Estrangement
2022-2023 Estrangement creation and rehearsals. Project terminated by Covid-19
North Bay Ontario
2016 – 2020 Pins and Needles Fabric Company (inter-arts) – Founder, Artistic Director,
Technologist, Writer, Inventor (pinandneedle.ca)
Us/We/Ours: An inter-art disabling presentation in distress – 2019
- Co-creator, digital interactivities, video, playwright
- An experiment in shifting the notion of distress from artists with invisible disabilities to instead be felt by the audience. In this production we actively seek to create a disabled space that prioritizes the comfort of expressing invisible disabilities through normalizing them through performance. The project focuses on an intersection between disability and culture/ identity.
- September 2019 – IMPACT19
- Two month creation process to mount Us/We/ Ours for the international audiences of IMPACT19.
Endaayaang – Our Home 2018 – 2020
- Artistic Director, curriculum creation, workshop facilitator, storytelling, digital and visual storytelling, writing, digital mapping, lead artist
- Participants documented stories, histories, locations in artistic, digital, and other multi- media format. Ten sites were highlighted with both a physical tour, and digital map with digital media highlights. Letterboxes with linocut stamps were used to mark “passports” of the tour – hidden in location as a gamefied aspect.
Mamaawi, and Mamaawi Revisited
May 2019, and Revisted November – December 2021
Mamaawi, 2019 – Co host and storyteller
“Organized by Divest Waterloo, the Waterloo Storytelling Project brought together Indigenous theatre creators Debajehmujig Theatre Group (Debaj) in a weeklong community-wide learning opportunity about climate justice. The project culminated in Maamawi, a cocreated theatre show that incorporated the stories that Debaj heard in Kitchener/Waterloo region with traditional teachings about our relationships with each other and with the land led by the Indigenous storytelling experts and a local advisory circle lead by Amy Smoke and local Indigenous theatre artist and community animator, Heather Majaury.” – Faith and the Common Good
Mamaawi revisted Endaayaang – Our Home emerging musician programme – 2019
Created curriculum and marketing materials, delivered a sound walk and additional programming, mentorship leading to a youth concert with new and traditional material with Rene Meshake and the Cedar Creek drum group.
“This project was undertaken by our GSS Chapter, Divest Waterloo, in partnership with Pins and Needles Fabric Company, an “Intersectional Inter-Arts Collective” and Crow Shield Lodge. The project involved land based workshops (funded by the Community Foundation) that were held in the woods at Crow Shield Lodge Indigenous Healing Centre to connect the artists with each other, their mentors, elders and knowledge keepers. Crow Shield Lodge is a particularly cultivated space for Indigenous teachings and connections visioned and realized by the urban Indigenous community in Block two of the Haldimand tract where there are facilities that encourage traditional culturally-based relationship building, to foster cooperation and collaboration and creating support.
“Participants spent time in the woods together and alone, listening and learning. They were also supported to develop their songs during one of these workshops by accomplished Indigenous studio musicians. Numerous online coaching sessions followed in advance of the final performance.
These focused on preparing the emerging artists to perform and to share their stories. The final performance was funded by the City of Kitchener and held indoors at the City’s Victoria Park Pavilion in December 2021.” – Faith and the Common Good
Wrong Way – 2017
- Artistic director, playwright, co-creator, digital interactivities, visual art, video and
projection - An inter-arts performative creation about Two- Spirit homelessness, murder mystery examining different facets of colonization- Presented at IMPACT17 – International theatre festival in Kitchener.
Memories memorialized : Place of Apology – 2016
- Story collection using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, visual art
- memorializing and commemorating spaces of trauma through both rubber stamps hidden on site w with written steps to locate (letterboxing) and digital tagging with coordinates (geotagging) to access narratives
- Lost to internet gremlins
“This project is about love and loss, memory and recollection, and how we reckon these to location. We will be tying story through memorial placed in various ways depending on the narratives to locations throughout the region. We are exploring:
- Who owns the stories that get told?
- Who owns the memorialising of what’s important?
- Who owns the representation of these stories?
- This project will make use of letterboxing and geocaching, narrative, memorial, small object fabrication, treasure hunt, social media, database, GPS, mobile technology, illustration, craft…
Process (please suggest changes/adaptations):
- collection of stories
- creation of database and online infrastructure
- memorialising and representation of stories through object, illustration…
- placement of memorial at location, upload of story online
- GPS and letterbox hints documented and placed online
- social media for stories (maybe we can do this in an obscure way by putting out hints/GPS without announcing the project per se
- continued story collection and memorial placement, encourage people to contribute their own”
No Safe Space : A Study in Hostile Urban Design – 2015
- Artistic director, storytelling and writer, photography
- Collaboration with unhoused community
- Project lost to internet gremlins
