Participant asks important questions

“Does It Really Ever Add Up to Anything? Who Is Listening?”

— Cass Henry

Community participant Cass Henry, who participated in creating the first performance of the pilot project for Transforming Stories, Driving Change, shares important questions about what effect this work actually has in the world. They are questions the research team will take up in the next phase of the project, in consultation with community participants who are working hard to make their voices heard.

Participating in this project has been a dual-punch for me. It has been a joy — to interact with my peers, to create a piece that is show-worthy, to perform and experience both the jitters and the post-performance-high. It has also been disastrously heart-breaking — to put so much energy into something and not really know that it will affect any form of change in the immediacy, to know that the next time I interact with a social service I am still likely to face the same problems I have faced previously, to expect that those in positions of power who have seen our work all agree it is though-provoking, but will it actually matter when policy is more of a financial numbers game than a human interest process?

I hesitate to think some of these thoughts and certainly to claim ownership of them by writing about them, because the process of creating our piece for Transforming Stories, Driving Change was truly a dream. I felt like a VIP who was coming to the table with all the knowledge and this research team was providing us with the tools (art) to squeeze out as much of that knowledge as I was willing to share. I felt respected, honoured, and truly inspired during the workshop phase of the process. When it came time to perform our work-in-progress, I felt treated like a real professional — we were fed, given time and space to practice, and we were financially compensated for our time. I have not previously (or since!) had such an amazing experience as a research participant, where I felt my integrity was upheld at every single turn. I highly recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to participate in this project that they take it!

But at the end of the day, tired from hours of work, practicing, performing and wrap-up discussion, I walk away wondering — does it really ever add up to anything? Who is listening?

We end our performance with the words “We need to talk.” And that couldn’t be more true. But when we leave our audience with their memory of our performance, that is the end of the conversation for us. We are still not invited to talk in other platforms. Our voices are given a momentary volume burst, before once more being silenced. Those with the power are making decisions that effect our daily lives, but rarely ever ask for our input or feedback in a meaningful way.

So do I write a review about my experience, about how lovely the researchers were, about how wonderful it was to be able to perform in front of students in the field and hopefully give them a different perspective of the system than they might find in their textbooks, about how empowered I felt in the moments after walking off stage after each performance …..?

Or do I write about how I really feel, about how I wonder whether this research ever informs true change? Are we merely stuck in the same rutted track, forever pushing against the edges, but in the end, succumb to the all-mighty dollar, sinking back once more to the path of least resistance?

The Audience Plays Their Part

Picture of whiteboard comments from audience
These are the stories of people who…

Our blog has been on a bit of a hiatus as we organize all the material that came out of our May 2nd performance of “When My Home Is Your Business.” We were pleased to see former TSDC performers, participants from the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton’s Displacements project, housing support workers, folks from the Community Legal Clinic and from church groups and community organizations, as well as a number of McMaster researchers, come out to the first performance of this new play. Our four performers did a great job of showing the audience what life is like in a building where tenants are trying to create a sense of neighbourliness, but where their needs and desires don’t seem count for much. They gave us a real feel for what it is like to try to build a sense of home when you are facing:

  • intimidating Supers who blame tenants instead of making repairs
  • elevators that don’t work reliably
  • fire alarms constantly going off because of excessive humidity or dust from construction
  • laundry rooms where half (or more) of the machines don’t work….

Despite all this, their performance offered the hope that people can work together to create a life where there is time and space for tenants to enjoy each other’s company and where despite it all, they can “stop and smell the flowers.”

But the story of “When My Home is Your Business” didn’t end with the performance. Discussions between audience members, the comments they left on index cards, their graffiti-like posts about what they thought life could be like in Hamilton if things changed for the better, all added to the story the play had started to tell.

After the performance, we asked audience members to write anonymous messages on index cards to tell us who they would talk to about the performance and what they would tell them. The messages reflected the different connections people in the audience have and the different kinds of messages they might want to relay to different people in their lives.

Audience responses transcribed from index cards
Audience responses transcribed from index cards

After filling out the cards, the audience divided into four different groups of 10-12 to discuss what life might be like for the people in the play if things changed for the better. A lot of interesting ideas and potential new stories came out in these discussions. Some people thought that non-profit and co-op housing would give tenants more control over their living situations. Others suggested that tenant’s associations were the key to protecting their collective rights, and some proposed that housing should be considered a fundamental human right, not just a way to make a profit for private businesses. One group discussed the current rent strike in Stoney Creek and how actions like this create a memory of collective action.

Other audience members emphasized the importance of places where people can get together to get to know each other, other than just the elevator or the space in front of the mailboxes in their building. Still others pointed to the fact that not all the problems shown in the play are fundamentally problems of housing: people need adequate incomes to be able to build stable living situations, we need more accessible support services for people living with, or caring for others who live with, mental illness and addiction. We also discussed how the city needs to get behind affordable housing and how city services need not only to respond to phone calls promptly, but to actually do something about the complaints they receive in a timely manner.

It was a lot to take in, but as people left the room, many of them shared their personal sense of what we should remember by summing up their views as “The story of people who… in a city where….”

Picture of whiteboard comments from audience members
In a city where…

Reading through all these responses, our research team was reminded of the way cultural theorist Michael Warner, in his essay “Publics and Counterpublics,” talks about what it takes to create public consciousness around an issue:

Public discourse says not only: “Let a public exist,” but: “Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.” It then goes out in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success—success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world-understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes. Put on a show, and see who shows up (82).

A lot of people showed up to see “When My Home Is Your Business” and their comments after the performance clearly indicated that they recognized the world portrayed in the play, could add to our description of it, could imagine how it might change. Thanks to the dedication of our performers, who spent 12 weeks working to collectively perform such a public vision, this play helped make visible some of the “world-making” that is already happening around public discussions of tenant’s situations in a rapidly gentrifying city. Audience response expanded on that understanding by using incidents in the play to circulate the world-understanding it articulated. What we have yet to see is, to take up Warner’s term, who else will “show up” and who else will “salute.”

Staging relational space

High-rise Buildings as Relational Spaces

Work on our newest play, “When My Home is Your Business…” is moving forward fairly quickly now. One of the crucial steps in making theatre out of the stories participants shared (see our previous blog entries) was to figure out how characters might actually come in contact with each other in the shared space of urban apartment buildings.

When we asked participants to imagine Hamilton ten years from now as a much better city, it was striking how unique each of their stories was. It became clear that each of us was coming from a particular experience of moving through the city. Some knew the city from the point of view of newcomers to Canada and others as long-time residents. Some knew the city from the point of view of single professionals, while others saw it through the eyes of retirees with grandchildren.

Despite these differences, when we asked participants to create a non-verbal image of Hamilton as it actually is, they had no problem using their bodies to create a sense of a shared physical environment that was immediately understood by all. In part because we had recruited participants for their lived knowledge of challenges tenants face, many of these images centred on how people relate to each other as they move through Hamilton’s large rental apartment buildings.

In the weeks of theatrical exploration that followed, our participants created dynamic images of how everyday life unfolds inside Hamilton’s apartment buildings. These images prompted our research team to think about how inter-personal relationships evolve in such places, and how the social dynamics that take place in a high-rise may facilitate and/or prevent people from living together in harmony.

What became increasingly clear as we explored these initial images was how the story we needed to tell was grounded in a very strong sense of place: that of a multi-story structure comprised of both private dwellings and common spaces that people are expected to pass through rather than gather in. From the very beginning of the workshop process, participants emphasized how building management often goes to some trouble to ensure, for instance, that people don’t linger or organize to meet as groups in the lobbies of buildings.

Translating Relational Space to the Stage

Because this is theatre, we needed a set. Contrary to what many people might initially assume, a theatre set is not so much about replicating the “look” of a particular space. What is more important is to create the space in which characters can move into an out of particular kinds of relationships. In our case, this meant a space where each character is expected to have control of the small space behind their own door, but where they must also move through common spaces where they encounter other tenants.

Our designer, Melanie Skene, whose gorgeous puppets some of you may have seen at Take Back the Night or at performances by the Hamilton Aerial Group, came up with a great way of showing this, as seen in the drawing at the top of this post. The set is simple, easily transported, and – one of the things that was most important to us – it asks the audience to imagine a space that may remind them of spaces they know, rather than suggesting that the action of the play could only take place in one particular building. Once we had a clear sense of the space, performers were able to weave together snippets of various stories by improvising encounters centred around the issues they have experienced, directly or indirectly. As they moved through the space telling these stories, the world of the play started to come to life in exciting ways.

On one level, creating the space of the action was important simply because this is theatre, not a series of speeches or a policy report. (French theatre theorist Anne Ubersfeld, in her book, L’Ecole du Spectateur, actually defines theatre as “talking bodies evolving in space.”) But through our workshops we quickly realized that defining the space in which we could imagine this world is about much more than the demands of a particular art form. As we started to tell stories by moving through this particular space, we quickly saw how the organization and control of any space opens the possibility for some types of relationships, and makes others much more difficult.

The question of the kinds of relationships that can happen in particular spaces, it seems to us, is not only a problem for theatre-making. Rather, thinking about space in our theatre-making process has pushed us to also think about the ways in which the control of space affects the kinds of relationships that will be possible in Hamilton ten years from now. This is already a pressing question where “my home is your business…”

Are there ways in which you have seen the organization and control of space affect the kinds of relationships people can develop in Hamilton? We’d love to have you share your observations by commenting on this post!

Personal and Community Transformation

“In the process of conversation, change happens”

— Jones

Editor’s Note: In this blog, "Jones" discusses the transformative potential of Transforming Stories and advises other Hamilton community members why they should participate. Jones is a community performer on Transforming stories.

Have you seen any changes come about from the transforming stories pilot?

I would like to think am a very good observer. That’s my secret. I observe things. And I have observed some changes in the community. The last time we came together I had to say, “Guess what? You know things are happening! And they asked, “What do you mean?” So I said, “Such and such agency have changed their policy and then another agency did the same thing. And some other agencies are doing the same thing. I don’t know for sure but we could be having some impact!” And it’s not just one agency. It couldn’t be just coincidence.

One person that could affect change attended almost every performance we did. She even knew when we changed some aspect of the skit. Sometimes we did a little tweak and sometimes I wondered if I should tell her what we did. And I thought, no I think she knows it. I don’t have to tell her anything. And she was like, “Oh, you guys changed skit up a little bit.” So, she was paying attention. From her agency there were some changes that were implemented. Which showed in my opinion that if you talk with people, and you have discussions, not telling them, not yelling at them, not blaming them, but have discussions change can happen. Transforming Stories is about discussing the problem. It’s a conversational piece. But in the process of conversation, change happens.

What about you? How has Transforming Stories changed you?

I think it gave me a voice, in an area I didn’t think it would. So, we’ve done talks, workshops, and interviews, which were all valuable. We’ve gone to some social work classes and some other community events. We have given some community talks and presentations. We’ve talked about the committee and what we do.

In going through all these stuff, it can be traumatizing. But I found conversing about these issues in this format, it was therapeutic, even though it was nerve-racking going up on stage and bearing it all. I am not very good at — one-on-one is great. Public? Oi! It’s nerve-racking! And I’ve gotten so many complements from people, including, the director. She said, “You’re really good at this. You are a natural.” And I say, “Mm-mm! You have no idea. I couldn’t sleep at night. I kept on thinking about this stuff. I was this nervous wreck!” And she says, “Girl, I didn’t see one hint of nerves.” And I will say, “Really?” So, I think something came out of this whole thing, which I didn’t even know I had. I began to speak and converse in a way. And my voice was heard. They were things that I want to say that I did not get to say at all. Or not allowed to say. Or I thought about it but didn’t say anything, but put on a smile. But I got to say some of those things. And I have more, trust me I’ve more stories to tell.

What advice would you tell a community participant who wishes to participate in Transforming Stories?

Advice number one, I would tell them to attend one of our performances. Most times they are free to attend. See what we are doing, and come chat with us. We look scary, but we are not scary. We are the most soft, shy, reserved women that you will ever come across. You know?

And I would encourage people to jump in. It’s not as scary as it seems. If you don’t feel that you have the guts to do the performing, sit around and watch the people that perform. You will learn so much. Because we still struggle with talking about this difficult stuff. And sometimes people feel or say that, “I don’t want my story to be out there.” Well these stories are a combination of people stories, it is not just one particular person’s story. My character’s stories are things that I’ve heard from friends, some have happened to me, some I have witnessed, Like taking someone to a place to get services and you hear some of these things being said.

And it’s good, because you get to say what you really want to say. And the people behind the desk get to hear what you really have to say without it being directed at them. Because they are human beings as well.

So, I say to people, just come. Attend performances. Join. And see where this can take you, because you would be surprised how much impact you can have for yourself and your community. It’s going to be the best thing ever, because you become part of the solution.

 

Saying what we really wanted to say

 

 

“Transforming Stories actually helped us to tell exactly what we want to say… instead of saying what they want to hear.”

— Jones

Editor’s Note: In this blog,"Jones" discusses the performance-as-research process from her perspective as a community performer on Transforming Stories.

When we were planning this whole skit, we didn’t know where it was going to go. We were just following the leadership of these wonderful people. We had three chairs set out. And we pretended that people were sitting there like you’re sitting in front of me right now. The chairs represented different agencies. It could be any agency; it could be your medical doctor, pharmacist, and specialist. Someone who works in social assistance, a case manager, a housing manager, someone from the food bank. Anybody you want to have a conversation with.

In the whole process, we spoke to the empty chairs, making statements that were expected of us to say normally to these agencies and service providers. What we would like to say to these people if they were in front of you? All of us, in real life, we all have the polite way of saying things, you know?

There is this thing in the community, where you feel that you need to say this, this, and this to get that.

So, you say this, this, and this.

But… what you REALLY want to say is not coming out.

The directors, they wanted us to say what we REALLY wanted to say.

Instead of what we SHOULD say.

You know what I mean? And so we went for it. Oh my God! I think that was the best breakthrough, I mean for me personally. And I think for the people who we were working with. Because we actually went ALL OUT!

This never made the skit, but I have to share this example. Going to your doctor’s office, your doctor will say to you, “How are you? What can I do for you?” And you say, “Oh, I have a headache.” And the doctor will say, “Fine. Take Tylenol”. Or send you to another institution. What you really want to say is, “Doctor, not only is my head hurting. My neck is hurting. I’m grinding my teeth. My back is hurting me, and I can’t sleep at night.” But for various reason the doctor doesn’t want to hear all that, you know?

Transforming Stories actually helped us to tell exactly what we want to say, instead of saying what they want to hear or what is expected of us to say. Which is the secret to this whole project. It evolved that way. Plus we have this wonderful great team who knew how to channel us in the right spot.

The organizers [of Transforming Stories], they are amazing human beings. They are amazing. They get it. They understand and appreciate what we have gone through. And they appreciate that we are sharing this. Because it takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable. To talk about your dirty laundry. And this is not just your dirty laundry, this is the dirty laundry of all of us, in the community. It is all of our problems. And to have them acknowledge that even though they may not have had some of our collective experience, or even exact experience, or even some of what we have gone through. They were wowed!

And they protected our integrity. They protected our mental state because when you are talking about stuff like this, it is very challenging. They made sure that we were taken care of emotional-wise. And they made sure that we felt that what we were saying was worthwhile. I think it’s because of that, I and these wonderful group of women performed the way we did and why were we were able to do this. Because we couldn’t do it ourselves. It is like you have a car with all its bells and whistles, and if there’s no oil in there or if you don’t fill the tank with gas, you ain’t going anywhere, right? So, the organizers were the oil and the gas for us and helped us perform this powerful, ground-breaking awesomeness!

Cassandra Roach on displacement

 

“Many of the people being displaced are the more vulnerable in our society.”

— Cassandra Roach

 

 

Editor’s Note: One of the aims of Transforming Stories, Driving Change is to bring greater attention to issues of gentrification and displacement in Hamilton. Cassandra Roach the Community Outreach Worker for Transforming Stories, Driving Change shares her reflections on displacement due to gentrification in the Hamilton area.

Displacement is the involuntary loss of housing, losing the place you live in due to no fault of your own. And gentrification has increased displacement in Hamilton. This is because gentrification increases the perceived value of a neighbourhood. People who have more money come into a low-income neighbourhood, and then they put more money into it. So, the price of everything goes up, including the price of rent. So landlords want to take advantage of this so they attempt to kick people out of the places that they live so that they can raise the rent.

The Residential Tenancy Act has rent control guidelines. For instance, in 2017 landlords could only raise tenants’ rent by 1.5% per year. The concern is that landlords are doing everything they can to kick current tenants out to raise the rent beyond the guideline. And so, people are priced out of their neighbourhood. These neighbourhoods might have resources that these folks need, or exist in a community that they love. Maybe their children go to school in these neighbourhoods, and now they have to leave and look for another place.

Now in Hamilton, the price of housing has increased everywhere. It is tough for people to find affordable housing. Folks on ODSP, on OW, people on fixed incomes, have a difficult time finding a place. And of course, many of the people being displaced are the more vulnerable in our society. Individuals who are new Canadians, who are racialized, single-parents, sex workers, people who are already having trouble paying the rent because of low income. Gentrification increases this issue tenfold. And then once people are pushed out, they are displaced. It is hard for them to find an affordable place in their neighbourhood because the rent has increased everywhere.

A powerful way of communicating issues

“When the Transforming Stories team came to us, we were part of an advisory committee that advised a larger committee that supports women who were facing homelessness. So, there were two co – chairs and 8 members. City employees we worked with introduced us to people at McMaster’s Social Work and Theatre departments. And they came in, talked to us about the project and asked us what we thought about it. And we were like, yeah let’s go for it. Why not? We came to educate and inform. That’s one of our primary objectives to inform about the gaps in the system, to provide the women’s perspective.”

— Jones

Editor's note: 'Jones' is a pseudonym chosen by one of our anonymous project participants. Every now and then we will hear from our participants about their experiences of Transforming Stories, Driving Change.

What is your role on the project?

I performed as one of the characters who had all of these experiences. Life happened. She was unable to go back to work or continue work, and she was then beginning to face all of these challenges: losing her family, having a marriage dissolved, and all these other things. Some of the information we used in the skit is not only ours, the people performing in the play, but it’s also our friends, people who we’ve talked with, people who have shared stuff with us. So, the stories come from different voices. These stories are a combination of all these different experiences. And I think that was powerful because you realize how similar we are, that we all walk on this path. We think that we’re just alone, but then when you start talking about it you start realizing, oh man there something wrong here! All of these experiences are like my experience. Something must be wrong. So we kinda brought all those stories together. There is a little bit of us in there. But not so much so. It is actually saying what is happening out there. It’s sharing stories.

Have you ever use arts approaches before to share these stories?

No! No! Not like this. We have not! And that’s the beauty of this project because I didn’t go to drama school. I don’t know much about acting or anything like this. It was nerve-racking! Right? But we had good mentors, directors and teachers. They were just awesome. And it all came together with us telling these stories. It was fascinating!

For a person who does not know Transforming Stories how would you describe the project to them?

It’s like sitting around a fire and talking about life, school, health, relationships and stuff. You are relaxed! You’re calm. You are venting, not really venting, but just talking about stuff. You are reminiscing.

I remember the first time we sat down together, we were told to bring an object or two that meant something to us. We sat in a circle and explained what that object was. For me personally, that story circle reminded me of my grandmother. Because grandmama would always sit with us and have this chitchat. This comes from my culture. But the theatre director was saying this approach is common in Indigenous cultures too, this story sharing. And I thought they do this too? I guess were all the same.

And it brings a sense of community. Because you are in a circle. There’s nobody above or below. We are one. And I think that’s kind of sets up this catalyst of actions. All the women in our committee, ten of us, we were open about stuff and sharing stuff. And a lot of stuff came out when we were doing this. And that evolved into something else.

So, let me make this short, Transforming Stories is basically telling your story from your perspective without pointing fingers. Because you know, it’s experience. It’s not to make anyone feel bad. It’s not about making anybody feel sorry. But it’s sharing. We are sharing it from a place of truth. It’s not like I’m going to tell you what you want to hear because of your position. It’s more like what I’m going to tell you irrespective of your position. I think the Transforming Stories process takes away the shame. It takes away the pressure. We get down to the nitty-gritty. I think it is a very powerful way of communicating issues.

I hope, this is my hope, I think Transforming Stories should go on. I don’t have anything against town halls, but I’m hoping that we have Transforming Stories about different topics, and have people come around and talk. Let’s have a discussion. Let’s chit chat.

 

Catherine Graham

In our in conversations with … series of posts we introduce you to the people behind theTransforming Stories, Driving Change project—the artists, researchers, and community participants who desire Transforming Stories to make a substantive contribution to civic engagement in the city of Hamilton.

Catherine Graham is a co-Principal Investigator on Transforming Stories, Driving Change and an Associate Professor, Theatre & Film Studies, Gender Studies and Feminist Research, and Cultural Studies and Critical Theory in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.

“Nobody is going to create a world that we all really want to live in if there is no pleasure in doing it. I’ve really come to believe that our emotions tell us where we fit in the world at any given moment. If you’re miserable doing something, something is wrong, something needs to be corrected. So I’d say play together and pay attention to what pleasures arise through this kind of purposeful play, because how everyone feels will be an important clue about what a mutually meaningful world might look like.”

Catherine, how did you conceive the Transforming Stories project?

It really came out of a number of conversations with Chris Sinding. We recognized pretty quickly that we had similar interests but were coming at this kind of community-engaged performance work from different directions. I came into academic life out of work using theatre to do community engaged work for social change. When I started getting asked to teach other people how to do group facilitation the way I did it, I realized I couldn’t teach them because I did it so instinctively I couldn’t explain why I was doing what I did.

After a chance meeting, a former professor encouraged me to go back to school for a master’s degree in Comparative Literature as a way of trying to think some of this through. I was a single parent and had been out of school for about 14 years at that point, so it was a bit of a scary prospect, but in the end I did it. What I ended up studying was, effectively, cultural translation, and I think that a lot of what we’re doing in this kind of theatre work is a kind of translation. One of the things you pay attention to in translation studies is what assumptions about the situation are already embedded in the way we’re expected to talk about it. Theatre is a way we can make those assumptions more visible so we can challenge them when we need to – and that is at the core of this project.

Transforming Stories was originally a pilot project. How will this differ from the pilot?

It will differ mostly because of the groups that we work with. I feel it is important to work with multiple groups as it does two things. One, in terms of civic community discourse, is that, hopefully, it may get people talking to each other, and really hearing each other, who have not been talking to each other before.

I think research-wise, it is especially important for us to do this with multiple groups. I think the danger of this work is that we do an exercise or use a technique that works really well in one place, but then we try to generalize it everywhere. So, I think working with multiple groups will help us understand much better what pieces of this performance-as-research method are essential, what we want to repeat almost every time, and where we need to be flexible. How to recognize the difference is one of the things we don’t necessarily know yet and truly need to figure out.

How is this project different from other community engaged performance projects?

For one, this is not a knowledge translation project. I think what we usually understand by knowledge translation is that academics go and figure something out and then create a performance that is accessible to non-academics about what they’ve discovered. That is not our intention. With this project, the analysis and the performance creation will happen more or less simultaneously. So, it really is performance-as-research. When we try to figure something out we will figure it out by creating a situation between human beings, in the form of characters, and create the possible worlds or set of conditions within which that kind of relationship could happen. And that is what we will present to the public, but it will not be presented to the public as a finished piece.

The two pieces we did for the pilot end by requesting something of the audience. So, we consider the audience to be as much a part of the performance-as-research process as the community participants who agree to perform. A big part of what we are doing here is we are asking something of the audience – we’re asking the audience to put themselves in the picture.

We’re trying to get people participating in a mutually meaningful world, recognizing that we all live in the same city. We all live in this world and we all affect each other – whether we intend to or not and whether we know it or not. With luck, this work may lead to a sense of being responsible for each other’s well-being and not just for solving a particular problem.

You mention participating in a mutually meaningful world as one of the aims of the project. Are there any other aims that you feel we should talk about?

I think the big goal is to figure out how to bring these voices into public discussion who are not currently being heard. Which doesn’t mean that they’re not speaking. We live in a society where we have freedom of speech. We don’t necessarily have the freedom to be heard. So, we’re thinking: what are some of our habits of communication that are excluding some of these voices who are affected by/who affect the city we are living in? If we truly are a democracy, these voices need to be heard.

As a practitioner of performance-as-research what advice would you give others who are thinking of doing a project in a similar way as Transforming Stories?

Everything depends on who is in the room. It is really important to think carefully about who is in the room.

And have fun. Play with imagined situations and help others play too. Nobody is going to create a world that we all really want to live in if there is no pleasure in doing it. I’ve really come to believe that our emotions tell us where we fit in the world at any given moment. If you’re miserable doing something, something is wrong, something needs to be corrected. So I’d say play together and pay attention to what pleasures arise through this kind of purposeful play, because how everyone feels will be an important clue about what a mutually meaningful world might look like.

 

 

Image Theatre

Josie is a senior citizen who lives alone in an apartment halfway to the top of her high-rise building in downtown Hamilton.

Josie is frustrated by frequent fire alarms. She regularly finds herself struggling to race down the stairs in the middle of the night, her two dogs in tow, only to stand outside in the cold with her neighbours for up to forty-five minutes at a time.

 Josie often doesn’t go out because she’s scared she may get trapped in the elevator. It often gets stuck between floors, and everyone knows the super is too busy playing solitaire on her phone to even notice.

While Josie’s experiences may sound familiar to many tenants living in Hamilton, Josie herself is a fictional character.

Every week for the past three weeks, a small group of Hamilton renters has been gathering with the Transforming Stories team to develop believable characters and true-to-life situations that represent life as a tenant. Josie and her experiences were created using a community-engaged performance technique known as ‘image theatre’.

For the past two weeks, our group has been having a lot of fun experimenting with putting our bodies into collective statues (we call these ‘images’) that help us to tell a story about life in the city.

Last week participants imagined the ideal future Hamilton. They created a series of images that showed characters who took care of each other, felt connected to each other, and spontaneously danced with each other in their local park!

Image of the ideal Hamilton. (Credit Melanie Skene)

Last week we also asked folks to create images of what life is really like as a tenant in Hamilton. Our group experimented with several images depicting life in poorly maintained apartment buildings. We saw images of people disconnected from each other, looking downtrodden, and feeling frustrated about chronic maintenance issues.

Image of the real Hamilton (Credit Melanie Skene)

 

The difference between these two images is pretty stark, and it left us with nagging questions about the grey areas between the problem images and the ideal images. What are the practical steps to creating a better and more inclusive Hamilton?

This week, we explored some of those grey areas.

This is how our group generated the images of Josie and her neighbours dealing with elevator and fire alarm problems. These new images led to some interesting discussion. We found it really interesting, for example, that neighbours were getting to know each other in the context of difficult living situations, such as waiting for a broken elevator or standing outside together during a fire alarm.

These images prompted questions related to what exactly makes living in an apartment building difficult and/or bearable. We asked each other:

  • How do inter-personal relationships amongst neighbours affect tenant organizing?
  • What exactly are the dynamics that prevent people from living together in harmony?

We will be taking up some of these issues, and others, next week!

If you have ideas about the answers to these questions, please let us know by leaving a comment.

To be continued…

Chris Sinding

“I’m really fascinated by what art does and can do in the world…there’s a magic in it.”

Chris Sinding

 

 

In our in conversation with … series of posts we introduce you to the people behind the Transforming Stories, Driving Change project—the artists, researchers, and community participants who desire Transforming Stories to make a substantive contribution to civic engagement in the city of Hamilton. Chris Sinding is co-Principal Investigator on Transforming Stories, Driving Change and a Professor and Director of the School of Social Work at McMaster University.

What is your role on the Transforming Stories, Driving Change project Chris?

In the life of the project I feel my role is learner, observer, wonder-er… I’m really fascinated by what art does and can do in the world, and I bring that question to our big-picture conversations and also to the details of the workshops – to the image theatre exercises that my colleagues facilitate, for example.

I suppose too that, with some of the collaborators on the project, I hold down the social science end of the interdisciplinary spectrum of people involved in the project and thinking about what it all means. And then more specifically I have a role in considering how social work contributes to and can draw from what we discover together.

How did you get involved with Transforming Stories?

Many years ago, when I was a PhD student I was involved in (what we called at the time) a research-based drama project. The research part involved focus groups and individual interviews with women who had advanced breast cancer. The research team got together with a theatre director at Ryerson, and her troupe of amateur actors, and two women with advanced breast cancer, to create a drama, working from those interview transcripts.

And it had magic in it. It did things to us and to audiences that more conventional qualitative research rarely does. That’s not to diss conventional research… it just does different things.

I have done lots of qualitative research in cancer care over the past several years. And then more recently, I’ve started finding my way backwards and forwards, to arts-informed explorations and presentations.

What are your hopes for the project?

It’s partly about understanding the magic…! What does art do… and how does it do what it does?

As we reviewed the literature on arts-informed social work, the question we asked, over and over, was: what do the authors think art is ‘doing’ here? What is art achieving for service users or practitioners or student or researchers or communities – what is it achieving for relationships or for ideas about the social world… and especially what is art doing that that usual social work education or practice or research – does not do – or does not do as well?

In my readings on what art can do, three themes stand out. Art offers an alternative way for people to express themselves in situations where language or conventional or dominant language is ill-suited for what needs expressing, inadequate or constraining or exclusionary…

Art allows us to imaginatively enter the situation of another … The idea here is that when we engage with art about people and communities unfamiliar to us, we are able to participate vicariously in their worlds; our senses are activated; we respond emotionally as well as intellectually; we come to ‘know’ the other in ways we would not in a more conventional account. The classic metaphor here is that art enable us to walk in another’s shoes.

The third theme rests on the idea that dominant images (media images, stereotypes more broadly), inculcated into our ways knowing, become perceptual habits… habits of knowing that diminish others. The idea here is that artful images, especially as they are in compelling ways set against or in their contrast with dominant images – can interrupt our usual ways of understanding and knowing – art can ‘break bad habits’ of knowing.

There are all kinds of complexities and potential problems with these ideas as well… for example, what happens to someone else when we ‘walk in their shoes’ – might their shoes become damaged in some way? And if art is so good at ‘getting stuff out’ – might people who engage with art ‘say more’ than they might have wished?

So it’s not simple, the ethics of it are not simple. Now that I’m involved much more closely with scholars and practitioners from other disciplines, my ideas about what art does and can do are widening…

What can Transforming Stories, Driving Change contribute to the social sciences?

TSDC is concerned with the conversation happening in Hamilton about the future of the City, about life in this community, about what’s good for us as a community. We know that many people are excluded from this conversation, not because they have nothing to say, but because only certain speakers as recognized as legitimate — and only certain ways of speaking are heard or recognized as worthy contributions to the conversation.

This project tries to interrupt the value patterns that fail to recognize the contributions of so many people… and uses theatre to do this. The idea is that certain kinds of theatre can make visible and ‘play with’ cultural values, norms that underlie communication… and in making them visible, allow us to talk about them, and challenge them if they need challenging.

What advice would you give to a person new to performance-as-research who will be taking part on the Transforming Stories, Driving Change project?

A few hours before my first experience of a story circle and image theatre workshop, I met with a colleague in the School of Social Work who was also a participant. We were beyond ourselves!! We were so anxious… I was having complete introvert meltdown at the thought of being exposed, of not being able to prepare for what would happen, of having to move and play rather than stand and speak… and especially in front of academic colleagues. I suppose I would say to people: there is magic in it…