Thank you.
I'm Grumms. I go by S.E. Grummett professionally, and I use the pronouns they and them. I'm a transgender theatre artist from Treaty 6 territory, Saskatoon. I'm here today representing So.Glad Arts, a queer theatre company based in Saskatoon. As well, I'm one half of the performance art comedy theatre duo Creepy Boys.
After graduating from theatre school over a decade ago, I became increasingly frustrated with the limited opportunities for trans artists like myself within mainstream theatre. I wasn't seeing artists like me on stage or the kind of work I wanted to make. I started making and touring my own things. For me, self-creation was and continues to be a way out.
In 2016, I founded So.Glad Arts, an independent theatre company with a focus on creating new queer and queer-led performances. Over the past decade, So.Glad Arts has grown from producing locally to touring on an international scale to 11 different countries, presenting work at some of the biggest arts festivals and venues in the world. As a company, we have also shifted from producing in fringe and indie spaces to more year-round national and international touring, as well as curated festivals, professional commissions and presentations.
In 2024, we received creative export Canada funding for a 10-week U.K. and European tour of our queer clown show, Creepy Boys, touring it to five different countries: Ireland, Iceland, the U.K., Germany and Denmark. This tour allowed us to solidify our profile in the U.K. and Europe, and it allowed us to build relationships with international venues and presenters. One in particular, LiteraturHaus in Copenhagen, has since invited us back for a two-week Denmark tour in 2025 and is presenting our new show, Slugs, later this fall. This includes supporting us in building additional tour stops across Denmark. These relationships with international presenters would not have been possible without this funding. This tour also allowed us to lay the groundwork for future touring and allowed us to build our audiences abroad.
Now, two years later, we are still seeing the real impact of this funding. Last August, we premiered our new show, Slugs, at the largest arts festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe, to success far beyond our wildest dreams. For context, the Edinburgh Fringe is an incredibly competitive and difficult market, with over 4,000 different shows in the month-long festival; there is everything from large-scale musicals that end up in the West End to someone's grandma putting on their first-ever show in the basement of a burrito restaurant.
It was here that Slugs sold out its entire run; received 14 four- and five-star reviews, including one from The Guardian; won two awards; and was nominated for the largest award in its category, the Edinburgh Comedy Award. This is often called the “Oscars of Comedy”. Past nominees include Flight of the Conchords, Suzy Eddie Izzard and fellow Canadian Mae Martin. Not only did Slugs have financial and critical success far beyond what we imagined, but we found that the international audience at the festival devoured it, with every single performance ending in a standing ovation. I believe our success with this show is directly related to the funding we received, allowing us to dream bigger and go further.
This international success has continued to open doors at home in Canada that we previously thought to be out of reach for us as scrappy prairie artists. This includes a recent presentation at PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the upcoming CINARS Biennale, which are some of Canada's largest and most prestigious arts marketplaces. We're currently gearing up for our largest international tour yet in 2026, our second international tour just this year.
I'm a weird kid from the prairies, so I never really imagined myself touring across the country, let alone internationally. Saskatchewan artists are vastly under-represented on both national and international stages, but because of this funding, all of this has been possible. The funding we received from Canadian Heritage—as well as provincial funding and Canada Council for the Arts funding— is the backbone of our recent success and, frankly, our entire careers.
It has taken years of building relationships and gaining international recognition, as well as experience in producing at an increasingly large scale, to prime us for our recent critical and commercial breakthrough. If we did not have the funding to support us through each stage from development to production and touring, it is incredibly unlikely that we would have created the boundary-pushing work we have been so recently recognized for. We likely would never have been able to share that work with an international audience, particularly one that is largely unfamiliar with Canadian performance. Funding has allowed us to ask big questions, take bold risks and be a part of an international conversation about performance.
Abroad, when people talk to us after a show, we are often met with the phrase, “And you're Canadian?” This is meant as a compliment. We always take this as a moment when someone realizes that their perception of what is Canadian, and what Canada is, has changed. This audience member is now offered a window into the complicated, beautiful, intellectual, hilarious mess that is the place we come from. I ask for this committee to ensure that this funding continues to be accessible for small companies—and indie artists—like the one I come from.
With funding like this from Canadian Heritage, I believe we can see more outcomes like ours: emerging voices from unexpected places, work that takes big swings and bold creative risks, and work that is uniquely Canadian and unlike anything else in the world.