Click here to visit the Jumblies Theatre website.
Jumblies Theatre and York University were both born out of a multicultural Toronto, possibly the most diverse city in the world. York prides itself on its pluriethnic student population, its interdisciplinarity and its commitment to community-based learning. Jumblies Theatre has worked over the past decade with long-term projects in multicultural neighbourhoods, facilitating multi-disciplinary processes leading to large-scale productions (community plays) involving professional artists and public participation. Jumblies revels in 'jumbling' together seemingly incongruous things (people, art forms, stories) and in blurring distinctions between high and popular art, process and product, audience and participant, performance and installation, art and life.
The "Bridge of One Hair" Project is a partnership between Montgomery's Inn (honouring Irish settlers) and Toronto Community Housing, and in particular, the Mabelle subsidized high rise apartments housing new immigrants and refugees from the Caribbean, Somalia, Korea, Russia and Poland. This new long-term Jumblies residency began in early 2005 by developing relationships with a variety of community organizations and by offering a 12-week program engaging youth (ages 12-16) in storytelling, photography, puppet-making, spoken word, video production, installation, and performance. Facilitated by eight artists, the youth researched and photographed their neighbourhood, interviewed local shopkeepers, created an installation on their roots and visions, produced a video on basketball, and performed a spoken word piece on "Where I'm From," moving beyond simplistic notions of cultural identity to embrace the complexity of their lives. Other small projects involved seniors in gathering oral history and visual mapping of the neighbourhood as well as an intergenerational dance group led by a Somali woman.
Participating artists and Jumblies founder and artistic director, Ruth Howard, identified the following creative tensions in the nascent project: the tension of holding on (controlling the direction) vs. letting go (letting participants shape the project) and a related tension between structured processes and emergent processes; the tension between artistic quality (maintaining an aesthetic) and participation engagement (allowing participants to develop their own skills); between playing the role of the artist and/or the social worker; the tension of being outsiders to particular communities, as it is impossible to be an insider in all communities. The artistic director named a key tension between the demands of fundraising for the project which takes away from her own creative artistic practice.
There is a built-in tension between the local wealthy residents of Anglo heritage, who may feel threatened by new residents and thus new stories.When we discussed the project in Achiote, we focused discussion on what we called "the white ladies syndrome" which reflected the identity of most of the collaborating artists working with visible minority communities. With just six months of a three-year project underway, these tensions will be engaged and new ones arise as the project unfolds.
