Jumblies Theatre, Making Room Community Arts, Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre and Fixt Point Studio are pleased to present: A City Arts Convergence
Thursday June 23, 2011, 5:00 to 9:00pm
- the launch of Hunger and Wholeness: a Making Room and PARC collaboration,
- PARC Painters: a visual arts exhibition and sale by PARC members,
- Living Archives Presentation: Parkdale stories in video.
- Vancouver Emissary: a presentation by Savannah Walling, Artistic Director of Vancouver Moving Theatre, about her community arts projects in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
5:00 – 7:00 pm – Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre, 1499 Queen St. W. – Exhibitions, Installation, Free Reception and Refreshments
7:00 – 9:00 pm – Fixt Point Studio, 1550 Queen St. W. – Presentation with Savannah Walling, Artistic Director Vancouver Moving Theatre – Evening Refreshments (thanks to Michelle Pursley) – PWYC Admission and Drinks, Limited Seating, RSVP Recommended.
PLEASE CONTACT: info@jumbliestheatre.org or 416 203 8428
Savannah Walling is a theatre artist trained in dance, mime and music who has worked for 35+ years as a producer, playwright, director, choreographer and interdisciplinary performer. Since 1983, she has been the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Vancouver Moving Theatre, an inner city Vancouver-based theatre / community arts company based in the Downtown Eastside, which has produced several large-scale community-engaged productions: In The Heart of A City – The Downtown Eastside Community Play, Downtown Eastside Romeo and Juliet, We’re All In This Together, and, for 8 years so far, the annual Heart of The City Festival. Savannah has participated since 2003 as a core member of the Canadian community play movement. www.vancouvermovingtheatre.com
Hunger and Wholeness includes Portraits of Silence – a series of large scale photographs of PARC members and friends sitting together in postures of reflection mounted on to outside spaces around Parkdale and Sparks that Fly, which transforms the PARC basement with a series of lanterns and light boxes that bring together photography, writing and mixed media art, in order to capture some of the “sparks” that fly when artists and community members come together. This event marks the end of a two-year process involving more than fifty PARC members and eight artists including Artistic Director Michael Burtt, Lead Artist Joshua Barndt and Photographer Patrick Struys. Making Room Community Arts brings together people, places and things that have previously been kept apart: noise and silence, action and contemplation, rest and movement, artists and non-artists, the housed and the under-housed – through the process of collaborative art-making. http://www.making-room.org.
The Living Archive Project is an arts-based PARC initiative supporting and continuing a tradition of storytelling as a form of survival. We work to bring the documents of PARC’s past – photos, videos, written accounts – back into the hands of our members, and run video, performance and scrapbooking workshops to develop the tools of storying the present. We are working to create an accessible digital archive of PARC’s history for the membership; an archive that members can add new stories to as they make their own films, write their own histories and perform their own narratives. The Living Archive Project seeks to reclaim Parkdale for the survivors through storytelling. To get involved or learn more, email gepstein@parc.on.ca.
Parkdale Art Group is a collective of artists who meet weekly at PARC. Our work is a diverse expression of who we are; consumer survivors, activists, painters, musicians, poets, strong individuals. PARC artists seek to build bridges within the community by sharing their struggles and joys through visual means.
Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC) is a drop-in community centre that imagines a world where extreme poverty no longer exists; where everyone lives with dignity, safety and enough resources and where people can achieve their potential. A board of directors governs PARC, half of whom must be members of PARC while the other half come from the wider community.
Fixt Point is a performance-based company dedicated to the creation of site-specific spectacles that inspire audiences to imagine change, founded in 2005 by Artistic Director Lisa Marie DiLiberto. Fixt Point’s Tale of A Town will be part of Theatre Passe Muraille’s 2011/12 season. Fixt Point also operates an arts in Parkdale. www. fixtpoint.com.
Photo Credits: 1. PARC members with Making Room, Photo: Patrick Struys; 2. WE ARE THE PEOPLE (2011)
Producer: Vancouver Moving Theatre, Sue Blue, Elwin Xie, Dalannah Gail Bowen, Mike Richter, Photo: David Cooper, Design: John Endo Greenaway.
Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Trillium Foundation for supporting various aspects of this event.