Jumblies Theatre is proud to present:

FINDING COMMON GROUND
 January 4, 11, 18, 25, Feb. 1, Feb. 2, 2013 – 1:00 – 5:00pm, plus a final feast on Feb. 2
Workshop Facilitators: Lee Maracle and Victoria Freeman
Location: an accessible Toronto location TBA
Cost: $200 – a few subsidized spaces still available. Please ask.

In Finding Common Ground we will explore artistic collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. The task will be twofold: to help each other in a process of decolonizing internally and to ground ourselves here in Toronto, on this land with its particular history of human and other-than-human presence. Our aim is to transform ourselves and our interactions – as human beings and as artists.

We will use the Indigenous pedagogy of the sharing circle to explore our relations with ancestors and the past, our connections to intergenerational trauma and internalized racism, the process of “facing ourselves” as the Sto:lo understand it, and reconciling worldviews. We will draw on our various forms of artistic expression to acknowledge our common ground and all our relations.

Lee Maracle, of Salish and Cree ancestry is a member of the Stó:lō Nation  and is a celebrated author, poet, educator, storyteller, performing artist, and orator. The author of a number of critically acclaimed literary works including: Sojourners and Sundogs, Ravensong, Bobbi Lee, Daughters Are Forever, Will’s Garden, Bent Box, and I Am Woman, she is also the co-editor of a number of anthologies including the award winning publication, My Home As I Remember and co-author of Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. She was one of the founders of the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, BC, and is currently Cultural Director of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto, and an instructor in the Aboriginal Studies Dept. at the University of Toronto. As elder in residence at the University of Toronto’s First Nations House, she mentors young people on personal and cultural healing and reclamation.

Victoria Freeman Victoria Freeman author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, which was shortlisted for the 2000 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. She defended her PhD dissertation, “‘Toronto Has No History!’ Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City,” in 2010 and currently teaches Aboriginal history at York University. With Sto:lo writer and elder Lee Maracle, she developed and co-taught a groundbreaking Aboriginal Studies course called The Politics and Process of Reconciliation at the University of Toronto from 2010-2012. They  have since conducted workshops together for The Meeting Place: Truth and Reconciliation Toronto 2012 conference, Canadian Roots Exchange, and the BC Health Authority. Victoria is a member of the Toronto Native Community History Project, and is currently writing a book, Retard, about her relationship with her late sister, who had Down Syndrome, and a sequence of poems, Gift for Gift, in which she talks back to archival Toronto historical texts. She studied modern dance with Elizabeth Langley and was as co-writer of a 2010 workshop production of Let Our Ghosts Be Spirits, directed by Jani Lauzon.

To Register and for more Information: please e-mail info@jumbliestheatre.org or go to http://www.jumbliestheatre.org/newsroom/advanced-artfare-workshops to download the registration form (same form for all the workshops listed).