SZEPTY/WHISPERS: DIALOGUE

Through the voices of various artists, this web-based experience explores the relationship between mental health, language, and lineage. Many awareness campaigns urge us to “break the silence”. But the question of whether – or how – to speak is complicated. Mental health discourses are shaped by particular histories, which reverberate in the present. By juxtaposing multiple perspectives, Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue aims to expand the possibilities for how we communicate about madness, trauma, and neurodivergence. The content is offered in the form of audio files, transcripts, and ASL videos.

The process for Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue began when artist Veronique West invited seven collaborators to make audio recordings in response to open-ended questions about mental health, language and lineage. The collaborators were: mia susan amir, Kagan Goh, Maya Jones, Constantin Lozitsky, Jivesh Parasram, Kendra Place, and Manuel Axel Strain. A digital platform was developed to host the recordings, through collaboration between the Cultch Digital Storytelling Team, Sound Designer David Mesiha, Inclusive Designer JD Derbyshire, Dramaturg Kathleen Flaherty, Deaf Interpreter Ladan Sahraei, Production Coordinator Brian Postalian and Veronique West. Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue was first presented at the 2021 rEvolver Festival.

Consultants: Amy Amantea, June Fukumura, Simran Gill, and MariFer Rios.

For a full list of the Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue team’s biographies, please follow the link below:

CREATIVE TEAM BIOGRAPHIES

Keywords: 2SLGBTQIA+ | BIPOC Experience | Community | Disability | Family

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Digital Platform Realization by: The Cultch Digital Storytelling Team

Developed at Playwrights Theatre Centre as part of the Associates program.

The project has also been supported by:
Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival
The National Theatre School of Canada’s Art Apart initiative

The parallel in-person performance has been supported by:
the Canada Council for the Arts
the BC Arts Council
the Province of British Columbia
Playwrights Theatre Centre
Rumble Theatre
Progress Lab 1422
Chimerik似不像 Collective
Boca del Lupo and Rice & Beans Theatre’s DBLSPK series
Mentorship with Boca del Lupo’s Artistic Director Sherry J. Yoon
Universal Limited’s Horizontal Help program
The Arts Club Theatre Company’s LEAP Playwriting Intensive

The Cultch Digital Storytelling Team would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts

HYBRID PRECARITY
Leena Raudvee

Hybrid Precarity is a series of pen and ink drawings that has emerged out of a daily drawing practice from the last year of pandemic related anxieties and isolation. It is superimposed, by necessity, on ongoing issues of vulnerability, disability and the precariousness of severely limited mobility.

As internal self-portraits, these drawings respond to changes in Raudvee’s emotional and physical body, as body in process, and become records of the evolving dis-eased body. They are reflections on a strangely hybrid identity, attached to walking aids and no longer wholly human.

Hybrid Precarity is an online slideshow of black and white drawings, accompanied by a sound recording of dissonant sounds, of things creaking and broken.

Leena Raudvee is a Toronto-based visual and performance artist, who focuses on the body in relation to personal history and social interchange.

Raudvee’s drawings, which investigate the performative embodied within the drawing of a line, have been exhibited in numerous juried shows including Drawing 2021 at the John B. Aird Gallery, Drawing Unlimited at the Propeller Gallery and Unpacking Pandemic Pondering with OCADU and Gallery 1313.

In performance art, Raudvee has explored disability and aging in Teetering on an Edge for Pi*llOry in Toronto and in Making Space, as video, screened in Photophobia 2020, presented by Hamilton Artists Inc. and Hamilton Art Gallery.

Keywords: Disability | Trauma

Recipient of the Ontario Arts Council grant for Deaf and Disability Arts Projects:
Materials for Visual Artists

Based on a 2021 Digital Workshop Series that Lisa Anita Wegner created for Yuri Araj for KickStart Disability Art and Culture in Vancouver, Workman Arts presents the Toronto Edition. You will hear from Apanaki Temitayo M & Lisa Anita Wegner, two extraordinary artists who live with multiple invisible disabilities and have made it a priority to not let that stand in the way of achieving their creative and life goals. Join us for an hour and a half long presentation of art, films, stories and inspiration. Talks will be followed with a Q&A period.

Where: Zoom
When: Thursday, April 8, 2021, 6 PM – 7.30 PM EST

This is a free event for Workman Arts members and the general public.

ASL interpretation and live captioning will be available.

a note from Oliver Jane, Creator of Jo Don’t Go There

Sometimes the “show must not go on” and that’s ok.

When I made the decision to not move forward with my piece Jo Don’t Go There in Rendezvous with Madness 2020, I was encouraged by my friend and contact at Workman Arts to write a short reflection for all of you in lieu of the show. Here you will find some rambling, musing, and reflecting. Thank you for taking a brief moment to reflect with me.

When I agreed to move forward with the project several months ago, I was excited by the challenge of transferring my live performance pieces to video web content. Unfortunately, I found that meeting the demands of a precarious/always changing pandemic environment made completing the project difficult. I am an artist that lives with chronic pain, Rheumatoid Arthritis, PTSD symptoms, and OCD symptoms. The greatest lesson I have learned from managing all of these is that I should not go beyond my limits. Unfortunately, working in solo-isolation and not having funding to adequately compensate others to do the much-needed-tasks to make this project show-ready was bringing me close to my limits.

Since I made the choice to pause the show, the phrase “the show must go on” has been echoing through my mind. Upon reflecting on the nagging presence of this phrase within my mind, I recall that I have, almost exclusively, operated within creative environments where that sentence is espoused. I have worked in so many creative environments where the expectation to see a show to its completion is demanded of artists, producers, and production teams: no matter the cost. My years training to be an artist and working professionally have been colored by watching many friends and colleagues sacrifice their physical and mental health to see work to its completion. For many years I have wondered if creative communities should let go of the phrase “the show much go on” and refrain from normalizing the practice of sacrificing physical and mental wellness amongst artists. What I have witnessed in theatre schools and amongst theatre makers has made me consciously attempt to avoid working myself beyond my limits so that I do not worsen my already-sometimes-very-challenging health.

So I say once again, to comfort myself and to encourage those who find themselves also facing projects, businesses, and plans that need to be put on pause, closed, or canceled as a result of the pandemic: “the show must not go on” and that’s ok.

I’d like to offer gratitude to the team who has assisted me during this process. Though the show will not be viewed in this festival, I am continuing the reflect on and develop the body of work I have made thus far. I feel I must offer my deep gratitude to all those who gave me their time and talents.

• I am grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with my older brother, a very skilled video editor, who has been a cherished peer, mentor, and teacher (of art and life) for these last several months.
• I am grateful to the handful of talented musician friends who were willing to do some work on this project for free, for very low fees, or for barter.
• I am grateful to Workman Arts for supporting me as I adjusted the show to the changes brought about by the pandemic. This is my second experience working with Workman Arts, and I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate the work Kelly, Scott, Cara, Paulina, and the rest of the team working behind the scenes at Workman Arts do to make this really special festival happen. And during a pandemic, no less!
• Finally, I am grateful for organizations like Workman Arts that are actively striving to foster greater diversity of representation within the Ontario and Toronto creative community. I hope you all will continue to support and patronize Workman Arts even after the festival has passed.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival, you remember to stay safe, you do what you can to support and aid the most vulnerable in our communities, you donate to groups and organizations that are trying to address the already existing racial and economic inequality within North America that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, and you all focus your energies on taking care of your immunity and your mental health while the world faces global crisis. I know I will!

I send love and gratitude to you all.

-Oliver Jane

Enter the mind of Jo, a nonbinary trauma survivor, video artist and clown. Meet Jo’s consciousness embodied: their performative imaginary friend Oli Oli Ennui, a snarky clown who doesn’t take all this modern art stuff too seriously. If you know Jo’s personal story (hailing from NYC, navigating OCD and PTSD while occupying space in Toronto during the pandemic), do you know Jo? If you hear Oli sing punk-injected cabaret, do you know their soul? Experience Jo’s multimedia happening: a video series, music playlists, Instagram uploads, photo exhibition and a live installation performance at 651 Dufferin Street. This collection of fragments resonates in permanent refrain: Do you know me now?

Founded by Maria Wodzinska and Oliver Jane in 2017, goat(h)owl generates collaboratively devised experiences. Grounded in the body, at the core of every piece is a question. We take flight through our investigation of the thematic territory, of our position to the question, and of our will-to-know. We attempt to affirm the unknowable with proposals — playing in-front-of/with/around an audience. We want to shake up sedimented modalities of meaning and truth-telling with our moving ensemble. We point the eye to the kaleidoscope of forms created. Do we invite the audience to make meaning? Yes. Do we make meaning? Come and see.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Loud Sounds, Mature Language, Nudity, Rape and/or Sexual Violence, Sexual Content, Suicide

Neuroelastic is a self-activated artistic performance. Taking a cue from the well-known concept of Dr. Norman Doidge’s neuroplasticity, it is inspiring that the mind can adapt in new ways. The artist imagined an idea; by wrapping oneself in streams of coloured synaptic “bandages” this symbolic act can allow thoughts and feelings to show on the outside. Using photography as documentation, a capture of the moment reveals what is hidden. This artwork of self-permission reflects on not only the unseen being seen, but that it can be changed. This collection of images I hope can read as a zany family album of the mind. Neuroelastic is an interior selfie and an invitation to an altered way of being.

Laura Shintani is a Toronto-based multimedia artist who creates work in order to provoke questions in artistic forms. Shintani represents a hybrid of work, art making, study and teaching. She is interested in seeing people embrace the cycle of creativity: playing, problem solving and reflecting. Raised in small-town Ontario, Shintani later studied fashion design at Ryerson University and received a degree from the University of Toronto. After personal discovery she made art a vocation and earned a Master of Fine Art from the University of Windsor. Shintani’s most significant exhibition was at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2019.

This artist has interactive materials which will be provided in the RWM swag bag in order to interact with their virtual content. All ticket holders will be invited to receive RWM swag bags available for free curbside pickup during festival hours.

Images of the Neuroelastic installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

A colourful video projection onto a soft surface, marks the entrance to the installations – a suggestion that the guest, following the arrows, is entering a carnival fun house. A series of drifter dance documentations using hand motions and body movements to respond to and amplify the patterns of found carpets. Taken in the semi-public passageways of hotels— it explores the interpolation of class and the end of conference culture. An act of resiliency, and taking nothing for granted: watching a sunset from a goldfish bowl, spun on a ride at a carnival, your body stays still below, by becoming a blizzard, in an inside out forest. The project celebrates itinerancy of artists, mad folks and other portable persons.

Grey Muldoon (they/them) is a movement artist working primarily out of Toronto / Tkaronto and Halifax / Kjipuktuk. Grey is disciplined in performance and puppetry arts and makes immersive sculptural installations. A proud Workman Arts member, Grey is interested in close observation, picking things up and carrying them gently, and collaborating with clear-voicing and shout-noisilying. Their experience of rare cognitive relational vibrance, a.k.a. Autism, of survival system sensitivity and subtle time injuries, a.k.a complex PTSD, and the discovery of practical imagination technologies via crisises, a.k.a Madness, allows them to make their work.

Images of the Mad Carpets – Hotel Carpet Dance Projections installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Paulina Wiszowata

Join multidisciplinary artist and creative writer, Hanan Hazime, for an online poetry workshop and art installation. Instead of psychiatric medicine, participants  of “The Mad Poetry Apothecary” will be prescribed creative prompts that encourage mental wellness. Participants will be guided through the creation of mixed-media poetry postcards and given the opportunity to virtually showcase their work. Those who would like to participate in the virtual art installation but cannot attend the online workshops have the option of submitting their poetry postcard via email. All levels of writing and artistic skills are welcome. Folks with lived experience of mental health and/or addiction issues are highly encouraged to contribute their voices to this project.

Click here to view the virtual Mad Poetry installation.

Hanan Hazime is a multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator and writing instructor living in Tkaronto/Toronto. She also identifies as a Lebanese-Canadian Muslimah Feminist and Mad Pride Activist. Through her intersectional and interdisciplinary artwork, Hanan aims to push boundaries, question arbitrary binaries, dispel stigmas and shatter stereotypes. Her primary mission as an arts educator is to provide accessible arts education to marginalized communities with a special focus on crafting safe, empowered spaces for Muslims, individuals with mental health challenges, folks with disabilities and BIPOC youth to discover and enhance their writing and art skills.