Blog 9,  May 2012

Somebody said  “Every man is like every other man, like no other man and like some other men.”

There’s been a great deal of press lately about the desperate situation in many of our Native communities, most of all those in the northern part of Ontario. There’s also, far too seldom, the occasional story of a Native person who has succeeded, like Gabrielle Scrimshaw of the Aboriginal Professional Association of Canada who I heard recently talking about members of her Association.  She, of course, corrects the picture a bit with the presentation of an accomplished young woman, representing a whole range of Aboriginal people who are amongst us doing jobs, living lives, having families, the things we all do. We’re all alike but unique too…see where I’m going with this.
                                                                                                                                   

The view we have of our fellow countrymen who are Native - and who in fact beat us to it in inhabiting this country - is much distorted.  The ones who are visible to most of us are unfortunate and unfortunately our knowledge often stops there. As I usually do when I’m trying to make sense of something, I turned to books to try and feel closer to Aboriginal people (You’ll notice I go back and forth from Native to Aboriginal and occasionally say First Nations, there’s not much consensus about which is most descriptive and respectful).

Here are some of the writers that I know a bit, there are dozens more to explore, enough to keep us reading for years. Since June is Aboriginal History Month, it's a good time to start watching for things going on and maybe checking out some of these authors.

James Bartleman, a member of the Chippewas of Mnjikaning First Nations was born in Orillia and grew up in Port Carling. After 35 years in the Canadian Foreign Service representing us internationally, he served as Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor from 2002 – 2007. He’s written several books of non fiction both about his experiences abroad and those at home as former Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s diplomatic advisor. His recently published novel As Long as the Rivers Flow tells the story of a small child being wrenched from home and family and taken in a plane to a residential school... it broke my heart.

I have a great memory of Tomson Highway…he came to do a reading for me at Toronto General Hospital when he was just finishing Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. We thought it would be fun to have the people on inpatient psychiatry do a read through of the play; it was its first performance and it was brilliant. Tomson was born on the Manitoba/Nunavut border and grew up with the Cree and Dene languages before learning English and French. He’s an accomplished concert pianist as well as a successful playwright

 

The child of an Ojibway mother and a Caucasian father, Drew Hayden Taylor  likes to call himself an Occasion... a Special Occasion at that. Growing up on the Curve Lake First Nations, Drew has, along with many other things in a varied career, done standup comedy at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC and been artistic director of the Native Earth Centre for Performing Arts in Toronto. He continues to move us and tickle our funny bones with his recent novel, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass and a new collection of essays, NEWS: Postcards from the Four Directions.   

Richard Wagamese is an Ojibway from Wabasseemong First Nations in northern Ontario.   My first connection with his writing was Ragged Company, which introduced me to a group of homeless people in Toronto whose lives were transformed by winning a lottery. His most recent novel, Indian Horse, traces a man’s life from his early days on a reserve, through residential school to life in a city with a career as a professional hockey player. It’s gritty and tough, with lots of interesting close-up background stuff for hockey fans.

                                                                                                                    

Born in North Vancouver of Cree and Salish ancestry and  a member of the Sto.lo First Nations,.Lee Maracle now lives in Toronto and teaches at U of T.  One of the first Aboriginal people to be published, her titles include Ravensong, Daughters are Forever and I am Woman.  Themes in Bent Box, her first collection of poems which I’m reading now, range from the personal to the natural to the political. I discovered her and her work at a recent reading at the Spadina library, an amazing source of material by Aboriginal authors. I’m looking forward to exploring her work further, also to discovering other native women writers.   Maybe there’s a future blog in store, stay tuned.

Blog # 8 April 2012

Laughter’s not just the best medicine, using it is also a good way to get a point across.  That’s one of the ways the folks at the Friendly Spike Theatre have been getting people to look at mental illness for the past twenty years or so.  It’s a small artist run community theatre with a professional acting troupe that creates and presents regular productions with themes that explore the experiences of individuals within the mental health system.  Many of them have direct knowledge of that system and speak with candour, humour and often anger as they call attention to some of its inadequacies and inequities.

Theatre Director Ruth Ruth Stackhouse, one of Friendly Spike’s founders and a longtime activist, is currently enrolled in the Graduate Programme in Critical Disabilities Studies at York University.  She was presented with a City of Toronto Access award at City Hall last November for her work with the Theatre.

Friendly Spike often partners with groups concerned with psychiatric survivors and from 2002-2005 created plays with Houselink, an agency providing supportive housing. This collaboration contributed to a City of Toronto Community Engagement award presented on February 28 in a ceremony at Harbourfront.

 

In  2011 they were a sponsor of  The Walls are Alive with the Sound of Mad People which consisted of the unveiling of a series of 9 memorial plaques in remembrance of the wall built by patients on the grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.  Together the plaques tell the story of the people who built the walls in the 19^th century (when the site was known as 999 Queen Street) and are a testament to people whose unpaid labour was central to the operation of provincial asylums into the middle of the 20^th century. 

 

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In the performance, the messages on the plaques are animated with words by Mel Starkman and music by Honey Novick. Actors walk from site to site, followed by the audience, developing the historical tales and linking them to their own contemporary stories. Patients of the past are honoured and attention is called to the persistent social problems of stigma and exclusion experienced today by people with mental illness.

The event will be recreated this year on July 11 at 6 pm on the grounds of CAMH as part of Mad Pride week. The new CAMH development is encouraging the demolition of walls that exist between people who happen to be on the outside and those inside.  The event on July 11 is open to all of us from both sides, a good chance to see the new CAMH, and have some fun…see you there.

Blog 7 March 2012

My romance with art in unusual venues embraces a book that became a huge favourite of mine when it came out last year. In Winter Sport, Priscila Uppal treats us to a collection of poems long and short - haikus, odes and love poems about the 2010 Olympic Games.  Some are funny like Curler Want Ad or poignant like Lament for Disqualification.   Winter Olympics Parade, starts with Albania and marches all  the participating countries past us with a sporty transition - Cayman Islands camel spin to Chile, Morocco moguls to Nepal, Slovakia slaloms to Slovenia, and Uzbekistan Zudnicks to…CANADA...I just learned that Zudnick was a skiing dog.

In her introductory essay, Priscila, who was CANfund’s  first resident poet for the Games, gives us a sense of her love for both sports and the arts and helps us see the close relationship between them. Both require concentration and dedication, practice and patience. Arts competitions (including poetry) were part of the ancient Olympics and revived for the modern Games from 1912 till 1948. During that period medals were awarded for works of art inspired by sport…paintings, sculpture and music, not  for poems though.  The cultural competitions were eliminated in 1954 when it was deemed that artists were professionals while athletes were amateurs.  This distinction has become blurred more recently and it’s good to see artists included in the opening ceremonies and to have poetry coming to the fore.

Priscila captures the best aspects of the Olympics in A Brother Has Your Back, for Alexandre and Frederic Bilodeau.  Alexandre’s affection for his brother came close to burning brighter than that first gold medal…well almost… well for me anyway.

Grace and courage emerged unexpectedly in the figure skating competition: 

                                 Ice Opera

                                 for Joannie Rochette

                                No one had to say, Get out on that ice.

                                Nobody needed to give you a nudge.

                               You were born to spin and spiral,

                               serve the gods of spectacle and suspense.

                               You courted the music in your heart,

                               soared with it, sharpening your edges,

                               softening landings.

                              If the stands were nearly empty, you imagined

                              crowds, you the heroine in an ice opera,

                              roses flung at your feet, the roar

                             of encores, the scores of symphonies.

                             But tonight, while we listen to the orchestra and

                             thunder applause, you are skating to a new

                             sanctum of silence, of shadows and silhouettes,

                            where mother and daughter mouth the words

                            to all the secret love songs ever written

Two essays complete the collection…one is Priscila’s sensitive coverage,  informed by familiarity with her father’s paraplegia, of the Paralympics which always follow and complete the Games. The other is a long piece on the Arctic Games, giving us a wonderful glimpse into the particular activities that are possible in that unique climate and reflect the spirit of Canada’s North.

Winter Sport is published by Mansfield Press, who will also put out Summer Sport which Priscila will be working on this summer in London.  She’s generously offered to share this experience and the resulting poems with us in a future blog.

Blog 6... February 2012

Using art forms as a vehicle for political statements can range from agitprop theatre like Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to the Afghan war rugs where close examination reveals the traditional designs replaced by helicopters and rocket launchers.  Art can transport subversive material under the radar in repressive regimes or give a nudge to democracies to be more inclusive. 

 

We can think of many stirring examples around the world  but, this being Black History Month  what springs to my mind is the home grown exhibit Africville…a spirit that lives on, conceived in 1989 by Mary Sparling, Director of the Art Gallery at Mount St Vincent University in Halifax. in collaboration with a small group of Nova Scotia cultural activists..
This show served as a wake-up call about racial intolerance, thoughtless urban renewal and the value of community culture.




Africville was a Black settlement that survived for 130 years on the northwest shoulder of Bedford Basin.  Although oral histories describing their roots in American slavery suggest that some families arrived there as early as the 1700's, formal written history begins in 1848. A church was established in 1849, a school in 1883 and people gathered for the affordable land and proximity to jobs. At  the turn of the century, there was a population of around 400 souls and Africville was described as "a vibrant place inhabited by young, hard working people with great potential". During its heyday between 1900 and 1920 Louis Armstrong, Joe Lewis and Duke Ellington all visited this national and international legend.
                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                            
Over the years as Halifax grew and the land occupied by Africville became more valuable, the City refused to supply utilities but instead moved a dump and incinerator close by and began to encroach more and more on the land with a railway and industrial activity.  The settlement began to deteriorate and in 1945, it was recommended that  "blighted housing and dilapidated structures in the Africville area" be removed.  The school closed in 1953 and despite intense community opposition, the site was demolished in the late 60's.  The last remaining resident Aaron "Pa" Carvery moved out on June 2, 1970. Meanwhile on the other side of the world, similar things were happening in Sophiaville and Meadowlands as South Africa was being torn apart by apartheid.

Although Africville was bulldozed out of physical existence, nothing could remove the memories from the minds of the people who grew up there.  Mary’s exhibit called attention, at both local and national levels, to the error of destroying a community without sensitivity to the people, their history and their culture.  The show toured Canada, spending two months in 1992 at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa accompanied  by the film Africville Remembered directed by her collaborator Shelagh Mackenzie for the NFB.  In 2002, the federal government declared Africville a National Historic Site. .

In 2008 on the 25th anniversary of the decimation of the settlement, 1500 people from all parts of Canada, the US and beyond attended a reunion.
A Paramount chief  from Ghana addressed the gathering and  Joe Sealy (an Africville descendant) performed his Africville Suite at the Neptune Theatre.  In February 2010, Halifax mayor Peter Kelly formally apologized to  former residents. Since then the Halifax Regional Municipality has agreed to transfer land and funds to build a replica of the Seaview Baptist Church and an interpretive centre on the Africville site... the spirit lives on.   Things have changed in South Africa too.

Being part of  the Africville project was a highlight of Mary’s career at The Mount which stretched from 1973 – 1994.  She  left as her legacy a strong sense of the importance of recognizing and reflecting local  Nova Scotia culture, placing particular focus on the work and issues of aboriginal, black and women artists.
A while before she died last year we celebrated 40 years of close friendship...this is a tribute to her and her work and a reminder to cherish your friends.

Blog 5, January 2012

Skateboards have wowed me since 1985 when I gasped at Michael J Fox’s long swooping ride in Back to the Future.  It seemed somehow connected to roller-skating, which was my passion as a kid (on the street, with skates that fastened to our shoes and could be extended with a key as our feet grew). We used to court danger by hanging on to the bread wagon or ice truck for a free ride.  Courting danger isn’t so much my M.O. these days, so imagine my delight when I found a way to connect with skateboards without risking life and limb and to connect skateboards with art.

Longboard Living is just one of many imaginative enterprises located in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Ryan Rubin, who operates this open door spot, just past Funky Junky and tucked between Roach-a-Rama and Ali Baba Discount Shoes, welcomes people from the neighbourhood and tourists from near and far.  Longboard Living carries hand painted custom designed skateboards with images created by local artists. As well as selling quality boards, they serve as action central for boarders and many artists as well, offering a showplace and market for the work of mural and graffiti artists or people with work that has value but doesn’t fit in conventional galleries.

Sometimes customers request a special image or a work by one of the regular artists, profits are shared and terms are worked out individually.  Boards can run from $150. to $400.depending on features like special bushings on the trucks for better suspension and to make turns easier.  Ryan is using higher quality boards now to make them more durable and also to make them worthy of the art.

.I also enjoyed talking about boards and boarding with Jordan Prentice, originally from Haiti, who grew up north of Toronto in Flesherton.  He has his facebook photo on his board so it's always with him as he cruises around the city..

Local artist Adrian Mayles has not only done one of the most recognizable murals in the Market (Miles Davis at the northeast corner of Oxford and Augusta)   he’s also done the signature board for Longboard Living featuring Toronto landmarks.

The possibility of losing quirky local icons like The Real Jerk and Casa Mendosa to development makes me appreciate small corners of connection and innovation like Longboard Living. This post is in the true spirit of how I imagined my blog, discovering art in an unusual place and encouraging us to value it.

Skateboard art gives a variety of people the opportunity to express their creativity in a unique and useful way and earn a bit of money in the process.  It’s a low-tech business, offering productive work to young people with a low-tech product that gets people active and on their feet

Smart economists forecast that small businesses are going to be a key element in our financial recovery.   So, a shout out to Ryan Rubin and the gang at Longboard Living for their contribution to the Toronto community. 

Blog 4, December 2011

Meeting Joan Erikson in the spring of 1989 was an immensely important milestone in the development of my ideas about the value of using art forms to help people with psychiatric illness connect and find a place in the world.  We started communicating by letter about a year before and I finally worked up the courage to ask if she would be part of a film about her work.  My partner Les Nirenberg and I invited her to Toronto in June to shoot it - produced and directed by our company Mental Health Library.

Joan was born in Canada, had been away for over 70 years and relished the thought of a return visit. Her father had been an Anglican clergyman in Napanee and Joan’s early rebellious nature led her to run away from Bishop Strachan School in Toronto (she asked if we could drive past it on our way to the airport before she left) to explore the world of modern dance.  She met Erik, who was studying psychoanalysis with Freud, at a masked ball in Vienna and they married in 1930.  They came to the US in 1950; Erik taught at Harvard, Yale and University of California at Berkley, and for many years they led a bi-coastal life, balancing three children with their work. During the time spent at Berkley, they worked together on their eight-cycles of human development. which has maintained a central position in subsequent formulations of psychological theory.

In 1951 Erik was appointed Director at the Austen Riggs Centre in Stockbridge Mass and soon after, Joan became Director of Activities. In her characteristically modest way, she describes it ” Well, I was a wife and my husband went to work there so I looked around for something to do.”  Her humility didn’t in any way lessen her strong belief in the dignity of people with mental illness.  She always loved to say that in the studio sessions, “they aren’t patients, they’re artists, they shouldn’t be observed and diagnosed, they should be allowed to experiment, explore and enjoy themselves.”

At the time we met, I had been working on the inpatient psychiatry unit at Toronto General Hospital for about five years, involving students from the Ontario College of Art, writers through a Canada Council program and dancers from York University in sessions with our patients.  I was establishing my ideas about the value of what these individual artists contributed and defining the difference between what we were doing and art, dance or music therapy - valuable disciplines but not what was needed in our setting.  Meeting Joan Erikson not only introduced me to the pure joy of her wonderfully generous and imaginative spirit but also provided me with a very solid framework of support for the use of creative activities so I could move ahead with energy and confidence.

The wisdom of her perceptions lingers with me from many of the conversations we had both on and off camera.  She spoke often of the importance of play, how we as adults need to maintain our ability to play in order to be creative, and how children must be allowed time to play so they can develop the strength and potential of their imaginations and their inner worlds. She also had very clear notions about the value of art forms in and of themselves, not as diagnostic tools, but as a way to make connections with the environment by exploring colour, shape, form and technique, and most of all, as a way to have fun.

As well as fostering creativity in other people, Joan was a practicing artist; her jewelry has been exhibited at MoMA; she wrote poetry and was the author of seven books… and she always moved with the willowy grace of a dancer!  My last visit with her was in the summer of 1996 at her home on Cape Cod.  She died in 1997 at 95, leaving all of us who were fortunate enough to know her richer for her friendship and inspiration.

Les Nirenberg died in January 2010, I miss both his collaboration and his formidable sense of humour.

This blog is dedicated with great fondness to them both.
Thanks once again to John Bilodeau.

Blog 3 November 2011

Frozen Assets, Diego Rivera, 1931

In 1930, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in NYC invited Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to be its second featured artist - the first was Henri Matisse. Because Rivera’s pieces weren’t portable, a studio was set up for him and he was commissioned to create works for the exhibit based on the recent stock market crash and resulting social conditions in the US, New York in particular.  A current show at MoMA reunites the gallery and the murals, with an ironic twist as real figures create a living reflection of economic disparity a few miles south in Zuccotti Park.

From the moment last summer when Adbusters threw down the gauntlet in Vancouver and mobilized people in New York, Toronto and 1500 centres around the continent and the world, much of the news has been animated by the unfair distribution of wealth in an inequitable global economy. In parks and public spaces people gathered, set up tents and civilizations were created overnight.  They struggled for consensus democracy in a version of the Greek agora – a public space that is always open where people can participate in a talk about ideas at any time.  They created horizontal structures with no official leaders, rotating facilitators and no fixed stated demands.  A grass roots combustion gave an urgency and passion to the discussions that policy-laden meetings about income distribution usually lack. Shock waves swept round corporate boardrooms and government circles.  Everyone began to realize that “They’re not going away”…for now anyway. 

When I went down to St James Park in Toronto I found a calm, benign, tidy setting, pretty different from what I remember of gatherings in the 60’s and 70’s.  It was friendly and accessible (more so than our city officials, as one local restaurant owner observed).  As well as the activists (I prefer this to protesters) there is a Diaspora of people like me -and maybe you - who support the cause of a more equal society. What we all seem to share is a wish to change the channel, without a very clear notion of how to do it. People gathered in St James Park, expressed themselves quietly and peacefully against the status quo in the financial industry. They don’t have ready answers to the losses of jobs, homes and retirement savings…but neither does anyone else.                                        

"What comes next?": an idyllic day in St James Park

The Occupation has given rise to some common responses   People have been frustrated with the lack of clarity of purpose and demands, Democracy is uncomfortable, sometimes messy, and anxiety provoking. We’re not good at tolerating uncertainty or ambiguity and patience isn’t our long suite (not mine anyway). My friend Ron Shirtliff (fellow admirer of Marx…both Karl and Groucho) sent around an urgent reminder recently to “be thankful for youth…who may succeed where our generation has failed.”  It’s an uphill battle to change a system from below when most regimes operate on a top down model and the people in charge have an investment in the status quo. The Egyptians are discovering that the transition to civilian rule is made difficult by not having a group prepared to guide it…the old order eviscerated or abolished the institutions that could do so. The Occupiers don’t have any solutions, but at least a process has begun, the channel has been changed. If Marshall McLuhan was here he might say, “Their presence is the message.”  And I think this movement is too big to fail!

Some people saw our homegrown Occupiers as copycats, feeling that our Canadian system had somehow escaped or avoided the recent and more long standing disparities and chaos that exist in the US.  It’s a question of degree rather than difference though and if you have any doubts about that, take a walk along Bloor Street and look at the homeless people gazing wistfully into the windows of passing BMW’s.  Just this morning I saw a young dude getting out of his sleeping bag in the doorway of Tiffany’s.                                                                   

There’s no economic farness here and there hasn’t been for many years.

The Occupiers have a mammoth job on their hands to keep the enthusiasm and momentum that was galvanized by being in a group with people’s eyes and ears tuned to their agenda. The movement is more an idea than a location and staying in a public place as a group was beginning to be a problem anyway for many reasons, not just complaints from neighbours and the wish of city officials for control and hygiene. The need for housekeeping began diluting the effectiveness of the group. Adbusters’ editor Kalle Lasn said, “the chessboard has been overturned and now a new game begins!”   

What’s next? Will the Occupiers disperse and things go back to where they were before? I sure hope not. Let’s trust that this is only the end of the beginning.

Still depending on John Bilodeau for technical help...thanks John