Collaborating with Chronic Illness – Sara Tilley

Research focus

How might we work with chronic illness—as subject matter, as the architecture within which performance is created, and as a collaborator in its own right? In what ways can we visibilize the invisible, externalize the internal and work in rhythm with the unpredictable to crip the process of play-making? What might sustainable collaboration look like, for ill artists?

About the researcher

Sara Tilley is a queer, chronically ill and dynamically disabled multidisciplinary artist from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, whose work bridges writing, theatre, clown and puppetry. A graduate of the BFA Acting Program at York University, she’s written, co-written or co-created fifteen works for theatre to date, as well as the award-winning novels Skin Room and DUKE. Sara ran feminist theatre company She Said Yes! in St. John’s from 2002-2016, producing many of her own plays, dramaturging new work locally, nationally and internationally, co-founding the Women’s Work Festival with RCA Theatre and White Rooster Theatre, and offering Clown through Mask and Neutral Mask training. She received the Rhonda Payne Theatre Award in 2006. Sara is currently based in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador.