GZP Edmonton

People

Don Bouzek - Artistic Director

Don creates theatre on a variety of social issues. For the last decade, he has been collaborating with Banner Theatre from Birmingham in the UK to produce a series of Video Ballads. Their most recent work includes Embedded with the Bankers which was commissioned by the National Union of Journalists and presented for their convention in London last fall. With Eyes Wide Open recently premiered in Birmingham, is currently on tour in the UK, including being featured at the UNISON national convention.

In Canada, Don has collaborated with singer-songwriter Maria Dunn on two shows. Troublemakers was featured as part of Alberta Scene at the National Arts Centre in 2005. Last May, their new show GWG: Piece By Piece toured Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto and Winnipeg.

Mr. Bouzek’s work emphasizes collaboration with various communities. He worked with writer / performer Patricia Darbasie on Ribbon, about Black Pioneers to Alberta. The show was featured last July at the centennial celebrations in the Amber Valley community.

Mr. Bouzek also creates video. His short segments are featured in the new GWG virtual museum on the Royal Alberta Museum website. Similarly, he created 52 short videos, in both official languages, for a centennial website about nursing in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He has made two half hour documentaries for Athabasca U and Access TV. Mr. Bouzek has won two awards from the Canadian Association of Labour Media for his work with unions, including the Canadian Labour Congress, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers and the United Nurses of Alberta. He is currently editing web video segments for the Alberta Workers’ Health Centre.

Mr. Bouzek is the recipient of an Alberta Centennial Medal for his work in the arts.

Kirsti Tamblyn - Administrator

Kirsti began working for GZP in early 2008. Before working with GZP, she did admin work for the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 401 as well as the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Alberta Division.

Kirsti first became interested in the Union movement at a very young age. This happened as a result of growing up with a trade-unionist father, Kevin Tamblyn, legal council for UFCW Local 401, who brought her to walk her first picket line, The Safeway strike in 1997, when she was 12 years old.

Kirsti now works full time for GZP while running a home-based business, Passion Parties by Kirsti, in her spare time.

Previous Administrators

Thanks to former GZP Administrators:
Joanne Janzen, Kim Green, Bob Moher, Loree Lawrence, Lina Chartrand

Board of Directors

Alex Grimaldi

Alex moved to Dauphin Manitoba a few years ago after a long career as a Union leader and board member on several agencies including The United Way Cabinet and Success by Six in Edmonton Alberta. Since moving to Dauphin Alex has trained to be a mediator and organizational leadership consultant, and has started his own consulting business Calabria Consulting.

Alex sits on the City of Dauphin Beatification Committee, the Board of Directors for the Parkland Regional Health Authority, and the Dauphin Multi-Purpose Senior Centre. He is a volunteer for ACCESS TV in Dauphin.

In his spare time Alex likes to cook, read, and fish.

Alan Filewod

Alan Filewod teaches at the University of Guelph, where he is a Professor of Theatre Studies and an activist with the unionized University of Guelph Faculty Association. His award-winning research focuses on the history and practices of political intervention theatre and theatre for social change in Canada. His books include Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (1987), Performing “Canada”: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (2002), and, with David Watt, Workers’ Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970 (2001). He is also the editor of several anthologies. He is a past president of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research and of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures/Association des littératures canadienne et québécoise, and was for many years editor of Canadian Theatre Review. He is currently writing a history of Canadian political intervention theatre from the 19th century to the present day for publication in 2011 under the title, Committing Theatre.

Alan comes to the field of social action theatre out of a long history of activist theatre work. In the 1970s he was a member of the Mummers Troupe, the Newfoundland company that pioneered community intervention theatre in Canada. As a dramaturg and occasional actor, he worked with Catalyst Theatre in its early popular theatre days. In the ’80s, he was one of the founders of the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance, and a coordinator of the Bread and Butter / du pain su la planche Festival of Popular Theatre in Guelph in 1987. During that time he was the founder and director of a safe-sex awareness troupe, One Night Stand.

Jeff Taylor

Jeff Taylor is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Labour Studies at Athabasca University. He is a labour historian who has written about the history of labour education, university labour relations, the origins of the grievance and arbitration system in Canada, the history of popular movements in Western Canada, and other topics. He is the author of two books and a numerous articles.

In addition to his scholarly and university administrative work, Dr. Taylor is active in a number of professional and community organizations including the Canadian Committee on Labour History, the Aspen Foundation for Labour Education, and the Alberta Labour History Institute.

Kevin Flaherty

Kevin grew up on the Canadian prairies as one of 7 children. He worked on the railway from 1974 until 1985, while earning a Masters degree in the Sociology of work and trying to do more interesting things, such as making-trouble. He moved to Edmonton in 1987 to the wonderful Edmonton Learner Centre (later re-named the Centre for International Alternatives, CIA, bad joke. Go figure!). There, among other things, he was involved in the creation of the Labour World Program. When funding for this and other NGO’s was lost to structural adjustment in the mid-90’s, he landed on his feet with the Alberta Workers’ Health Centre, a non-profit organization which has the ambitious mandate of ‘helping Alberta workers make work safer’. It was and is an opportunity to work with workers, for workers, in matters of life and death.

Kevin has tried to infuse the practices of popular education into this mandate. This has meant working with those who work in theatre, music, and visual art to start to tell the stories of working people that only time and struggle will finish.

Throughout the years, Kevin has organized several local unions and held numerous union positions at a local and national level. He hates meetings.

Kevin and his partner, Donna, live in Edmonton and are embroiled in the lives of 5 adult-ish offspring. He is lucky to have been able to use the luck and privilege of being white, male and Canadian to enable himself to work with working people from around the globe.

Kevin looks forward to a future as an avid paddler, cyclist and active participant in the saving of the planet and its inhabitants from the nasty evil-doers; and doing so with others who recognize the central role that artistic expression will play in our success.

Previous Board

Thanks to long time Toronto Board members:
Heather Howe and Chris D. Walroth.