About MISCELLANEOUS Productions Society

MISCELLANEOUS Productions, founded in 2000 in Vancouver, Canada, is best described as “a hip hop theatre boot camp” developed for culturally and socially representative youth from the community. The company presents an original work every two years and tours, gives free peer-run workshops to at-risk youth, and makes films about their performances.

Through a rigorous transdisciplinary training process, youth are encouraged to think and act as professional artists, with a critical eye, helping them acquire the skills and confidence to tell their own stories in their own voices.

This work teaches both professional artists and youth to think and act outside the established categories that have marginalized them in the past. It gives them a voice with which to speak out about sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, addiction, poverty, and violence. We don’t believe in sugar-coating difficult issues, and neither do the youth with whom we collaborate. They are adamant that our work reflects a deeply progressive and visionary morality.

Working with artist-activists who are audacious enough to make performance that has relevance to an audience beyond the establishment art world, we integrate art with community development and crime prevention models. In doing so we help educate professional artists and the public about the challenges to youth facing multiple barriers, and share new ideas for dealing with and eliminating those barriers. We are ethically minded and believe in long-term community development as well as adequate time for creation and production. This best serves the youth at the centre of our work.

Our Vision

MISCELLANEOUS Productions envisions a community that supports youth of all cultural and lived experience backgrounds in telling their own stories, in their own voices, through community engaged art.

Our Mission

MISCELLANEOUS Productions’ mission, in pursuit of our vision, is to work with youth of all cultural and lived experience backgrounds to create art for all. Integrating international artistic disciplines with community development models and popular culture, the company educates the public and professional artists about the prevention of, and responses to, the challenges facing youth who deal with multiple barriers.

Our Current Projects

Moving ahead within the constraints of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, MISCELLANEOUS Productions is currently developing a number of new initiatives with an anti-colonialist take on the original, bloody, brutal, and horrific tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Working with internationally renowned folklorist and fairy tale expert Jack Zipes, we are creating “The International and Indigenous Fairy Tale and Folklore Project”. This initiative includes the development of an original script under the working title “The Plague”, the live streaming of a lecture by Jack Zipes, and a series of free workshops titled “Distance Hats” responding to the pandemic related needs of artistic youth.

As well, we are preparing for the creation of a new motion graphics dance-based video to “No Superman”, the central hip hop song from the MISCELLANEOUS Productions 2019 creation “AWAY with HOME”. The video will explore connection/disconnection, fluctuating feelings of powerlessness, confinement, and hope for young people struggling in a time of plague and uncertainty.