movement range and hands-on interaction with the student/client, pioneering somatic practices internationally. She died in 2011 in Toronto.
Visit Amelia Itcush’s website.
Petra Kuppers
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, writer, dance video maker and community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses somatics, performance, speculative writing and media to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She teaches at the University of Michigan as the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture. She was an adviser on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College for 15 years, until the college closed in 2024. She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s (first in her native Germany, then in Wales, UK; Aotearoa/New Zealand; and since 2001 in the US). She continues to lead workshops internationally, in these forms as well as in disability-culture adapted social somatics.