DYPP: Take A Sick Day On August 18

Take a Sick Day! is an August 18, 2012 event organized by the Disabled Young People’s Project. Read on to learn more about DYPP’s objectives, motivations and inspirations.

What is DYPP all about?

We’re all about Youth + Art + Community

Video trailer courtesy of Disabled Young People’s Project; all rights reserved. Click video to watch.

Disabled Young People’s Project centers the experiences of young people of colour with disabilities through arts based initiatives and community events. The objective of DYPP is to connect young people with disabilities. We are a diverse group of racialized people who identity with or find disability concretely relevant to our everyday lives.

It’s hard to say where the project began, it’s as if it’s always been happening but it started out with the recognition that there is an urgent need for a space that addresses the impact of disability, the ways in which it is framed and understood in our society, in our homes and within our communities as well as and the impact that this framing has had on our lives as people concretely affected by disability. DYPP is a part of recognizing that our communities have always been talking about disability but that the way the growing disability discourse as we know it is largely shaped by whiteness and the west, and white supremacy in activist spaces, in academic institutions and in global policy and actions that seek to address and measure “disability” so that it is as if we are “new” to the scene.

The project stems out of an urgent need to address the fact that disability is contested and has always been – historically, within our city limits and transnationally – and that we must began to do something about it. It’s about recognizing the past, the work that has been done by those that have come before us in our communities and moving forward. We recognize that it is an old tool of colonization and domination: divide and conquer to keep our communities as well as communities of resistance siloed and separated from one another. To that end, we seek to take action in anyway we can to end discrimination and oppression against people with disabilities. For us, this project is very much about saying that race is not a separate issue from disability; neither is queerness, neither is gender, neither is labour and work, neither is education and poverty and access to education.

One important thing to mention is that we recognize that we are operating in a nonprofit industrial complex within a neoliberal socio-economic system and so we are trying to think of ways to do the work that we recognize ought to be done with the resources that we have available to us. We are a very new project. We do not know how long we will be here for but while we are here we hope to create safer spaces for our communities to gather in dialogue to  and to discuss what it means to be told that we are ill, sick, or unwell and what it means to have different bodies from those around us who have claimed normal for themselves.

One of the things that we feel we can do right now is to create room for nonjudgmental dialogue and learning and education among members of our community. Many of us have faced extreme isolation in our everyday lives as we’ve tried to deal. It has been very painful, it has been very costly. We know that that this is not ok, and so Take a Sick Day! was born.

Why ‘Take a Sick Day’?

The event is called Take a Sick Day! as a way of calling attention to and honoring the ways in which many racialized, poor and working people with disabilities too often are forgotten or erased from conversations about disability, especially in western contexts. We wanted to draw attention to all the ramifications of the associations of health and disability.

We recognize that an insistence on the careful disassociation of disability from health by many disability scholars and activists is actually a very dominant theme in Euro-American white disability scholarship and activism. Overwhelming emphasis is put on separating disability from health and illness – mainly by social model advocates….We think that the initial insistence was due to saving disability from the domination and authority of medical expertise and discourse, but unfortunately it was done at the expense of many disabled people, by erasing/ignoring one of the main reasons of disablement, namely timely access to adequate health care on a global level.

We no longer find this useful and don’t understand the point of separating “health” from disability, in that they function along the same lines to oppress different bodies and impose very costly – to those labeled as such – ramifications, such as institutionalization and criminalization.

The name Take a Sick Day! is also about the false constructions of merit and labour, the idea that sick days are extravagant, a luxury and cost in a society that has a way of devaluing the constructions of the “disabled body”.

Take a Sick Day! is one event, and we recognize that much more is needed. For some of us, this is just the beginning. Some of us are going because we’ve felt removed from the disability community or didn’t feel like we were a part of one. Others, because it would be nice to be around other youth of colour with disabilities, to learn from each other as a refreshing change. There are lots of giveaways, swag bags and art. The food, the TTC Tokens… come because you want to!

What do you hope will grow out of this event?

Community and a space for youth of colour to discuss disability amongst ourselves. We are not sure what that will look like yet.

Who are the local artists who inspire you?

There are many local artists, groups, scholars, writers who have inspired us as a collective. Aside from the inspiration we draw from ourselves we have to shout out some special people to us.

Artreach Toronto for their unrelenting patience and support for this Project, for maintaining accessible and youth friendly funding structure and for cheering us on all the way! Annu Saini at Frequency Feminisms for her extraordinary art and facilitation skills and amazing show at Radio Regent;Esther Ignani and Critical Disability Studies at Ryerson;Rachel Gorman, Assistant Professor at Critical Disability Studies for quietly and confidently believing in DYPP and creating the most accessible classroom ever for many of us; Robertha Timothy for her outstanding scholarly contribution to race and disability studies; Andrew LaRose for his amazing music from his upcoming album ‘Playground’; Leroy Moore and Sins invalid,Pauline Hwang at paulinehwang.ca,Golshan Abdmoulaie, Tess Vo at the reachOUT Program, Griffin Centre,Isabel Mackenzie Lay, Darcel Bullen at METRAC (Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence against Women and Children), Jayson Gallop Photography,Cory Silverberg, Yaya Yao, Bessie Head; all the members of our advisory board and the numerous other folks who have been our friends and allies and made this day happen!

Check out the Disabled Young People’s Project’s ‘Take a Sick Day’ at the AGO on August 18, 2012.

For more info, please visit http://takesickday.wordpress.com

Photography and Emancipatory Communication

This article is an excerpt from a paper presented at the Canadian Communication Association’s 2012 conference on Thursday, May 31. I was part of a panel called Body and Affect in Visual Communication. Though there were quite some gaps between the substance of our presentations, it was still a great pleasure to present alongside Sara Martel, Tess Jewell, and Gary McCarron.

“….When I began my research, my interest was in community arts practices that deployed camera-based practices: so rather than, say, community theatre or community murals, I was interested in sites that employed community video or photography. However, as I quickly came to find out, camera-based practices are rarely found in isolation, but rather co-exist with those built upon community theatre, community media, and other interdisciplinary, multimodal, and grassroots traditions. There’s an important specificity to photorealistic, camera-based practices in community arts that I will only be able to touch on obliquely here; so, for the purposes of this paper, let me just suggest that they are an important engagement tool and media production method comparable to others in the field.

Kris and Elinor shooting houses of dreams and memory; image courtesy of MABELLEarts

In what follows, I’ll try to weave descriptions of some of these organizations and practices into the arguments I’ve proposed: first, that community arts helps shift the ground upon which critical social action might occur, and secondly that community arts helps expand the repertoire of forms and gestures those actions might take.

The practices and organizations with which I’ve been involved exist in a variety of situated and transitory spaces. For example, MABELLEarts, which is an organization working with and physically based in the high-density, low-income Toronto Community Housing complex called Mabelle Park in an otherwise affluent Central Etobicoke. Over the past four years, MABELLEarts has put on recurring, registration-based workshops, as well as weekly drop-in sessions. It has also put on less fixed events – whether temporally, such as seasonal events coinciding with Ramadan or with winter – or spatially, such as performances and parades that occupy park space or that transform live lanes of traffic into spaces of celebration. It has documented many of these interventions in photos and video, and has used camera-based methods to generate a variety of more pictorial, less documentary material for these and other events.
Making Room – an organization working with members of and neighbours living near the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre in the heart of that Toronto community – also hosts weekly drop-in sessions. Over it’s four year history, Making Room has tried to find ways to engage residents and guests with Parkdale: with its histories, its stigmas, and its proximity to other, perhaps for some, more desirable spaces, such as the lake shore. It has used cameras and photorealistic imagery in ways similar to MABELLEarts: for both documentary and for more creative, pictorial purposes.

These and other practices are marked by a number of spatial interventions: for one, participants are invited to be in familiar places at unfamiliar times; secondly, they are invited to be in unfamiliar places proximate to those more familiar at a variety of times; and thirdly, they are invited to navigate spaces, both familiar and unfamiliar, in novel and non-habitual ways. As I have suggested, camera-based practices are deployed, both by facilitators and by participants, in all kinds of ways and at various moments during these interventions.

Streets of dreams and memory; image courtesy of MABELLEarts

Some examples: in the first case, as an intervention into being in familiar places at unfamiliar times, MABELLEarts crafted pinhole cameras out of cardboard, tape, and aluminum cans with some residents. Given the unique optical characteristics these cameras possess and long exposure time they demand, pinhole images are generally unpredictable and difficult to envision. Two afternoons with these cameras in late January resulted in impromptu photoshoots at units where people let us borrow their balconies, as well as in areas of the park and apartment grounds that participants thought “might look good as a pinhole photo.” As bad weather took hold on the second day, the pinhole plan had to be scrapped for lack of light, and a back-up plan of timelapse videos shot with digital cameras.

Greg working on time lapse video; image courtesy of MABELLEarts

In the third case, navigating spaces in novel ways, Making Room incorporates meditation into their weekly sessions. Artistic Director Michael Burtt is careful to note that this is not merely a cerebral activity. Thus, the opening meditation activity, what he calls a 10-20 minute “sit,” is meant to heighten a participant’s awareness of their bodily presence within the everyday, within the material goings-on of their community, warts and all, rather than to claim a separation from it. This kind of holistic activity acknowledges rather than supresses the complexity of a community, one historically portrayed as at-risk instead of in greater need of support and resources. The meditation also fosters a kind of open awareness, one that encourages playful encounters with the Parkdale neighbourhood, and has been integral to a process that has resulted in a portfolio of projects and performances that includes large-scale still photographic portraits wheat-pasted onto local buildings, as well as mixed-media sculptures selectively developed and installed adjacent to conventional social service agencies, and the launch of a boat into Lake Ontario – designed and built in-house, led as much by skilled boat-builders as by active residents. The launch is scheduled for mid-June.
The examples described, in short, shift the grounds whereby interpersonal communication can occur, both by opening spaces and by reconfiguring relations within and across existing and familiar spaces. Further, by engaging with space in asystematic and non-habitual ways – for example, by meditating as a group or by being in a public park legitimately after dark – through such engagements, both directly with the space and with one another in such spaces, distinct conversations occurred. I wouldn’t claim that camera-based practices “made” these events any more than other media and non-media practices did or would have, but they certainly enriched the way such interventions unfolded, and contributed to the complexity of discursive and non-discursive communication that occurred in such sites.

A number of the practices I just described also relate to my second argument – namely, that community arts functions to expand repertoires of social action, and possibly critical social action. As I see it, this happens in several distinct but not necessarily discrete ways: first, by augmenting personal capacities for acting; secondly, by collectivizing social action; and thirdly by providing spaces in which collaborative practice is encouraged and normalized.
In terms of personal growth, community arts encourages a whole host of individualized skill development. Some practices encourage fine arts or performing arts or media arts production skills, others develop self-help or entrepreneurial skills, still others experience in pedagogical facilitation, anti-oppression teaching, and so on. Although these outcomes are seldom the product of an explicit pedagogy, community arts nevertheless tends to foster various arts and crafts, popular education or social justice skills for which little systematic training is otherwise elsewhere available.
Michael Burtt from Making Room, for example, is aware of his participants’ comfort and seeming expertise in welcoming and hosting new participants to their sessions. The same is true of Phyllis Novak – the Artistic Director of Sketch, a multi-purpose studio located in a space adjacent to Parkdale near Queen West, and geared toward at-risk and street-involved youth. Novak claims her organization is making explicit attempts to enact literature on “the art of hosting” into its mandate and practice, particularly in the peer-leadership and mentorship work that they support. Regardless of the depth to which such training occurs, the effect is that participants are invited to engage in organizational activities and processes – as facilitators or decision-makers, for example – and to also acquire the skills demanded by these roles.

This kind of organizational model in particular – a model which values leadership skills development amongst participants – relates to the second aspect of community arts’ contributions to expanding social and cultural repertoires: namely, the collectivization of social action. Despite the seeming concentration of power embedded within the designation “Artistic Director,” community arts often deploy fluid organizational hierarchies that decenter the authority of its Artistic Directors. Of the examples I mentioned, for example, youth are often invited to shoulder organizational responsibility as peer leaders. Similarly, senior citizens are invited to share accumulated wisdom, both with younger generations and with peers from distinct cultures. In my experience at least, Artistic Directors serve less to authorize, control, and legitimize such practice – how could they and still have a community with which they work? Rather, Artistic Directors often shape and cultivate practices, acting to redistribute rather than devolve responsibility and control onto participants.

Indeed, in these and other cases, this is a kind of democratization of practice that amounts to more than simply a way for communities to “buy-in” to what community arts claims to offer. It is a direct rather than a representational democracy of sorts: altering the nature of what community arts can accomplish by attempting to incorporate community-derived beliefs and values into the aesthetic and discursive systems within which community arts practitioners operate. It is to this politicizing action that I earlier referred when speaking of the potential contribution community arts may make to understandings of emancipatory and decolonizing communication….”

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Comments on this paper, as well as criticism, are welcome. Some rights reserved: cc by-nc-sa 2012 Kris Erickson. To check out the full text of this article, visit the thinking practice blog about ‘photography, learning, creativity, and other matters’. Kris Erickson can be reached at kris.erickson@ryerson.ca

To learn more about MABELLEarts, visit http://mabellearts.ca

To learn more about Making Room, check out http://making-room.org

2012 Small Business Arts Forum

The 2012 Small Business Arts Forum is coming up on Tuesday April 24! This year’s topic is Financing Growth in the Arts. Check out the program or visit toronto.ca/artsforum to learn more.

EMERGENCE: Call for Volunteers

CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS to help the Neighbourhood Arts Network on

Friday February 24 at Harbourfront Centre

Be a part of Emergence, Neighbourhood Arts Network’s first Symposium on Community Arts Practice!  Join us for the day and enjoy the opportunity to participate in Panel Discussions or Networking Sessions and meet artists and cultural workers from across Toronto.

Greeters: Greeters will help answer questions and guide symposium guests to their session rooms.

Registration: Registration volunteers will work at the registration table for half a day, and spend the other part of the day enjoying the panels and networking sessions.

If you decide to spend the full day with us, you will also have a chance to have lunch with guests from Toronto’s vibrant arts community.

Morning Shift

Registration Table: 7:45am – 12pm,

Greeters:  10am – 12pm

 

Afternoon Shift

Registration area: 12pm – 5pm

Greeters:  2pm – 4pm

If you would like to volunteer, please contact skye@torontoarts.org

or call 416.392.6802 x212 before February 1st

Plays to Playgrounds

Invitation to attend
Community Arts: Plays to Playgrounds Symposium

      don’t miss the chance to see JumbliesTheatre’s production – Like An Old Tale

December 11th to the 14th, 2011

Join artists and allies from across Canada as we share our evolving ideas, practices and unfolding stories of engagement and transformation on the other side of a community play, when the show stays in town – or in the park.

Together we’ll explore the diverse outcomes and evolutions of the Community Play Movement in Canada, with a special focus on the legacy of community play projects. We’ll share perspectives on projects that continue after the play wraps up, and discuss the ramifications of staying or leaving once the play is done. We’ll invite artists and allies from across Canada to share their work related to community arts and outdoor spaces and hear the perspectives of veteran community arts project participants from Toronto, Vancouver, North Bay and beyond.

Check out http://symposium.mabellearts.ca/ to find out more about our contributors and the companies they represent and to see our schedule of events, including public panels, community workshops. In addition to this, there will be a chance to see Jumblies Theatre’s latest community play Like An Old Tale – a Scarborough Telling of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale for the Wednesday evening show. This is an exciting opportunity to see the work that Jumblies Theatre has been creating for over three years in Scarborough- Kingston Galloway.

For pricing information or to register, please visit http://symposium.mabellearts.ca/register-now/

For more information about tickets to Like An Old Tale visit http://www.jumbliestheatre.org/upcoming/tickets/

We hope you’ll join us in celebrating and sharing the art the builds community.

With love from MABELLEarts and Jumblies Theatre