Edmonton’s Chris Dodd has been awarded the Guy Laliberté Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts. The $20,000 one-time prize is in recognition of Dodd’s exceptional work in deaf theatre, according to a news release by the council.

“I’m both honoured and humbled,” said Dodd of the award in an email interview. “There are many others who could have also been the recipient of this award, as we have a fantastic community of individual artists and deaf performing groups.”

Dodd, who became the first deaf graduate of the University of Alberta’s drama program in 1998, is a performing artist, playwright, and the founder of SOUND OFF, Canada’s national festival devoted to deaf performing arts. The festival, which runs from Feb. 12 to 16 at the ATB Financial Arts Barns, brings deaf artists from across the country to share their stories, in part through American Sign Language so that deaf and hearing audiences alike can participate.

SOUND OFF is part of the Chinook Series — a multi-disciplinary festival at the Arts Barns that kicks off Feb. 6 and runs until Feb. 16. Many performances at the Chinook Series will be ASL/English accessible.

Dodd says there are significant challenges to being a deaf artist. But SOUND OFF, initiated in 2016 by Dodd and then-artistic director of Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre Vern Thiessen, has led to more access to performing spaces for deaf artists.

“Sometimes the best opportunities are those that you make yourself,” said Dodd. “Our idea started off small but then gained momentum from there, and the festival has been growing stronger with each passing year.”

Dodd plans to put the award money toward travel to a variety of theatre experiences, including a trip to Washington, D.C., to take part in a new deaf performance festival called Oiol.

In addition to working as an adaptive technologist at the University of Alberta, helping students with disabilities, Dodd is an artistic associate and playwright-in-development with the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. In 2019 Dodd wrote and performed Deafy, a play that deals with the daily obstacles faced by deaf people in the hearing world, for Toronto’s SummerWorks Performance Festival.

Other performances include appearing in Queen Seraphina and the Land of Vertebrate at Sum Theatre in Saskatoon, in Gravity for Edmonton’s Theatre Yes, and in Ultrasound at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. Dodd was also involved in creating the Cahoots Theatre’s Deaf Artists and Theatres Toolkit (DATT).

lfaulder@postmedia.com