Pandora’s Briefcase

Created and Performed by Ghost Rooster Collective

Elizabeth Emond-Stevenson, Rachel Gray, Liz Winkelaar, and guest artist Rebecca Gray.

Pandora’s Briefcase follows the daily routine of the Ghost Rooster office workers and a mysterious briefcase. This work is an absurd, glamorous meditation on temptation, transformation, longing, and the absurdity of productivity culture.

Genesis of the Show:

Pandora’s Briefcase was born out of our desire to move from film into live performance, bringing our collective’s energy into the room with an audience. We were curious about what would happen if we combined singing, dance, and experimental theatre in a playful yet unsettling way. The office became our central metaphor: a place of structure, repetition, and absurdity, where routine can both hold us and trap us. We loved the fun of bringing ordinary objects to life by turning corporate props like desks, folders, and of course the briefcase, into instruments that disrupt expectations. The creative spark was the tension between order and chaos. Our greed and desire, what we forget in daily routine, and the sudden power of disruption to reveal something more human and wild underneath.

As a disability-led collective, disruption is central to our creative language. Disability art often unsettles familiar structures, asking audiences to question assumptions about bodies, productivity, and value. In Pandora’s Briefcase, the corporate world becomes a stage where those assumptions are most rigid. By inserting singing, dance, and absurd play into that environment, we used our lived experiences as disabled artists to turn routine into a site of possibility. The performance’s unruly energy reflects how disability arts challenge systems designed to contain or exclude us transforming the office into a space where difference, desire, and imagination take centre stage.

About Ghost Rooster Collective

Ghost Rooster Collective is an interdisciplinary group of disabled artists based in Ottawa, committed to exploring accessibility as a creative framework. Founded in 2021, the collective draws from a wide range of artistic disciplines, including dance, choreography, animation, film, puppetry. Our work is rooted in the lived experiences of disability and seeks to expand the representation of disabled artists in the arts, particularly in film and dance.

@ghostroostercollective

Elizabeth Emond-Stevenson

Elizabeth Emond-Stevenson is a franco-ontarian dance artist and mother from traditional unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory (Orléans ON). She makes space to access dance through inclusive collaboration, artmaking across disciplines and intergenerational sharing under the moniker TAKE UP SPACE and elsewhere. Elizabeth creates dance works, films and interdisciplinary collaborations that have been supported/commissioned by a wide range of organizations and arts councils, including the NAC-commissioned work Navigating Tides created with violist/composer Kathryn Patricia Cobbler. She is a graduate of the Quinte Ballet School, The School of Dance, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks’ Professional Training Program and the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has trained extensively in inclusive dance techniques through Propeller Dance, Candoco (UK), AXIS Dance Company (USA) and Stopgap Dance Company (UK), A company dancer with Propeller Dance and a member of Ghost Rooster Collective, she has performed across the country both independently and with The Ghomeshi Effect, Tara Luz Danse and Allison EB Dance. She also dances with Ottawa Dance Directive and was mentored by Tedd Robinson from 2021-2022.

Rachel Gray

Rachel Gray is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Ottawa. Working as a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker, Rachel specializes in creating accessible art that blends dance, animation, costume design, puppetry, and visual media to tell complex stories. Her artistic practice explores themes of deep time, the consciousness of the natural world, and the potential of interdisciplinary storytelling. Rachel's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has collaborated with a wide range of artists, academics, and medical researchers. Her leadership roles include serving as the Executive Director at BEING Studio and co-founding several arts collectives.

Liz Winkelaar

Liz is one of the original Ghost Roosters from the time when, to stay connected in the pandemic, a group of disabled artists started sharing dreams, interpreting them, and giving them artistic form. She has danced with Propeller Dance since its inception. In 2006, she was one of the first recipients of the company’s Emerging Choreographers Award. Her first choreographed work, Spasticus, has gone through many iterations and is now a staple of the repertoire. For five years, as Artistic Lead, Liz served as executive leadership of the company, contributing to strategic planning, mentored and supported other dancers, and organizing classes for the company with Canadian and international teachers, choreographers, and dance and theatre companies. She is still active in its long-term planning and day-to-day operations. Liz has worked with Persian dancer Maria Saba, choreographed work that was performed by Elizabeth Emond-Stevenson at Dark Horse Dance Projects in 2022, and choreographed a duet, GUST, that she danced with Elizabeth in Ottawa Dance Directive’s Series Dance 10 in 2023. Liz collaborated with TAKE UP SPACE as a performer in W(WE) in 2022. Liz is the first certified North American Gyrokinesis teacher using a wheelchair. She often is seen at the NAC working with Sioned Watkins in the Arts Alive programme, bringing accessible movement practices to new communities. Liz loves working with the other Ghost Roosters—delving, transforming, soaring.

Rebecca Gray

Rebecca Gray is a soprano, composer and improviser passionate about performing and creating both classical and contemporary repertoire. She loves contributing to the queer opera scene as a performer and composer, and has presented interdisciplinary work at many international festivals and residencies.  She loves finding the grandiose operatic moments in our sorry peasant lives, and her work blends earnestness, absurdism and dark humour.  Her work reflects her interest in feminism, neurodiversity (Rebecca is autistic), queerness, bilingualism and the dark silliness that pervades modern life. She received an Opera America Discovery Grant to support “BUS Opera,” a queer fantasy of overnight Greyhound angst. A winner of the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes, she collaborated with writer Rachel Gray to compose “Raccoon Opera – a fable of the housing crisis.” which involves an aimless tenant, a pervy Landlord and a ruthless raccoon. She recently received 2nd place in the Atlanta Opera 96-hour Opera competition for “TransBlissTM,” a comedic opera showcasing the misadventures of space aliens attempting to date via an unreliable translation software.

Premiering October 15 - 18, 2025.