Shows in Development

Realwheels always has works in development at various stages. Revisit this page to see what’s next in line for Realwheels’ audiences.

Five Lives

Carrying on the tradition of Skydive and Spine in creating a visually arresting production with a strong social impact, Five Lives explores the universal issues of death, dying and grief. Just as death remains a social taboo, so too is disability; this production will explore the point of view of a person with disability whose diverse experiences with death influence his life journey.

Realwheels is uniquely positioned to explore this subject matter and theme. Members of the core artistic team for Five Lives--Kevin Kerr (playwright), Bob Frazer (director) and James Sanders (actor)--have each been deeply and profoundly affected by death in their lives. As individuals and as artists, each has his personal inspiration points for wanting to explore the theme.

Five Lives will begin with a period of exploration and development that will involve the core artists in three workshop periods over a five-month period in 2010.

Musical Passages

The Musical Passages project will employ the technology that Realwheels is developing in Spine to engage people with high levels of physical disability i.e., those with little or no use of their hands and/or arms (in addition to their feet and legs), to perform music. The project will engage people of all ages--including children and youth--whose ability to express themselves musically faces major physical barriers. The project is a partnership with VAMS (Vancouver Adapted Music Society) and will outreach to the Vancouver-area disabled community and support interested individuals to explore and express their musical abilities, and set the stage for a live performance, composed, arranged and conducted by a prominent Vancouver musician with a disability.

Using devices specially adapted for this purpose from the remote control unit of the Nintendo Wii, people will use the motion of their wheelchairs to generate electronic signals that are then transmitted to a computer that synthesizes the signals into musical notes.

The technology for the project comes from Matt Skopyk from the University of Alberta (with whom Realwheels is working on our production of Spine). Realwheels will launch The Musical Passages project in our current year and the project will continue to build to culmination as a larger-scale community production in 2010-11.