creative forces

Blog # 143…July 2023

 

I’ve lost enough of my pandemic twitchiness about crowds to venture into small theatres and galleries… had almost forgotten how wonderful creative imagination at work can be.

At the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto recently, in her one- woman show She’s Not Perfect, Fatuma Adur encourages us not to beat ourselves up for not being perfect – even to relish the joys of mediocrity. She’s a Somali/Canadian living here, a Black Muslim woman doing well as a cultural figure, sometimes subjected to the pressure of being a model both in her original country and here. She raps and jokes about longing for the freedom to be ordinary and maybe even screw up occasionally.

I’m often thinking about what we consider to be disability and was gently jolted by a friend the other day when I made a thoughtless remark from my perch of privilege and unconscious prejudice. Since then I’ve come up with a term - superabled - for people existing outside of the mainstream in some way. And I’m reminded of an actual stream, moving fast, with the most interesting things growing in the calm silt at the edges

Such is the case with Alex Bulmer and her latest work Perceptual Archeology at the Crow Theatre, a piece designed for all of us and including people with visual impairment.  Alex developed retinitis pigmentosa in her early 20’s and found gradually that she needed to shift her visual imagination to employ her other senses. Describing and using this experience, her one- woman show takes us into her world of disruption and uncertainty, shifting our perception of both her world and our own.

Bracketing the Rumi show at the Aga Khan Museum, in a clever curatorial feat are two women artists, both Muslim, each interpreting the Sufi mystic poet’s themes of displacement and transience in their own  medium.

Iranian/Canadian Soheila Estahani transforms two high towers of shipping pallets, often used as platforms to transport goods, to capture the feeling of unbetweeness. Echoing Rumi’s writing of movement and transition and the lived experience of many people, the pallets are laser etched with geometric designs often seen in Persian culture. After the exhibition closes the pallets will return to circulation, resuming their role in a permanent state of movement.  

Hangama Amiri, an Afghan/Canadian fabric artist uses hanging panels to present images of the objects often lost by refugees forced suddenly to leave home:  a dinner table set with family china, a simple bag of local rice, a garden with  trees growing the delicious fruit they picked as children. These very personal objects tell us stories and hold memories for the people who left so much behind,

The Rumi exhibit runs until October, see it if you can!                You'll find that he was the originator of the story of  three people feeling different parts of an elephant in the dark, all coming to different conclusions about what it was, also how he's revered by Brad Pitt, Beyonce and Coldplay.                                      

For me, a moving sight at the Aga Khan was a group of school kids on a tour, little girls in head scarves, little boys with patkas and others in ordinary kid gear, but different skin colours...that's my Toronto.

Back in August, deep into summer.