 Welcome back, everyone. Just stand here. Don't hold on to the microphone. So there goes my whole rock and roll performance, just right down the drain. I'm here, my name is Marie Lopez and I work for the Vancouver Parks Board and I'm here to introduce the afternoons, 10 by 10 speakers. So again, we're going to be listening to a group of artists, organizers, professionals in community-engaged practice. And then following that, we will have our witness reports and then open up the floor for a larger discussion with this group and we hope to get you all out of here by about 4.15. So without further delay, I'd like to introduce our first speaker for the afternoon, Jay Dodge, who is the artistic producer of Boca del Lupo Theatre Company, one of Vancouver's most innovative and dynamic theater companies. Boca specializes in experimental theater productions and spectacular outdoor presentations, focusing on collaboration with international, national, and regional artists. Jay, I can't see you, but you're out there. So here I'll try to get this sorted here. Can everybody hear me okay if I just talk like this? Okay, so unfortunately I didn't have the benefit of being here this morning and being able to know whether or not anything I'm saying is relevant to the speeches that happened earlier or if I'm contradicting them or saying anything provocative or repeating something that somebody else said. But what I'm going to go through is sort of, I guess, my personal beliefs on how art and culture intersect with community and then talk about one specific project that I feel we did a reasonably successful job of bringing them together. So first my belief, it is my belief that art can be a powerful force in the creation of great communities when great art is created with the community. And I bristle at the idea that community and art when termed together become an excuse for amateurism or a lesser quality of art. Not that I don't believe in a vibrant amateur community. I am a amateur guitarist and amateur photographer. I get tremendous joy from those things. My father does half a dozen shows in community theater every year. I love it. He loves it. It's fantastic, but I think not having been here this morning, what we're talking about here is something a little bit different. As a professional arts practitioner, I'm theoretically engaged in the definition of our contemporary culture through my work. And I think that part of my job is to engender community through my work, along with many other things that art is good at, of course. I don't believe that this process of engaging with community takes us off the hook for the quality of the work that we're making. I guess that goes back to my first statement. I think that if we set out to achieve a lower bar because we're involved in some sort of community engagement, I think everybody loses. I think that we don't strive to the excellence that our culture and community can be. I believe that we don't. I think that people leave not with a better, stronger sense of community and of culture. I think it undermines that if we don't strive for excellence when this idea of art and culture and community intersect. There are many, many great examples, I think, of when it's very successful. I mean, I'm going to draw my own experience. I'm a theater practitioner, so my examples are from the theater world, but we can look to organizations like the Leaky Heaven Circus. They create fantastic work with engaging with community members, everything from dogs to people with developmental disabilities to professional artists, and all without, in my opinion, undermining the excellence and sort of the point of the art that they're making, which is a social commentary of sorts, as well as tremendously entertaining. I think they're building community. They're creating great art all at the same time. There's other great examples, like looking at Marie here. I mean, I've seen a number of really interesting works at the Roundhouse recently, people like, you know, Theater Replacement and Radix. I mean, they're doing fantastic work there that I think does both of those things. It engages the community, but it engages the community in the creation of great art, or at least attempting to create great art, knowing that I'm not always successful, but I do try. And so, here I'm going to just start a little slideshow here onto the piece that I'd like to talk about, a piece called La Maria. I'm going to hit. All right, so I think I've departed a little bit with tradition in that I don't have 10 slides, I have one slideshow. So forgive me that. La Maria was a piece that we did in 2011. It was part of the Vancouver 125th. It was part of the Push Festival. And it happened over four days on the rain-slicked streets of Vancouver in January on the 0-100 block of Water Street in Gastown. Over 6,700 people came down over the four days. They all came down, you know, bundled up with their umbrellas and took part in this unique performance installation. In my opinion, the show was remarkable in its accomplishment. It involved six storefronts, three other scenes that were happening in the streets. There was, you know, just some of the numbers. There was nine video projectors with sur-titles that were telling stories that were originally written by an Argentinian director, but that had been adapted with a local dramaturge to stories of the people that were, you know, within the fictional world that we created down in Gastown. And every night it was akin to setting up and tearing down a, you know, a medium-sized on-location movie set, shutting down traffic, cabling, hundreds of feet of cabling, setting up, you know, lights, all these kinds of things. So not to toot my own horn, but it was like, it was a big thing. It was a lot of work every night, and it took a lot of effort in order to make that happen. And so what's so great about this large and handsome project, you know, that's not really what we're talking about here except that, except for what it took in terms of community engagement and involvement in order to pull it off. And not just to pull it off, but I think it was much more than just the four days of a handsome production in Gastown. And that's what I'll get into here. So, you know, who was involved? This piece involved a whole host, I suppose, different communities, you know, defined, communities are defined in so many different ways. But we worked with downtown East Side Residence. There was 10 downtown East Side Residence that were a part of creating and running the show. We worked with the Gastown Business Association. These were, you know, Gastown storefronts that we were running on the streets of Gastown. We worked with, you know, six retail stores. We worked with SFU Woodwards. We worked with SFU School for the Contemporary Arts. And now this is just, that's just the neighborhood community that we were working with. And out of that we also worked with the two other professional training programs in the city, UBC and Studio 58. And this was an unprecedented coming together of these three training institutions in the city to formally work together towards creating a project. We worked with the Push Festival. We worked with the City of Vancouver. We worked with the Vancouver film industry. And we worked with professional artists from Argentina and Vancouver. So we brought together, from those groups, we brought together 60 people, 60 people from disparate communities to work together to create something that at first glance was sort of a near impossible task, you know, all towards the creation or the striving to create great art. And this is something that perhaps make clear. I mean, these are, when I was looking at what we're talking about here today and you look at community and you look at culture and I know there's a lot of different definitions of what culture is and what community is. And just to be clear from my perspective of what I'm interested in, I suppose, is working together as a community or communities to create a collective contemporary culture, whatever that means. So, how did this sort of, you know, what was the result, I suppose, of bringing all these communities together? You know, what was extraordinary? How did what came of it, I suppose, was the next thing that came to mind that might be of interest? And what you're seeing behind you here, like I said, it's one slideshow. It's just an example, but these are, this slideshow is put together from a simple query on Flickr. So, of the 6,700 people that came down there, there are thousands and thousands of photographs that proliferated the social media world. You know, Flickr is one site, there were many others. It sort of spiraled out, I think, from the 6,700 people there. There was tens of thousands that experienced, you know, sort of a transformation of perhaps a street, a part of their city that they had known in one way that would now be seen in a different light. And that's just, that's one example of it. Of course, there's, you know, it's social media isn't everything, but it's easy to put up on a computer here on the screen. Of the 60 people that were involved, the 10 members of the downtown Eastside, the 30-odd students, the 20-odd professional artists from both Argentina and Vancouver, many of them still work together now in different capacities. Boca de Lupo in particular, of that group of 10 from the downtown Eastside, there's two of them that are part of our regular group that come together whenever we're creating work. One of the students that worked on that show is now an intern with us. You know, those are just some examples of, I think, tangible examples of how I define community, anyway. And now I think, and I touched on this before, and I'm not sure where I am in terms of my clock. One minute, perfect. That's great. But, so I guess just to sum up, I mean, that's sort of a lot of, I guess sort of facts and figures and some pictures, and it seems to have frozen up on this one, but it's a good one. Is that from that, I think there was a transformation that took place. Working together, bringing together several communities. Like, it took us about 12 months to bring this all together towards those four days. And from that, there was a lasting legacy, but there was also sort of a transformation. There was people in the downtown Eastside, for instance, that would come thinking that it was a film set and say, oh, what's the film? Expecting that they would have to walk around, but instead they were invited in. And saw this, were sort of embraced in this art making through, you know, participating as a viewer in a situation where they're used to be turned away. And then there's all the other people in the neighborhood. I mean, that's one example. All the other people in the neighborhood who came there, they see the streets now in a different way. The Gastown Business Association is, we met with them afterwards, and they're saying, well, yeah, you know, maybe we can move away from the show and shine. Maybe we, you know, maybe we can, maybe this can be a place where art happens, where we explore who we are as a community. What is our collective contemporary culture? And I think that happened on many levels with all of the different partners that I listed there and the individuals that were part of those various communities that came together for this one extraordinary project. So there you have it. Our next speaker is Sabine Silverberg, who is a registered art therapist and expressive art therapist who has been working for the past decade on intercity, excuse me, community-based healthcare through the Dr. Peter Center. She teaches at Vancouver Expressive Arts here at Emily Carr and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Hello. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today, and I have a cold, so my synapses are not firing as fast as I would like them to be. And I might use my paper a bit more than I had hoped for. What my title referred to is really the large element of the work that I'm involved with, which is uncertainty. And this visual is a visual metaphor for most of my life. I know usually about one ingredient and then as a large open space to figure out what to do with. When I came to Canada about 17 years ago, I shifted my life. I used the opportunity to change, to shift my life from geography to what I wanted for it to be most central, which were art and people. And where I saw that path most clearly opening up was in getting trained in first in art therapy and then in expressive arts therapy. And the distinction might not matter to you as much and maybe it doesn't really matter at all, but it exists out there in the field. And learning about how to use the arts to facilitate processes and relationships with others. However, as I know, and as you know, every single encounter is different and the shaping of the encounter will depend on all the ingredients and every relational opportunity. What that basically means is we have the arts and we have the relationship and both are creative processes. I've been fortunate to work as a counselor at the Dr. Peter Center for about 12 years now and I suspect that quite a few probably know the place just to lay a bit of a foundation of background. Just please bear with me. The Dr. Peter Center is an HIV AIDS organization with a residence and day health program. About 400 people are registered in the day health program. We have a small team of six to seven clinical members of nurses, counselors, arts and music therapists and we see about 120 people a day. Our clients are largely from the downtown east side and consider themselves as living with the impact of marginalization and are considered, as you all know as well, BC's most vulnerable citizens. Besides HIV and AIDS, they're often usually living with active addiction, with diagnosed, undiagnosed mental health concerns, with recurrent homelessness, with inadequate living conditions. Most of them, if not all of them, have a history of abuse and neglect. The impact of marginalization in short is that it renders people invisible to themselves and to others and that it deepens a sense of displacement quite often and of not belonging or mattering. One of the approaches that shape the work at the center is harm reduction and what that means in brief is compassionate pragmatism with the brief slogan of meeting people where they're at. Which we know, you know, lucky for us that we live in Vancouver is prevalent for so many services in the downtown east side. In short, as a pragmatic work designation it means acceptance and engagement. And what that translates into is offering a place of belonging and one of discovering and nurturing strengths and resources. The idea to bring art students, as you can see here with one of our participants, Bill, who is a fabulous tour guide every time there's a new group of students living at the center, the idea to bring the art students into the environment was to multiply the opportunity to engage with the arts and imagination and to give each group the opportunity to meet the other. So by doing that, hopefully creating an exchange of imagination, of life stories, of learning, of collaboration and of leaving your usual comfort zone in relating and thereby letting go of stereotypes. The students are asked to work within an ethical framework and that is really consistent of one core premise which is listening as an act of respect and thereby drawing on relationship over production. So if in doubt, let go of the great creative idea and go back to the basics of connecting. What those pathways usually look like as I'm sure many of you have talked about this morning when I wasn't able to be here, unfortunately, is that it looks like there's largely three pathways to entering. One is to find a shared entry point of interest and developing that into a collaboration. Two is to bring an art piece, a project or a modality for the student to bring to the center something that they're enthusiastic about so that the spark might catch and people who feel interested can join and find a path of collaboration from there and three following a participant interest or a client interest into a project. And I'll give you some examples for those collaborations. This is one of the outcomes of one of those cores situated at the Dr. Peter Center and just to clarify this for a student to get a tattoo is that's not my usual expectation of a course outcome. But what happened is that two people recognized each other in the crowd, a student with tattoos, a client with tattoos, launched into a conversation and he drew a rose for her and which is one of his preferred tattoo drawings that he likes to engage with. He's often the community, within this therapeutic community, he's often the one who develops the shape for others to later get a tattoo off. So she was really quite enthused by the rose and came back on the last course day with a tattoo on her forearm and he wasn't on site. He was actually at the time in the hospital. So I took a photo of her arm and the image and when he returned to the center weeks later in quite a hopeless shape, I showed him the picture and it made a huge difference for his outlook. It was like this brief moment of a sense of something mattered, something I did, something I left within this connection made a difference to somebody. Another opportunity, Bahar, brought in material to make baskets and Bill really liked the idea and came up with his own repurposing of the basket into a bicycle helmet. And this is an exercise and Anja, one of the art students, found Jose who is one of our participants of frequently paints in the studio and they spent the whole morning portraying each other. Which led into a long conversation in multiple story lines. Unfortunately they exchanged the portraits after so I was able to take a photo of her image but he had taken his home already and I didn't try to make him go through the effort of bringing it back to the center. When the students leave the environment has changed and this is one of the few small visible impacts people are left with. Somebody has a whole new outlook onto Vancouver. He redesigned his shades with a skyline of the city. And what the impact in the environment for almost any therapeutic invitation or effort we put out there looks like is usually a small act of visibility. We are not expecting any grand outcomes but what we are aiming for is connection and through the connection to help people regain a sense of agency and supporting each other. And as we know the community in the downtown east side has a fabulous social support mutual social support and bonding network which often reemerges and with some support in the center also kind of then often also not usually leads into increased self-care self-worth and a sense of belonging and mattering. One project I'm engaging with myself is introducing photography into my work there and trying to find out what people are actually interested in if they have access to cameras and support with the technicalities of it and I don't give them a project to focus on but just follow what interest might emerge. And Bill again, I actually saw him just before I left this morning to come here and he offered to come with me and co-present and I told him I only have 10 minutes so that wasn't for today that wasn't the right opportunity but he is fabulous at finding and losing cameras so the main point for him really is to look like a photographer and I think that's something I really respect because it means that actually having access to a camera and being seen with a camera is an achievement for quite a few people living with addiction because it's a precious object that could easily be sold and it means you're somebody with a purpose and a role for that moment in time you're not just somebody who has nothing to do you have an interest and he loved especially posing with this camera because it has this whole professional feel and didn't know how to actually operate it and it really didn't matter and then Rob all of the clients and participants actually insist on being called by their real name rather than being anonymized how it's often practiced in the therapies to maintain confidentiality they all really want to be visible and so one of my observations has been that other than people don't always like to focus on what healthcare suggests is important so it might not be HIV or addiction or mental health concerns or homeless that are important but longing for beauty for finding light for perceiving things in a different way for learning how to look more closely and understanding their own aesthetic attractions and in the end always coming back to a sense of community and looking for a larger social body to present their work within and the importance of identifying with geographically and socially with their network in the downtown east side I just have to check to see if I have my conclusions available so in this sense I think at the core of it all lies listening and following in the very intimate personal act of meeting somebody and for me the arts are a way of meeting the other that relies on all the senses and thereby offers a much more intimate way of knowing each other and in my experience that leads to the wish to share, the wish to connect the wish to spread out and to build community and hopefully I hope that health contexts open an opportunity and an entryway into transcending itself so poetic nomad as a path of uncertainty but with the arts so we have really a lot to gain thank you Delia Brett and Dalek are the artistic directors of Machine Noisy a contemporary dance company based here in Vancouver with a mandate to foster the research and creation of innovative performances that transcend traditional notions of dance and theater cool so and it's Dalek that's okay yeah so this is it so we're a Vancouver based contemporary dance company and we were just talking that we realized we've been working together for 20 years in some capacity we both have a background in theater and we both have extensive training in contact improvisation so it becomes the basis of our work it's the the underlining status of our base I'm just going to move this down a little bit so as a company we're interested in pushing boundaries and to do this we look for different ways to approach dance sometimes it's working with artists and other disciplines and for this project we're about to talk about we actually wanted to work with non-professional performers and so we so we yeah we conceived of a production called Law of Proximity which was a community engaged project that we presented in the summer in August this year and the project employed eight queer youth between the ages of 19 and 24 and with this project we were interested in creating a situation in which we could mentor the youth in the scales of contact and improvisation and together we could collectively create a performance we were also really interested in understanding while educating ourselves on the issues, the current issues for around identity and around queer issues and we were also just really interested in challenging ourselves to work with non-professionals and then I would say that finally we were wanting to demonstrate for our dance peers that you could still make high quality aesthetic art and also be engaged in social politics so that brings us to the process so we worked for five weeks with the youth and on the six week we actually did four performances we worked for five days a week and for the first hour and a half of the day we taught them a contact improvisation class and then we did a four hour rehearsal which we paid them for and then we also worked with some new media artists Sammy Chen Stefan Smolovic who brought in the interactive technology that we worked with Yeah, I should say we should say first that we created partnerships with community and with the queer arts festival and that was really significant to how we before we jump into the process and into all this talk about interactive technology I realized we didn't say that and with those partnerships we were able to prepare for this process we were able to conduct a brief workshop the year previously through the queer arts festival for queer youth and just kind of get a sense of what was involved we used those resources to access to queer youth we had discussion groups we had these organizations use word of mouth to get the idea that we were proposing that we were going to create this performance around them and for them and with them so we were able to get quite a lot of people interested and then that got pared down to eight based on mostly on the availability of the youth their ability to commit to the whole six weeks of production So now getting on to interactive technology one of our ideas about that was that we would create we would give the youth themselves access to technology so that they could have really active choice making and they could also the whole sort of with the right word the whole sort of mystique of the theater could become transparent so they could engage this technology themselves in the middle of the show you could see the choices that they're making in advertising the performance itself and so we worked with Stefan and he decided to use an Xbox controller in his system that he designed called the conaxis in which you trigger light and sound with your body in front of the connect box we had a Wii controller signaling triggering the camera and sound and we had an iPad that they used during the performance to designate spaces and shapes and categories and stuff like that and an iPhone that triggered music sometimes and a surveillance camera that we used to in this box to see what was going on inside the box and our idea around these particular technologies is that we're hoping that the kids or I shouldn't say kids because they really weren't adults we're already somewhat reversed in this kind of technology that was the assumption we made interestingly enough they were they were all really not so it was a learning process for everybody so that kind of gets us back to this notion of that politically and socially engaged art can also be really good so we wanted to work with this technology to challenge ourselves as artists to continue growing we didn't see this as something in which we were downing our own process down in order to work with people lesser than us we considered the youth are equals and we wanted to create a situation in which we were all growing as artists so them as well as ourselves yeah good moving on we had a very diverse group within the eight we diverse in a lot of different ways we thought we were going to get a lot of youth with no kind of training in any kind of performance experience and we actually got a huge diversity of experience we had some clowns we had some physical theater actors doing dancers what else do we have drag artists yeah so it was quite fascinating the skills that they brought into the process and we were also really happy with the spectrum of queer that was represented during the process we had two transgendered people we had people who identified as bisexual we had people who identified as non-binary we had people who identified as asexual we had people who felt they were gay and some people who just felt like they were odd they were weird and that made them queer so yeah so it kind of expanded our own our personal idea of what queer was and then actually we realized we were in the same category too very good non-binary is a word that's used to describe somebody or some people who try to think outside of male female or just opposites outside of dualities so they're neither he or she so there's one person that we worked with who wanted to be called they as in the pearl what are the most important things that came out of this whole process was the idea of pronouns and how important it was for each of the youth to be identified as a proper pronoun and how much time they spent trying to find the right label for themselves to really identify themselves and how important that was and how brave that was in terms of being somebody who's queer in this very binary heterosexual environment somebody who can go actually no I'm a he and to really challenge that system so that was a huge learning curve for us so part of the process was working with training the youth in contact dance wanna talk about that we practice contact dance and it's a really significant part of our creative process but we also use it because it's a really it actually is a very exciting way to explore communication it requires that you it applies physics to dancing to moving and it requires shared weight shared exchange of energy of what else am I saying here you're saying it's a study in trust it's a study in trust so you have to trust yourself and you have to trust your partner you have to be clear with your communication of how you're interacting with your partner there's a lot of need for awareness of how you're coming how much energy you're giving in how you're receiving energy it's about being very alert so responding it just really opens up the body and the mind for communicating and it develops a kind of intimate connection between people finding intimacy in another way that's not necessarily sexual but at the same time very honest and very tangible and it's also it's very real so that's not representation what you see is what it is and it doesn't require any formal technical dance training so it felt like the right tool to give the youth in terms of finding a common language in which we could create this production on so we already used this word and it was a big, big, big part of this experience for us we spent like the first two weeks basically developing trust with the group so creating ensemble we worked a lot on skills to create to choreograph with to bring imagination to bring their own personal skills into the rehearsal process and it was always for us it was always about giving them the opportunity to offer us to include into the process and we also found that we had to trust ourselves in this process we were kind of over our heads in many ways we hadn't done a community engaged project before we weren't familiar with people with different kinds of ways of operating different political beliefs and we couldn't just make the same assumptions that we always make when we work as professional dancers to our own experiences and our own understanding of human beings and of communication and find new ways and new methodologies with everybody which within all this work we about two weeks into the process we had a big conflict with the group and it really came down to sort of their expectations about what they were going to get out of this process and what they wanted to put into it and what we were actually doing with the process in our opinion in the way that we work in the way we think it's kind of a friendly dictatorship we make the decisions and the dancers we work with provide the bodies to make the work but that's a sort of understanding that we have as dancers in the dance world and for this group it was very different a lot of them they push against those ideas of hierarchy and so we had to really negotiate with them around certain things like we're making decisions for the whole group because we're on the outside and we can see the larger picture and so we had to find ourselves being more transparent about why we were making decisions and we had to struggle about how we ask for things we had to explain ourselves a lot more than we normally would have to so it was quite a learning experience for us as well and then finally what we came up with was a really exciting production in which we were able to just really highlight the individual uniqueness of every performer on the stage we thought we were going to sort of delve into some deep and kind of lofty political issues that were relevant to queer youth at this time but we kind of found that the most exciting and engaging and interesting thing about it was just them so it was just putting them on the stage putting all their beautiful wilds, queerness on stage and having them negotiate that performance energy, honesty together and we felt like basically we learned a lot from that experience that it's humanity itself that's really the interesting thing about art making in general and that's what we're interested in as artists and it was very affirming I think we're done D.B. Boyko is a performer vocalist, composer and curator who has initiated and participated in many collaborative projects she is a specialist in experimental vocalization and is known throughout Canada for her practice and for the last 20 years she has been the director curator of new music at the western front Canada's most preeminent artist run center you know the job that you were going to give me? the job that you were going to give me? is that job done? okay howdy hopefully you were handed out a little package so while I'm giving some basic introductions you can take time to open it up and then you discover that you can't actually eat what's inside there if not put up your hand hopefully Cindy's got a bag she's wandering around there I'm over the moon I've been part of a project now for four years out of the round house community center it's part of a larger project called the arts and health project and I just to thank Jill Weaving Marie Lopez and Diana van der Veen who are who have been my guides as well as other fellow artists the arts and health project aims to develop creative artistic practice in a community of elders people who are dealing with chronic illness as well as isolation and so the project that I've been working on is called express your voice and it's a choir and it's an ongoing project which we create works together and so I admittedly I was a little snubbed that I was not able to actually provide sound so I thought we would actually create our own sound and have our own sense of experience with this so we're going to do a very basic deep listening exercise and this comes out of the work of Pauline Oliveros a woman out of the 1960s who was really at the vanguard of contemporary music practice building in ideologies around Buddhism and thoughtfulness and meditation it's also the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth who also is the forefather of contemporary music practice and a lot of these ideas apply so what I'm going to ask you to do is put these in your ear you will be able to hear kind of and just we're going to take a moment I'm giving up a moment of my 10 minutes somebody is probably going to take the hook away from me I'm sure and just listen to your own breath and if you feel there's some sound coming moving your lips whatever and let's just do that I'll turn my watch on okay I started to hear a little bit of sound coming from the room hang on to these they're good for a myriad of uses so that's a deep listening practice and really that's the basis of a lot of performative development the breath is the key aspect to making sound for vocalizing so I spent a lot of time teaching just the basic principles of that and it really creates a sense of heightened awareness about what is happening in our body and it also is a great vehicle for doing things like creative visualization in order to kind of source personal stories and so I do this on a weekly basis at the Roundhouse Community Center it happens over about 8 months and so I teach them principles like this I work a lot with improvisation to get them to generate sound and create material for a project that happens annually at the Roundhouse called Seniors Week and the other projects in the Arts and Health program include storytelling through theater, through puppetry there's literary works visual art and video storytelling and of course we specialize in the voice so the other thing that I use this exercise for is really a step towards what they were talking about is trust and trust is really key to helping people engage in something that's new to them and by just working with that simple idea they begin to watch themselves and not in a way that they're critical or judgmental about themselves but they're just watching and to me that's one of the most important things to mitigate uncertainty and uncertainty I think is a beautiful thing and really for me is the way to connect into art making what we don't know about and as people are reaching elderly ages there is a lot of uncertainty and so what we're trying to do is really engage them in a way of moving through the world where they can be flexible and they can embrace changes so this whole project has affected my own practice and it really has come about in my years as a curator in the past 10 years really feeling that the community has been very concealer certainly I'm in the contemporary music world but I would say at large and so I have been my own engagements on a curatorial level has been to start doing projects with kids and with people just coming out at universities and working with geographers right now and on my own personal practice is to work with vocal choirs and vocal work so I do have another choir called the Voice Over Line Choir which I developed in 2010 and that largely is inviting anybody who wants to come and make crazy sounds with me so a lot of this also bleeds over and there's a lot of interchange with this project that I work with out of the roundhouse so some of the objectives of this project of Express Your Voice is to develop a creative practice it's such a huge subject and it's still a contentious one for me but grab me in the lobby to talk about that it's about community building and as we move along it's about integrating with the larger community so I'm going to give you a few examples about this so in my work at the western front one of my fellow curators brought in Matte Benginero who's a Romanian artist who asked me to create a work which I worked with my other choir Voice Over Mind and he was very interested in the Chinese community and so the makeup of the group of Express Your Voice really includes a lot of different people and we've had simultaneous translation in that group and so I thought it would be great to feature them in this project and we can see there's Grace Chan Sylvia Kwong along with Shirley Sung who's hopefully in another photo here and we used Mandarin language in a spoken word style to work with chanting Sylvia actually has a background in Chinese opera so she was featured as a soloist in this and it was just fantastic to have them featured and stepping across cultural linguistic boundaries as well as putting them right into the artistic community so there you can see Shirley and we're going to talk about her in a couple of moments what has happened the bonus of when we started this four years ago we didn't realize that we were going to have to actually deal with translation in the class and the first year was a little bit rocky but it ran smoothly enough but what makes me begin to want to weep is that the sense of exchange that has happened within the group and some of those who would barely speak a word of English now are communicating with one another but they're actually really connected and they're affectionate and they get up and move across the room and hug one another and there really is a sense of them helping one another they're really eager to share their own sense of vulnerability and they're telling other stories of their daily life and they're really eager to help one another we have an elderly man Kurt Gersher who's 88 who's very fragile we all adore him and he's not always completely included in the picture but when he comes back a week later we know he's actually understood what's going on and these people are helping him out they're sort of reiterating some of the exercises or explaining things to him so let's see what else do we have here so there's Sylvia again you can see how wonderfully enthusiastic and engaged that she is in that performance just right in behind me Yvonne actually is a practicing actress in the community so there's a real mix of that and actually this group has changed keeps changing its enrollment but now I seem to have invited or they've invited themselves there are several writers and visual artists who are part of this group so it's interesting to see how this dynamic will change the practice within the group and how they help one another and it is a two way gradient there are no experts here's another project called Zuniqua Beneath the Forest Floor and through the Underworld and I did this through the western front a 125 project that's the VPL and this was kind of a WC fields project to go on the stage with children and animals well we had 150 kids from high school bands and Scott Goode who was the outgoing composer and residence created a piece we collaborated with William Wasden from Alert Bay and his gave us his expertise in the storytelling of this myth of a creature from the woods of Zuniqua I brought William into the seniors class for a session and they wouldn't let him go at the end of the class he was singing them all sorts of traditional and contemporary songs and they were really really curious about his about his community about the contemporary Aboriginal community particularly outside of the city and so they participated in this project I had my other choir Voice Over Mind and they joined in with this and so I'm always doing as much as I can to help everybody build their confidence have that sense of trust that they're going to take those risks and this time in this context I was really putting them through the grill to really have to deliver so I think some of them had a little bit of anxiousness but you can see here that they're still smiling as part of the rehearsal so here's some of these gals again these three have been with me for the past six years and it's pretty remarkable I adore them so the last anecdotal story so in here is a young fellow gay fellow Lewis who came to me through the western front and I asked him to join Voice Over Mind and here we were in rehearsal and following the event at the VPL I took my other choir, the Express Your Voice Choir out on a sound walk so it has some similarities to what our listening was except you're going outside and it really is a really heightened sense of awareness and that with their sense of exhilaration of having participated in this something happened and this pressure valve released and two things, Shirley talked about her sense of isolation and so she had not opened her mouth to speak a word of English and she talked about the fact that she was no longer at home washing dishes she recognized that she was part of a community and then she came up with this very poetic line about her experience of the sound walk and she said, when my foot touches the ground I feel closer to God and I was short of weeping in that moment and it was we took that, that became the material of a song for a piece that we performed in Seniors Week several months later and then Lewis became part of the discussion and we also have a downtown set who's part of this Express Your Voice choir and some of them are not fully retired and they're very active women and more acculturated and more aware of the artistic and cultural scene and so yet another confessional happened that one of them said she had run into Lewis after one of the rehearsals and had felt uncomfortable about his identity wearing a woman's coat and after having a conversation with him realized how remarkable he was and he is a remarkable young artist and there was just an avalanche of discussion and Marie Lopez had been telling me all the time we're waiting for these conversations to happen and I knew that I had hit the mother load and I had really nothing to do with it it was just the accumulation of them learning to be flexible and to be open to new ideas so just one personal note is that you know several months before Occupy happened I was having a conversation with a friend going you know I just I feel like I have nothing to do here and I feel paralyzed with what's happening in the entire world and it reminded me that really what this work for me is about my own sense of political activism and working with people and allowing them to transform and it's just a remarkable process and I'm thrilled to be part of it thank you Nicole Dextres is here to speak about the art is land network a collective that functions as a vital social network for artists engaged in the landscape to share ideas and opportunities and to find common ground for collaboration and partnerships today I'd like to talk to you about our first project which was the art and land exhibition and I'm a member of the art is land network which is a Vancouver based artist collective whose shared connection is the use of natural and repurposed materials to engage with the landscape our group acts as an artist which was the art and land exhibition which took place here on Granville Island in 2011 the project involved both culture and community on a variety of levels we created 11 outdoor installations integrated into the landscape of Granville Island with special attention given to making them accessible to the public we partnered with local community centers CMHC Emily Carr and the Fringe Festival once we decided to produce the exhibition we looked at the various local sites and community partners and finally decided on the Vancouver Fringe Festival during a meeting with CMHC here on Granville Island we were told that the fringe was looking to create a new facet to their festival which was site specific theater now our site specific art installations turned out to be a great fit for them some of our installations overlapped with fringe performances such as Shirley Webe's which consisted of two large concrete culverts donated by Ocean Cement here on the island the images on the right are from the play situated on the crane which is that site by alley theater called Lost in Place as most fringe shows were in the evening our installations helped animate the space during the day which you can see from the images on the left where the public spontaneously interacted with the art also below is a Pierre Leitner's piece called Connected which used colored sand to create a network of line between the trees in Ron Bassford Park which is just over there that also became part of the site for the tentative equinox play called Rove the theme of our exhibition was the island as microcosm of our planet's ecosystem and sorry there is a mistake it should say microcosm of our planet's ecosystem this gave us a broad mandate though to interact with the site for example my piece was called stream and it represented the lost streams of false creed and the fact that the island was once a sandbar abundant with sea life this led this idea of the island as being this place full of fish led the local First Nations adopting the saying when the tide is out the table is set also interpreting the history of Granville Island was Sharon Callis's piece called dry dock relating to the long standing tradition of boat building and repairing in the area Sharon worked on site repairing her boat made of willow alongside the modern boat hulls being scraped and painted at the marina other artists such as Faye Laugier and Tiki Mahalville created floating installations that referred to the water circumnavigator was a mysterious watercraft nestled under the bridge which invited curiosity and imaginary voyages Faye's clam line which appeared and disappeared around the perimeter of the island alluded to both the tides and the local fishing industry Tiki also had a small piece called detritus they were lily pads made from used plastic bowies and fishing paraphernalia it lived up to its name by trapping floating debris in the water which it turns out there's quite a bit of here on Granville Island some projects invited the public to engage directly with the works so for example Robin Ripley's piece they were funnel shaped forms made from salaw leaves they encouraged the public to interact with them directly by filling the cups with their own gleanings approximately 50 diverse items were deposited including shoelaces flowers, paper clips notes, coins, a baby soother and a snail just to name a few also I included the picture of the bug so it wasn't just people interacting it was also the plant life and the insect life Haruko Kana her ocean flotilla really emphasized the community engagement as it invited the public to participate in various stages of her work her sculptural work included boat shape with a figure inside which also acted as a sundial because it's shadow pointed to stones that were sitting in the grass that had text etched into them her site also included a drop box where people could write messages of hope which were later included in hundreds of paper boats launched from the island so these pictures down here are showing the boats being launched this project also included a website where people could submit their messages and track the boats as they traveled around which took this project from the local to the international our commitment to cultural engagement was also achieved through free public tours which included facts about the history of the island and also about the intentions of the artists in relation to their work the Fringe Festival produced a full page in their program with a comprehensive site map of all the exhibits basic information on each piece plus a timetable for guided tours the tour information was also promoted online through our website the Emily Carr website and of course the Fringe's website the tours were very well attended and we got positive feedback from people who said that the tour enriched their experience this of course was very important to us because as artists we really did want to engage the public the other method of public engagement we brought to the project was through workshops I led workshops about the Falls Creek Community Center where participants made fish out of leaves which were then incorporated into the stream installation Haruko Okano held several workshops to make the hundreds of boats for her ocean flotilla launch the boats were made with 100% chemical free paper at waterproof with eco-friendly Kaki Shibu in addition to the Falls Creek Community Center Haruko partnered with the Britannia the means of production Community Garden the China Creek Housing Co-op to host her workshops so there really was a broad range of people that we engaged in the process of just putting this exhibition together promotion well we had no budget for promotion so we used our group's artistic talent and our partner's resources to promote the exhibit our campaign to engage the community at large consisted in the creation which was produced by the fringe onsite signage, web promotion workshops, press releases logo design and invitations Gravel Island lent us some of their posts which enabled us to have a sign at each site to which we added bright yellow flags to increase their visibility as an example you can see Robin's piece Samara which is right beside the picture of the yellow flag there a pair of wings covered in maple seeds very few maple trees here on the island it happened to be located in the busy surround of vendors and so you can see how the signage was particularly important for pieces such as this our intention was to give the public many different ways to discover and interact with the art the first way was through total serendipity where island visitors would just stumble across an installation and then maybe read the description there and then pick up a map and maybe investigate some of the other ones the other option was for festival goers to use the guide in the program as a self-guided tour or from there they could also just sign up for actual guided tours led by the artists the fringe estimates that about 1500 people attended the exhibit funding the seeds of our project could not have grown without the support of our many funders financial support came from the Gravel Island Cultural Society, the Vancouver Parks Board and the Community Arts Council of Vancouver in addition we created our own fundraising campaign where individuals and companies could donate directly towards our project we also had a variety of in-kind support such as Ocean Cement the Falls Creek Community Center Gravel Island and the Fringe Festival support also came from Emily Carr which hosted a new institute of classes focusing on art and nature called Second Nature Lab they also ran an event called Hot House which we participated in the success of this project can also be attributed to the many unpaid hours of work from the group itself logo design, letterhead development website, photography, writing, signage and tours are just some of the talents that we drew upon the members of the AILN each have active individual practices both locally and internationally our members have participated in art residencies, sculpture parks and land art festivals from Mongolia to Mexico with many stops in between this global exposure to other projects has inspired us to seek out ways that we can share some of those ideas here in Vancouver we're interested in pursuing projects that work with the larger community to provide a sense of engagement and a stewardship of the land this past year MOPARC which is the means of production garden live lab, an incubator for ideas and the development of new projects in the future and in the future we're always interested in possible partners for sites and of course we wouldn't say no to funding either if you're interested in knowing more about the AILN and our activities please visit our website artislandnetwork.com our last 10 by 10 speaker for today is Ivy Fung Ivy is the business liaison for the DVBIA 16,000 members and she is the voice of downtown Vancouver on Twitter and Facebook she handles many community projects including public wifi, wayfinding street food and public art welcome Ivy okay hi, so just really quickly I just want to get a sense of who knows what a business improvement association is that's pretty good actually I'm here to talk to you about the RAP project which is an initiative between the downtown Vancouver BIA and Emily Carr essentially graffiti has been an issue for our downtowns all over North America, the world over since cavemen have been drawing on cave walls thousands and thousands of years ago graffiti has been an issue some call graffiti the voice of the urban underprivileged some call it art and some call it vandalism so needless to say graffiti and graffiti art has both fascinated and frustrated downtown associations and it's cost us millions of dollars from city run abatement programs to programs run by BIAs at the downtown Vancouver BIA we're no different like you we're a non-profit we have challenges with budget we have a downtown ambassador program what they do is they report the graffiti to the city and sometimes the city has an anti-graffiti unit that can deal with these issues and sometimes it's cut from the budget so either way unaddressed graffiti often leads to more graffiti which leads to vandalism which leads to decay Grambel Street downtown Vancouver over the years is a great case in point Grambel has seen its heyday as a great white way back in the days of neon since then decay, dirt, crime, a bad reputation even some porn shops over the last 30 years graffiti has played a big part of this blight in 2006 we began construction for the candle line for the Olympics and while the construction was in place there was a bit of a let at the end of the tunnel the city had invested 21 million dollars in the redesign of the street and this was finally our chance to get Grambel Street right to make it what we want it to be I had the unique opportunity to have that as part of my bucket we only have seven people in our organization BIAs tend to have very small staffs and while we have a lot of members that we represent we only have seven people and I happen to have Grambel Street fall in my lap so day in and day out I would visit the businesses and let them yell at me which was great fun but in that we also had opportunities to hear what people wanted to see on the street so one of the things that we did which allowed people to provide input on the design of the street so it was designed it was to include clean lines a blue-gray monochrome palette and we saw during the Olympics that Grambel Street was really wildly popular it's what we call center ice it was fun, it was busy we had a ton of buskers if you remember as well during that time we also sponsored Lunar Festival for the first time and they installed lanterns on the 700 block of Grambel Street the city had just established that area as plaza space where organizations could host festivals and we were just kind of feeling out how that might look what you might not know is while they installed these white neon tubes throughout the entire street on the 700 block it was a little bit different the sidewalks were wider the street sides were wider and then the neon tubes were twice as big after a year after the Olympics we began to realize that the monochrome palette was kind of boring really really flat and we had these electrical boxes gray electrical boxes up and down the street that had recently been installed but they didn't really add much to the vibrancy of the street and in fact attracted quite a bit of attention from graffiti artists or people that wanted to poster their posters it was a bit of a challenge but these were approached by members of the community our business members just saying what can we do what can we do to make our boxes look a little bit more interesting and hopefully deter some of the graffiti so what happened was I was faced with this issue and I was just surfing on google because that's what I do sometimes and I happen to notice that Cameron Cartier was presenting on public art and quickly shot her email and said hey we've got a problem do you want to talk about maybe doing a public art project for downtown Vancouver and she shot it back saying yes we'd love to do that and we thought that was fantastic we arranged to have a meeting together and we decided to have a student business collaboration which is something that we've never really done before what we did is we offered the opportunity for students and graduate students to submit designs for the different boxes and the primary purposes were to celebrate the creativity of our students to provide an opportunity for these newly trained artists to be exhibited to help Emily Carr sort of establish a foothold in our air which we wanted to emphasize further highlight the character of each city block along Granville Street help deter graffiti and posturing and most of all add color to our gray and blue street so what we did was we organized walking tours with the students small groups and we talked about the different nature of each block like if you're familiar in Granville Street downtown pretty much from the 700 block it's different the south side is more entertainment based whereas the north side is more financial so we basically went through the challenges that happen in each block the traffic flow, the different businesses the kind of objectives that they were trying to achieve in each block and the students were to design something that reflected their passion, their flavor and also the local flavor of that specific area in the end we ended up striking a judging panel faculty from Emily Carr, members of the business community and an environmental design security consultant and we had about 150 designs that we reviewed the results beautiful just stunning, we were so pleased with what came out of it for example if you can see right there it's the one that's right in front of H&M I believe so it's a block that tends to have a lot of clothing and if you can't tell it's a closet and then down there that's the box that was in front of Tom Lee Music and that's speakers but what you can't tell is actually a whale on it it was called Whale Sounds 2 and it was sort of a tribute to music so all of them very interesting, very beautiful together we had 11 blocks one to two on each block and we toured right from the 300 block of Granville right to the 1200 block of Granville on each of these boxes is a QR code that can be scanned and with that they could find out more information about the program, more information about the artist and it also enabled us to provide some metrics so we could tell when people were taking the tour which boxes they were hitting, which ones were popular something valuable I think in doing these kinds of projects here's a picture of the students I'm Susan to launch the project we had a media event at Tom Lee Music it was so rewarding to see how excited the students were some invited their grandparents and their parents they felt like they had arrived it was pretty amazing and felt great to be a part of that they would see a real tangible location where their art would be exhibited and ultimately this project wasn't that much it was $20,000 for the full installation of maintenance for a year and a half we provided a partnership fee and faculty honorariums the students were also given honorariums ultimately we were responsible for the production the production costs and Emily Carr helped with the design the judging and organization and the city of Vancouver when we did this project it was right about Thanksgiving their staff, their engineers actually stepped away from their Thanksgiving dinners to approve the plethora of designs that we had so they provide in-kind advice approvals and also gave us permission to put these wraps on the electrical boxes so just in terms of measurables the electrical boxes would have about a tagging once every week several perhaps every week but now it happens very very rarely there seems to be a real respect of the work by other artists the project has since forged a new relationship between business and arts which we're very pleased with we're happy to add to our inventory of public art Emily Carr students were super excited to showcase their work and the university provided real world learning opportunities so a win win win super excited about that the DVBIA also furthered its partnership with the city always a plus we engaged the staff in the process and they gave us the chance at no cost to the city they love that in addition to that we used special eco-friendly vinyl to wrap the boxes doing our bit for the green cause and in terms of the business benefit this project addressed two strategic objectives for the BIA helping the downtown feel safe and clean and adding to our streetscape and redesign to have made a dent in terms of savings as well many BIA's have heard about this project and they're super keen on replicating it we've won three awards with the international downtown association with the CSA and the BIABC and we're looking forward to continuing a future project with Emily Carr thanks my name is David Pay and I'm here to introduce the witnesses who will take information in their own observations and break out sessions and relate them back to you the four witnesses today are Simon Levin, Claire Robson Terry Hunter and Kamala Todd and we're actually going to start at the bottom of the list in your program with Kamala Todd who was born and raised in the Coast Salish territory of Vancouver she is Cree, Irish and German and she has a master's degree in urban geography from the University of British Columbia her work as a community planner filmmaker and writer is focused on facilitating and making space for new perspectives she is creator of such projects as story scapes and indigenous city her film credits include sharing our stories, the Vancouver Dialogues project, Indigenous Plant Diva and Cedar and Bamboo she also worked as a writer and director on the children's Cree language series Nahi Uetan and most recently Kamala worked as a consultant and facilitator with the City of Vancouver Dialogues project she lives with her husband and two young sons in New Westminster, Kamala Todd thank you so I don't have the 10 slide limit so I can just take all the time I need right there's so... there's so much to reflect upon and I know that I'm supposed to reflect upon the breakout session and I will but the previous presentation just gave me so much to respond to that I'd like to take that opportunity and my kind of overall reflections on the day if I could ask your thesis on the redevelopment of Granville Street actually the area that you're referring to so I think it's really interesting and I want to talk a little bit about the language of erasure and the sort of neocolonial waves that projects like this that are seemingly win-win all good for the artists have consequences so in my own research of Granville Street and Granville Mall there was a lot of wasteland it was not empty it was not just dirty and covered in graffiti there were many SRO hotels there that were home to many low-income people who couldn't find homes anywhere else it was a place that had been well a welcoming place for hippies and then it became a welcoming place for street kids and punks my friends and I used to hang out there and it was a community it was a place where there was a lot of relationships and meaning but the DDBIA and other organizations like that you know the language of who are the wanted publics who are the desirable publics who belongs and doesn't belong so if you're trying to reclaim that place and restore it to the great white way as it used to be called then suddenly you need to rewrite the story so that street kids are no longer there's a lot of research on the narratives of that and I think it relates very well to some of the things that came up for me when we were talking about social practice I work mostly in film but I also work a lot in thinking about public art and the importance and the privilege of seeing ourselves reflected in the landscape of being able to write ourselves onto the land of seeing our language our aesthetics, our stories our history, our contributions all of those things reflected in the urban landscape as a geographer I spent a lot of time reading the environment around me and I think we could all agree that not everybody's story is visible not all of us are acknowledged as being part of that and so I think these projects are wonderful because everybody wants to have a visible presence everybody wants to have the opportunity to express themselves but we do need to ask who is considered a legitimate artist what is considered legitimate expression so when young people try to write themselves onto the landscape try to be visible is their stuff their expression any less valid than the more official stuff is a question I ask to you so thank you I'm not trying to poo poo what you did I just went because of all the research and the work that I did there I see a lot of this kind of it's the same thing we see in the down tiny side the whole reclaiming of that wasteland that kind of language in our workshop it was a wonderful discussion in our breakout session a lot of the things that people were looking at in terms of supporting artists to do this kind of work was the usual frustrations around resources and access the amount of time people have to spend on the administrative work and the burnout that happens and all of those things I think we're all very familiar with the reality is they affect people's work they affect the projects that we can and can't do so those things came up a lot in our discussion about supporting this kind of work there's also a lot of discussion about instead of always focusing on money and finances and grants what are other ways that we can support each other so the whole idea of mentorships and also getting support through access and space people sharing their expertise people helping you connect to those networks that you wouldn't otherwise have access to so other ways of supporting and creating that work other than just funding the whole issue of one really important employment question that was asked was yes it's important to support artists to do this community engagement kind of work but the first question is why should community support artists to do that in the first place so not assuming that that's just a given that you can just go in and do that work so that raised questions around how do you connect with community how do you make them see that the work that you want to do as part of that community or as an artist who has some kind of connection to that community and revitalize the area or whatever the various objectives of that community are and that raised questions around should you be from within that community that okay for artists from other places to come in and do that kind of work but definitely not taking for granted that an artist can just go in and say I want to do this and then the other really interesting idea was raised around the language of that the language of what we're going to help you or we're going to fix your neighborhood you know we want to revitalize or whatever and some of the power and balances that can come out of that kind of language and so that raised all kinds of wonderful discussion around engagement and working together and that kind of stuff so not that I can actually represent everything that was talked about there were many different examples and if people want me to share some of those examples I can I know for myself what came up again a lot of it was about place and voice and again who has a voice who is considered a legitimate artist and how much are artists coming in and maybe taking people's stories as content for their project as opposed to working with community lots of time it is completely you know people are working together and shaping the project together but let's be honest there is a history of coming in and kind of minding and cultures and that kind of thing I like that it was also raised you know the whole idea of they are a diverse community so when we say engaging with the community well who is that community there are many communities and the work the onus is on us who go in there to try to create these projects to really identify and work with all of the various groups as well as we can you know and if there is resistance from within a community it is usually because of some of the history maybe some uncertainty or mistrust people might have and that's why working with people to shape the project idea is always much more successful than coming in with an already predetermined project does anybody from the group want to make sure that I don't admit certain things or that I highlight things that I haven't highlighted I have my own agenda so kind of scribbling all my own comments or does anybody who was in that group interested in some examples well I can speak for either my own work with the street involved youth in that area and then my own work with Aboriginal people the whole idea that there is sort of a dominant narrative to most neighborhoods or to most communities in our city right so we have Yale town has a certain identity Granville street has a certain identity but that dominant narrative you know erases a lot so my whole approach through that story scapes project was okay so Gaston is seen as the history the birthplace of Vancouver but where are the Coast Salish people in that story so we did what we could with a small project timeline to try and gather some of those stories and work with people to share their stories of that area and their understanding of that area and their relationship with it with the street involved youth and they were reviewing people but what I did they had a really cool zine at the time I don't remember what it's called from downtown I forget the name at the moment so they had a really cool zine that was that base out of the downtown South area and it was full of their narratives of their place and how they felt about Vancouver nothing you would ever really encounter in your everyday experience of that place but those voices were there you know again not this idea that the marginalized people can become your content but that you recognize the legitimacy of their voices and you find ways to support everybody to try and express their place and even their dis satisfaction with what's going on in their community and that the dominant narrative doesn't reflect their place there so just one last point and I'm happy to talk more about it after but in terms of the Aboriginal community in all of our work in the city you can't disconnect we're all part of the land and we should be very aware where we are on the land and develop those connections and help all of us develop those connections because I think when you're in the city people forget that we're on an ecosystem that we're on indigenous land and so the more we connect to those stories and build relationships with the people of this place and the land then all of our practice will hopefully be rich with the actual those stories so that the erasures and the kind of invisibility will no longer be as blatant as it currently is and I'll stop there thanks Thank you Kamala Terry Hunter was the witness in session number three and he's the co-founder and executive director of Vancouver Moving Theatre an award-winning community-engaged arts organization based in the downtown east side recipient of the City of Vancouver Mayor's Award for Community Art Mayor's Columbia Community Achievement Award for his work with and for the residents of the downtown east side Terry is also the artistic producer of the groundbreaking and flagship downtown east side heart of the city festival Terry Hunter Hello everyone Thank you David and thank you to the organizers for inviting me to be here today I'm actually stepping in for Savannah Walling who was initially invited to take on this role I was lucky enough to to get the job the session that we had was on how organizations institutions, businesses engage the arts what constitutes success and failure and what are the values of explicit and intangible outcomes I hope that I can grasp the breadth of what was said in the very interesting conversation with a very very interesting group of people who had lots of really really interesting things to say and certainly stimulated a lot of creative thoughts for me, questions and thoughts about my own perspective so I'm going to give a quick overview of what was discussed and that'll include some of the interesting quotes that I heard and wrote down and along the way I may give my comments and also circle back and try to give some of my own particular perspectives and thoughts some questions are asked that I certainly was asking myself 10 years ago and have come up with certainly what's been some solutions or approaches for my company Vancouver Moving Theatre Company and if you could so the conversation that we had, the questions that were asked were really springboards and we kind of bounced on them and moved around in the circle touching back on them and then moving around again and so the while the questions served as you know as a touchstone in a springboard we certainly didn't address each one individually we talked about measurability and the whole notion of evaluation and how do we measure our outcomes that got awful language that probably comes from the corporate world and then the conversation also rolled into a discussion around sustainability and this ties into you know comments like we have to write these grants and we're going to do these kind of questionnaires and it's hard to get money because we don't know how to answer the questions and which tied into a larger question around sustainability and how do we continue on and survive in the face of changing times and in particular in the face of funding decreases the conversation then rolled into comments around art and the creating of art and particularly around the process and one of the comments that someone made is process is the priority and this is in relationship to community art and that community art is best developed when the community develops and the ideas and the methodology which I found really interesting because I come at it from quite a different perspective I realized too I thought and I'll come back I just realized I forgot to say one thing the next area we talked about a discussion of what community art practice is in itself and one of the interesting comments was the reality is we are all working in community which I find a very very interesting comment and I'll come back and I'll talk about that and then at the end somebody mentioned the fact it was Carrie Nemo about the importance of responsibility and which I found really interesting because to me responsibility is one of the key elements of this practice that we call community engaged practice and which also went into the notion of remaining relevant and the idea quote of taking art to the people which again I also found very very interesting comment and then the whole notion about about outcomes and measurement there was a lot of discussion at the end about the importance of documentation and what is the documentation that we need to do and to me that's really really key and I'm going to come back and talk about that and then the last part which was really really interesting was a conversation around what constitutes failure which I thought was a really that's a great question failure in the context of community art practice and the thing I wanted to say at the top I come from my own particular bias my bias is I come to this work as a professional artist as a professional community engaged artist and my particular take on community art practice is that it is artists working with and for community in a collaborative and shared experience to create art that's what my that's my bias so when I look when I'm talking about community art practice that's what I'm talking about and that's my particular bias and I'm pretty clear about what that is and the other element too is I think in terms of terminology we get mixed up between the notion of community art and the notion of community art practice we produce Vancouver Movement Theater produces the downtown east side heart of the city festival and we had this conversation very very early on is this community art practice the festival and the conclusion we came to it's not community art practice but it is supporting community in the making of art so a lot of times when we talk about community art we're talking about the art that comes out of a community that might be people going and taking a class that might be an art program it might be all kinds of things but it's very distinct from the notion of community art practice which is artists working with and for community to create art that gives voice to that particular community but also supports the art of the artist those are two very very different things and I think that in our conversations we often mix those two things up how much time do I have three minutes okay so here we go measureability I want to talk about that how do we evaluate and somebody said feeling like we're forced into evaluation I think from my perspective it's a very it's not a good attitude if I can put it that way it's very very important as artists that we always evaluate our own work and we need to do that whether we're involved as a community artist or a community engaged artist or as just as an artist and so it's very important for the art practice of community art that we evaluate what we're doing and it's very very important that that evaluation is built into the process and that evaluation is built into the process at the beginning of the project and so one of the questions that came up with that came up in the room was well how do you evaluate and one of the ways that we evaluate by we I mean vancour moving theater in the heart of the city festival is that we develop both quantitative and qualitative measurements and quantitative is very simple straightforward things like how many people came to the event how many participants were in the event what else let's see look at my notes here how many hits how many hits in the media did we get these are very quantifiable things that you can identify very early on to develop your measurements the other area that we do is qualitative and they can be as simple as and as profound as the participants enjoy the process that's very very important to us if people don't enjoy the process then I question whether you've had a successful project and that has to do with the essence of what community our practice is about which is the artist working with the community and the people having a good experience and being able to go away from that and say I really want to do that again boy I really got one minute left so anyways we call this indicators of success we actually got it from Jill weaving Jill weaving has been a rock for us she provided us with this foundation and it's been really really helpful for us in the early years sustainability conversations around sustainability and I want to for me the essence of community our practice is artists engaging with community and developing that relationship and developing the sustainability of that relationship that's crucial and that has been crucial I think to the success of something like the heart of the city festival because we've been able to develop relationships with over 40 organizations within the downtown east side and those relationships are very very very very important to us and we do a lot of work to develop that sustainability and the key thing about art is that despite the fact that there's going to be cutbacks and despite the fact that we're going to go through hard times we can develop the flexibility and the adaptability to be able to work with community so that the art that comes out of the community is always flowing human beings are by their very nature have the impulse to create art it's going to be there since the time I'm in war and it'll be there if the BC arts council ever goes away we will continue to make art so our role as artists is to keep supporting that and keep developing that and my role as an artist is not only to support my own practice but also to work with the community to develop their practice and I'm not going to get through nearly all of this stuff but I do want to go back to that notion of responsibility because to me that is really really key one of the key elements for myself of artistic practice is the responsibility to work with the community from the beginning through the process to the end and that includes evaluation what did the community how did the community respond I heard somebody the other day say we went into community and we took their stories and this is a gentleman that was very very interesting community art practice but I thought boy there's a step that he's missing here you don't go into community and take stories you go into community and you work with them in the supporting of them of telling their own stories it's a huge responsibility it's also a huge responsibility to maintain your own integrity as an artist and to find that meeting place between your art and the voice of the community so that that shared collaborative experience is a positive one for not only you as an artist but for the community itself and I'll end there thank you thanks Terry Claire Robson was the witness for group number two oh thanks Claire Robson is writer and residence for quirky the queer imaging and writing collective for elders an arts engaged group of elder activists funded by Canada council and BC council for the arts she's also a contract researcher for the University of Calgary her research theorizes the educational potential of writing memoir the subject of her new book writing for change which is published by Peter Lang Press Claire was the 2007 pink triangle press writer of the year and the 2009 recipient of the Lynch history prize at UBC she received the Joseph Katz Memorial Scholarship in the Dean's Award among others and her creative work has appeared in the North American Review so to speak and many other journals newspapers and anthologies and she's a number of publications and scholarly journals her memoir Love and Good Time was published by Michigan State University Press and her edited collection of stories outside rules by Perse books Claire Robson thank you so I'm a memoirist and a fiction writer so take everything I say with a grain of salt please also I pay attention as a writer to strange things like sayings, imagery and just sort of the weird little peripheral side bars that come up in the conversation so watch out for that we did have a question but it boiled down really to three words and they were audience participation and engagement and we had a navigating image or phrase I think that emerged through our discussion and it was a sort of reversal of if we build it they will come we were rather asking if we build it will they come the image that became a sort of reference point for the dialogue was the purple belly from Barbara and Susan's presentation this was referred to quite again and again it was kind of a touchstone and people frame this really as a safe place to take risks and as an ignored urban space that was ready to be transformed that became a revised space that revised our own notions of how large space we might need to make art and to engage in art and what kind of space that might be so what was our space we were in a public space Emily Carr we were in a room with tables we each had a very large piece of blank paper in front of us and I saw this as a symbolic reminder of how frightening it can be to engage in art I know my blank piece of paper loomed and I watched what other people did with theirs some people wrote very small in the corners other people filled it with some people did not engage at all with a large piece of paper we all had working vocal chords and we could all speak English and that may seem a minor point but of course it's not some of us wrote and some of us spoke and some of us did not art requires constraints and structure we talked about this quite a lot and Marie Lopez was very helpful in providing us with some constraints for our conversation we were to turn off our cell phones and we were not to discuss the contested nature of funding nobody's cell phone went off but we completely ignored the second constraint and in fact from the get go we began to talk about funding but because Marie had told us not to and because we were artists we did it in a very subversive tangential way behind all our conversations I felt looked the forbidden topic of funding and management and its contrast with art so over lunch I pulled out these contrasts on the one hand there is professionalism policy management accountability funding bureaucracy this is separated into departments that do not communicate with each other as Judy said and he's a snatch of dialogue welcome to the nightmare this bureaucracy is large unwieldy and monolithic and it quantifies engagement through counting on the other hand we have art art occurs in a small intimate space the body becomes the instrument art is nimble art is creative playful childish it kicks out received wisdom and it kicks against the departments that are created by bureaucrats it's passionate it's educational it's energetic and it's engaging so throughout our conversations we played for a while with these dichotomies we talked about evidence of engagement for example do you count the number of people who come to an art show or do you try somehow to assess their relationship with the art with the quality of their engagement we talked about freedom about boundary crossing and about structure on the other hand we talked about the notion of the out one notion we felt of the artist as individual lost soul wandering in the wilderness and art as collaboration art as social activism we talked about being active and about being passive we talked about process rather than product we talked for a while about the some of us thought false dichotomy between on the one hand the artist who is dangerous, disturbing and unpredictable and on the other hand the fact that art can be safe it can be healing it can be sweet it can be innocent it can even as I think our last witness pointed out a sign of gentrification something to be respected there is large, there is unwieldy there is faceless, there is small there is intimate and there is nimble Judy gave us the image of the goldfish in a bowl for the artist and we began in the latter third of our time to consider how the goldfish might get out of the bowl how the goldfish might invite people or send messages out to the wider universe in order to engage and we talked about how the gap might be bridged Mark talked about some of the people he worked with as a musician in Richmond who came up to him passionate to make music but feeling somewhere that art was out there perhaps in there in the bowl he said the way they talked to me about wanting to make music made me feel like they wanted to engage in pornography there was an element of the illicit of the passionately dreamed of but barely understood and one of my favorite take home points was when Marie responded to Mark by saying that what we need to do then is to crack open the everyday life of art how can we bear the soul of art how can we make comprehensible what are often seen as esoteric and rarified processes even dangerous processes Marie from gallery Gache talked about getting work out of the garret and onto the wall but people felt that wasn't quite enough that also we needed to find translators in the gallery as people looked at the work that somehow art may have taken something of a wrong turn as it got lost in art speak how do we find translators for the work at exhibitions how do we help people navigate the bewildering array of art that's available somebody said there's not enough art there's too much bloody art nobody knows which thing to go to anymore how do we navigate that how do we help people make those decisions how do we make art that matters how do we bring art to public spaces like prisons how do we bring music to people in a petting zoo kind of way I love that some of the solutions make art for social justice lose the art speak tell people somebody said somebody tell me what to do when I get home after they finished an art project tell people what to do when they get home include everyone in a tightly woven fabric that's inclusive and accessible and I want to leave you with a mystery because I feel every piece of art every performance should end in an opening and a mystery so here's a mystery that I'm trying to unravel in what one person I think it was Judy said she said before there is an engagement there must be a proposal and a proposal means getting down on one knee it's a risky offer not every engagement ends in a marriage we have to be able to say no a witness is Simon Levin who is a session lecturer within critical and cultural studies and dynamic media here at Emily Carr University and he has published a curriculum on contemporary public art he creates site-based systems that explore the aesthetics and engagements Simon creates site-based systems that explore the aesthetics of engagement using a variety of designed forms and tools that address our many publics these spatial and pedagogical projects expand the social agency of art making rethinking notions of space and place, authorship and audience working collaboratively and primarily within the public sphere his work ranges from billboard projects alternative tours of cities land care centers and alternative mapping and telecommunication systems recently commissioned projects include a user-generated sous-valent system and a global new media platform both showcased for Vancouver's 2010 cultural Olympiad he has been an artist in residence for the Vancouver Parks Board the Tech Lab at the Surrey Art Gallery and at the International Art Space in Caliber in Australia nationally and internationally Simon Levin thank you David that's a really tough act to follow Claire I don't have the poetic resonance that you have but I will do my best and I realize that I was struck with a task a challenge that goes completely against my nature a challenge to be a witness which meant that you had to repeat potentially verbatim what people say and as my partner knows I don't hear that way I don't I don't know the words that came out and so I'm struck there kind of imagining that I'll I'll write down a few little words and then I would get hit with an image and then I would just sit and look at that image and then realize a few sentences went by and I still hadn't written anything down and so as I took the time to try to gather my notes I realized these are useless these are useless and it speaks to in fact what I do best is I work from uncertainty as it's been spoken about before this idea that I am not an expert on anything I am not somebody who's got great crafts or great skills I am not anything that I can tell my students do it the way I did it and that actually helped me understand that that was the way that everyone is sort of talking about that this exchange of knowledge that everyone is trying to put forth is there's a variety of practices there's a variety of methodologies that are being used here and that all of them will work but it is actually in that engagement that makes them useful my own role within a lot of these types of gatherings is I always see myself as the person who wants to problematize the notion of community I don't buy it I know a lot of you people do I know it I love that you do but I also think that it is, I once had a mentor, Steven Kurtz from Critical Art Ensemble, who said you know community is to the left like family values is to the right that in some ways that we all go to community and believe that in fact we all have to believe in this together and ultimately there's these moments where consent and conflict don't always connect and so that's how I come to this I come to this as an educator who is always interested in those ruptures, those dissonances because I feel that is where they can grow and to pull from the session the session also spoke to me in certain ways and their images that I grapple that one of the things that was talked about was this notion of cross silo collaboration the idea that Emily Carr has a program SFU has a program Langara has a program that everyone's got the program and they're all in many essence as all institutions do in competition but how do you facilitate that crack I think it was Elizabeth who used the term leaky how does it leak out and how borrowing from one of the grad students that I worked with recently the Leonard Cohen song about cracks are what lets the light flow in that ultimately that these cracks are also areas in which we can plant seeds and see where they grow that in some ways that in this session people were wondering at what point are the students are the students at the right place to actually get the benefit of learning some of the skills and it became probably a moment of agreement with most of them that it should start at any time that perhaps it is actually useful to be done middle schools that the idea of trying to figure out how to build that toolbox that kit that they walk out of school with and that they now have the confidence to be able to work in these ways how do we get there so one of the key things that I looked at okay if I start with that toolbox I can start to break it down because I can picture the toolbox I can see the toolbox so what's in that toolbox in that toolbox there's one problem that problem is time social practice takes time it doesn't fit into a semester system it does not fit into three credits or six credits it takes time it takes time in which the process is a protracted working in which skills are grown into and learned into not just absorbed and then regurgitated we are all moving towards an educational system that tries to resist that kind of point in which there is an elite authority in the room that we're opening up our learning and we're trying to figure out ways that those types of unpacking of education itself can be a way of facilitating in that toolbox there is obviously a best practices right how do we demonstrate best practices and I think in some ways what we have today is an example of different practices some people will look at those and say you know what that one was definitely a best practice other people will look at it and say how are they allowed to do that that's ridiculous there was no community involvement at all I don't know those are the types of things that we need to understand is what is our criteria for best practices as Terry said just before me he's very clear on what a best practice is and that is what guides his work if a student can find that best practice that fits with their project then they have a guiding force a guiding path also this notion that it has to be socially sustainable I think it was Susan Stewart who brought up this point that the social sustainability is part of understanding that they're not going to get it in one course they're not going to get it in one way of working that it has to be something that in the act of engaging with the practice other things start to be attracted to it that it actually supports the actual community of practitioners that the people who are engaged and see themselves as part of these practitioners are also involved in there so that they are bringing and working with people from their projects and bringing them into educational facilities then those educational facilities are producing more young people who are interested in getting back into those groups that there is has to be an ethics there has to be an ethics of representation an ethics of social interaction an ethics in terms of I think it was Terry who was talking about responsibility it has to be the idea of respect that ultimately we are engaged in a way to understanding that this isn't the plucking of content that at the end when the person sees their content used in a way that does not fit with their understanding of how it was going to be used there is some betrayal in this toolbox there has to be some entrepreneurship there has to be this understanding that students come out of these programs and even though we might have courses called professional practice how do they actually learn where to go look for a grant where do they actually get the skills to learn how to fundraise to partner I mean if one of the things that we are talking about crossover collaboration is to partner with other groups where do we learn to partner it isn't so advantageous for the administration to say that there are here is a partner we got one for you go ahead start working with them how did that happen where did it come from it's like mana from evan it partner showed up great the idea of approaching art as fundraising I think it was Mallory Mallory talked about David's workshop where there is an idea that in understanding that when you are trying to get fundraising that you are actually helping them the people you are approaching that they too have a mandate to give how are you fulfilling it for them and it led us to this understanding of exchange and reciprocity that something has to be traded something has to be given back and how can that be defined so I know I can't get to it all I'm just looking over some of my images here I want to leave with one thing that I believe was really important is that there is this that it is not about solving problems it is about asking the right questions and I think that was a quote that I did grab on to from Susan Grossman and then ultimately this idea of families we come from families we understand families that there is a sensitivity to understanding a family even though you might not agree and that learning that the ability to be able to speak to one another in that respectful way in that reciprocal way and being able to actually figure out how we can potentially work and with dissenting moments becomes very very important and I led to leave one thing that was very important is that a lot of these types of ways we teach are about dialogue and about dialogical ways of moving and dialogue as it was pointed out doesn't have to be purely people talking that arts based process is a way to build metaphors to connect people to understand the huge gaps that are between different people and I want to leave one image two years one image which is this we shared this with us this image of a sailboat a series of sailboats that I've changed in the context and I hope I have license to do this a series of sailboats and somebody below and we actually inspire those sailboats thank you thank you Simon and I'd like to thank all four witnesses Simon Levin, Claire Robson, Terry Hunter and Kamala Todd so I invite Jill Weaving and Marie Lopez to lead us in the discussion