A Reflection on Pandora’s Briefcase
Dear friends of Ghost Rooster,
As we look back on Pandora’s Briefcase, we’re filled with gratitude for the many hands and hearts that made the work possible.
This piece invited us into a strange and glamorous office world, following the daily routines of Ghost Rooster workers alongside a mysterious briefcase. Through absurdity and play, it became a meditation on temptation, transformation, longing, and the peculiar rhythms of productivity culture. What emerged was something collaborative, curious, and deeply shaped by the energy of everyone involved.
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support through the Theatre Recommender Grant. Their investment made space for this work to take form and reach audiences in meaningful ways.
We are also grateful to our local MPP, Stephen Blais, for their continued support of the arts in our community.
This project continues to echo through our ongoing work, opening up opportunities to share and develop new creations in the year ahead. It remains an important part of our evolving practice, reminding us of the value of experimentation, collaboration, and risk.
Thank you again to local festivals like Fresh Meat, who continue to champion and provide platforms for Ottawa artists, encouraging us to explore our projects in new and unexpected ways.
Thank you to everyone who was part of this process and to those who experienced the work with us!
Ghost Rooster Collective
Festival Artworks by Maggie Woods
@specialmaggiemoments
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.
