blue skies, red earth & tall pines, with Sharada Eswar, is a multi-disciplinary, intergenerational project that explores stories, literal and metaphorical, about the various borders people cross throughout their lives. Through artist facilitated workshops in storytelling, visual arts, music and other artistic disciplines, community members will bring the theme of borders and crossings to life with the recognition that borders can not only be geographic, but also linguistic, religious, racial, emotional, psychological and cultural.
Updates
blue skies, red earth & tall pines is back for Jumblies 2023-24 season, with workshops and activities at The Ground Floor, and with partners in Toronto and Brampton. The Gather Round Singers will be rehearsing new musical works by Suba and Sharada Eswar to be performed as part of a culminating event in June 2024, moving to 3 locations: The Ground Floor, Rose Theatre Brampton, and Cedar Ridge Creative Centre in Scarborough. As well as musical works, this event will include other performance elements, an evolving multi-media installation, showcase of several years of project art work, and more.
As part of the blue skies, red earth & tall pines project we have been working on a podcast where we invite the community to share their border crossing stories.
blue skies, red earth & tall pines:
A BORDER CROSSING PODCAST
As they move, borders become an opportunity to express, to share space and to show empathy in another’s space.
When does a border become a border?
Listen to Sam Egan share his border crossing experiences in our first episode.
(available on our website on Tuesday, January 10th).
Episode 1 :
In our first episode, our General Manager, Sam Egan, shares his border crossing experiences.
Click Here for Past Workshops
SHARADA ESWAR
Playwright, storyteller, singer and arts educator, Sharada Eswar’s work spans across multi disciplines and art forms. A graduate in Literature Studies, she trained to be a writer and a storyteller. Simultaneously she also immersed herself in Carnatic Music (south Indian classical music) in Chennai, India. She also took to many other styles including Hindustani Classical (Patiala Gharana) Rabindra Sangeet, Abhang and European. While maintaining her Veena studies, her interest shifted to the voice and storytelling. She was part of the team representing India at the India Abroad show in Paris and New York. She was also one of the three chosen by the Centres Culturels des Lions Club de Paris to present Indian culture in Normandy, France. Since then, she has been performing and teaching in Toronto and internationally, drawing on her own South Asian ancestry and heritage. A published children’s author, Sharade has recently been OAC’s Cultural Animato in Mississauga/Peel Region and is currently the Assistant Artistic Director of Jumblies.
LISA HIRMER
Lisa Hirmer (Guelph) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across visual media, social practice, performance and writing. She is primarily concerned with collective relationships—that which exists between things, rather than simply in them—in communities, publics and other assemblies of people as well as in human relationships with the more-than-human world.
SID SHARP
Sid is an artist and illustrator from Toronto who makes drawings, paintings, and comics. They are mostly interested in folklore, horror stories, and finding good sticks for their stick collection. Sid attended OCAD University, works in a bookstore, and published The Wolf Suit, their first graphic novel for kids, with Annick Press in October 2022.
