Taking a break

This blog is an expression of my professional work. However, I want to share piece of my personal life here as well. Last April, I became a mother and my whole life had changed. I enjoy being in the moment with my son, Narayan. We are creative together and I am looking forward to developing a project in the near future, which will include his world as well as the world of our new community here in Los Angeles. Until then, stay tuned.

MABELLEArts Etobicoke

My time with MabelleArts

I entered the world of MabelleArts http://mabellearts.ca/at the beginning of mask-making Tuesday evening sessions. We were creating masks for the upcoming parade: Light in Mid Winter Festival. The large community hall at 41 Mabelle where the sessions took place had a barren feel, but Leah and her staff always transformed the space into creative place with tables inviting to various artistic activities – sketching, clay - shaping, paper mache-ing, painting, etc.

First, I observed. Some participants already knew each other and some were new to the program. There were several languages spoken around the tables and people helped each other with translations. I could see that no matter what people’s artistic experience or skill level, they were all committed to learn the art of mask-making from Leah, a professional artist. Many participants were claiming that they had no skills. However, week by week, their hands created incredible pieces of art. As we progressed, I started assisting Leah in encouraging people to see the beauty in their creations. We were also discussing the possibility of people wearing their masks in the parade. This, however, presented a big challenge for many participants.

During one particular session, Leah inspired a change in their attitude. She asked each participant to hold their mask so that others could clearly see it and could share what the mask invoked or represented for them. It was amazing to observe people’s reactions as they heard the richness of interpretation that their mask invited. Some started to thaw to the idea of wearing their masks during the parade. At that moment, I brought my theatre background into the mix to assist participants in imagining the full expressive possibility of their mask. I lead a theatre session. Alexandra, also a theatre artist, helped me to demonstrate how masks could express themselves through body postures and movement. During the session, participants experimented with body expressions, movement, and costumes. Everyone was amazed by the power of the masks and laughed at the mask expressions. The participants’ enjoyment of playing with the masks is visible on the pictures that Leah took from the session.

At the time of the Light in Mid-Winter Festival, I was honoured to become a Bread Bearer mask. It was a remarkable experience for me to travel with the parade from the park at Mabelle, through the streets of Etobicoke into Montgomery Inn http://www.montgomerysinn.com/. The lanterns, the masks and the costumes transformed the Dundas West Street and its intersection with Islington into magic places where people met, played, talked, laughed, and ate together. I especially felt the power of the festival in the energy in the Montgomery Inn, which was bursting in seems with people and buzzing like a bee hive as we all came there to warm up and to talk about life and art; all the while sharing the human need celebration.

I am positive that the Mid-Winter Festival has been born as a full community art event and will continue to draw participants from all walks of life, skills, and backgrounds. I cherish the motivation to fully engage in community arts as a theatre artist that MabelleArts inspired in me through its programming, focus on community participation, and adherence to artistic excellence and beauty.

Beyond the Apple workshop at OISE

On Jan 25, 2011, Naomi and I started our new year with the workshop Beyond the Apple: Acting for Equitable and Inclusive Teaching Practice by working with a class of teaching candidates at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto.

Larry Swartz, instructor at the pre-service elementary program invited us to his class. Please see Larry's credentials http://code.on.ca/honorary-members. Working with the students was a pleasure as they welcomed us into their afternoon session. We delved right into identifying and exploring issues and challenges standing in the way of making their teaching practice equitable and inclusive. Naomi and I were curious what the issues will be. The students already had their first practicum (student teaching) experience behind them and thus the issues we explored were real for them; they ranged from classroom management, witnessing bullying among students, and difficult colleagues to systemic discrimination. These issues all impacted equity they all thrive to uphold in their classroom/school environments.

In our workshop, we use Forum Theatre techniques to support the analysis and understanding of these challenges and issues. We structured the workshop so that the participants in small groups developed their issues into short scenes, which they then presented back to the other groups. Under our guidance, the participants stopped and analyzed the scenes and rehearsed alternative course of actions and outcomes by stepping into the shoes of the protagonists and making different choices - intervening. In Forum Theatre, we always explore so called anti-model, i.e. a situation, which is the worst case scenario and through the interventions, we are looking for alternative solutions and better outcomes for the protagonist. All students identified that the opportunity to talk about things that went wrong or were very difficult to handle was the main asset of our workshop. For many, our workshop offered healing and insightful moments.

The feedback comments we received were overwhelmingly positive - a great start of a workshop series for us. Also, Larry commented after the workshop in his thanks you email: "thanks to you both for a terrific workshop.. i'm sure the feedback strongly supported your work. your work is terrific".

Looking forward to carrying this exciting work with other teaching candidates as well as offering it to teachers in the GTA school boards as their Professional Development experiential workshop.

Beyond the Apple

Wonderful news to announce.

Naomi Tessler, my friend and fellow educational theatre colleague, and I are collaborating. We created a professional development workshop format for teachers and teacher candidates called Beyond the Apple: Acting for Equitable and Inclusive Teaching Practice, an experiential professional development workshop for teachers. Naomi and I co-facilitate this workshop and we use the techniques from the Theatre of the Oppressed, such as Forum Theatre and Image Theatre as well as elements of Playback Theatre. These techniques help teachers to heighten their critical awareness of personal biases and inequities as well as discriminatory situations that are taking place in their workplace, in their classrooms and among their students. We currently offering the workshop to Ontario school boards and school principals to suit their staff professional development needs.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B2-8_Y2NOVy1OGZmYjVhYjgtYzY0Zi00NWI5LTlkZDAtYmFiMWM3ZTgzMDM3&hl=en&authkey=CJWewfAB

We believe that for teachers to be able to promote social change and work towards inclusive and equitable classrooms and school environment, they first need to see themselves as agents of change.

Beyond the Apple offers strategies to directly assist teachers’ immediate experiences in their day-to-day school life. In addition to critically reflecting on their teaching practice, teachers will be encouraged to contemplate how to improve communication with students, colleagues, and other constituents, and ameliorate their conflict resolution skills/approaches.

Our workshop merges the practices and theories of critical pedagogy, Theatre of the Oppressed, and performance. We believe that our workshop will greatly contribute to the quality of teachers’ professional development as it addresses the realistic challenges and relationships in multicultural classrooms and schools and aims to equip teachers with the tools to actively create positive change.

This is us, facilitators:
Pavla Uppal, M.A.

is a theatre artist and educator specializing in experiential learning. Through the work with diverse populations in the Czech Republic, Canada, and the USA, she has been expanding the use of theatre arts as a tool for exploration, learning, and social change. Her practice is based in participant-centered philosophy and she uses the principles of critical pedagogy in her work. She is a Bachelor of Education program at OISE/University of Toronto graduate and has been a member of Ontario College of Teachers since 2003. Recently, she graduated from the Master of Arts in Applied Theatre, City University of New York, a discipline that promotes the use of theatre strategies and techniques in education, community development, and social justice. Since then, she has facilitated educational theatre and community-based theatre projects with diverse communities in the USA and Canada and is thrilled to be part of Toronto community-based theatre arts network.
To find out more about her professional projects, please visit:
http://pavlauppal.blogspot.com/


Naomi Tessler, M.A.

is a theatre artist and educator and a graduate of the Masters of Arts program in Educational Theatre for Colleges and Communities from New York University. Naomi has been working with communities globally for 7 years, using theatre-based workshops to inspire positive change. She currently works in Toronto, facilitating Branch Out Theatre Workshops with organizations and groups across the GTA. She is passionate about using theatre as a tool for encouraging self expression, self-confidence, community building environmental awareness, literacy, leadership, social justice and healing. She believes in uniting communities through theatre to build bridges towards personal and collective creative transformation.
To learn more about her professional practice and workshops, please visit: www.branchouttheatre.com

Arts for All Essentials workshop

Last week, I was part of ArtsforAll Essentials - a workshop in Community Arts practice. http://www.jumbliestheatre.org/now/arts4allessentials.html

The week-long, intensive workshop was organized and run by Jumblies Theatre http://www.jumbliestheatre.org The introduction to the company (from their web site) states: "Jumblies makes art in everyday and unexpected places with, for and about the people and stories found there, thus creating transient utopias and far-reaching ripples."
Jumblies for me embodies the practice of community-engaged/community-based theatre arts and I learned a lot while creating art, observing, and discussing. There were several points of entry for me into what I learned that week:

• It was inspiring to work with and under the guidance of Ruth Howard, who has been immersed in community arts for many years and has experiences that encompass many possibilities.

• Jumblies aesthetics are vastly inspired by visual arts and design. I got to create small pieces of visual arts. Visual arts activities do have different powers to bring people together or to offer solitary activity than theatre and drama do. Visual arts also produce immediate result (tangible pieces) in the form of decorated objects, sketches, paintings, collages, etc. It brings to mind the relationship between process and product in my work, which I am constantly pondering. The process documentation has been a challenge for me. Now, after getting the inspiration from visual arts, I can see the possibilities that the integration into my practice may bring. By creating something tangible at each stage of the process, the record keeping becomes much easier and is embedded in the creative process. The creating of the visual arts/installation pieces is thematically linked to the exploration that takes place. I am very excited about the the invitation I was given to open the door into my practice to visual arts.

• I started to think in very concrete terms how to bring more of visual arts and other media and disciplines into my work and what that integration may bring. I not only see an advantage of this integration in terms of thematic investigation, grant writing, and legacy, but also in terms of practicalities of group facilitation. For example, one of the issues that drama/theatre arts usually has to tackle is attendance; people showing up late or very sporadically. Most drama activities/games and exercises require the whole group to be in the room in order to start and/or be meaningful - theatre happens in the present moment. However, visual art-making can be structured as an on-going process, which starts as an individual activity (as people show up at the door) and gradually encompasses everyone (when everyone finally arrives). That way, the time period is creatively spent and is not perceived as just a time for waiting for others.
  

The following two images are from the introduction activities. We were given a box. Each side of the box was decorated with a piece of art that somehow reflected the day before. This one, however, is from the first day, and thus just bares my name. Then, we were asked to decorate two little figures - one is ourselves and one is a fictional character we would like to invite as a date to a ball. So, here I am with Peer Gynt.

• Grant writing. On Monday morning, we sat in a cozy team room of the Montgomery Inn in Etobicoke (Islington and Dundas West) and grouped around several tables for mock jury. We were assessing three grant proposals for community arts projects. Loree Lawrence from the Ontario Arts Council and Andrew Suri from the Toronto Arts Council were present as the directors. They gave us an overview of what a real jury would look like and we adhered to the procedures as closely as we could. The morning was intense - having to rate the proposals and allocate limited financial funds was difficult; especially because the three proposals were all wonderful. What was the biggest gain for me that morning was to find out that the Councils officers and as well as the jurors are artists. Thus, when thinking of writing my own proposal, I now can picture my audience and it feel more encouraging to engage in the conversation with them. Also, Loree shared a personal experience with us about her grant application, which shed some additional light on the necessity of clear articulation of the goals of the projects and contingency plans. I am actually looking forward to writing my grant proposal in the spring!!
  

• Participants were also a huge part of my learning - they were all practitioners in various stages of their careers and from different artistic disciplines/backgrounds. I made great connections with people and can't wait to start engaging with talent and creative mind.

• During the Arts for All Essentials workshop, what I also enjoyed and learned from was that the Jumblies' mission statement of inclusiveness transpired from the first moment when I walked into the door to the last good byes, and from each and every activity and interaction. In my view, it was the best legacy-building workshop I attended in many years as it radiated the contagious energy of love for people, care, creativity, and artistic expertise, which springs from the moments of sharing with people (community), and which I, as a practitioner, will now strive to carry on in my work.

So, this is my big thanks to the whole workshop team:
Ruth Howard, Leah Houston, Michael Burtt, Liz Rucker, Keith McNair, Sean Frey, Beth, Lisa Marie DiLiberto.

I continue to be involved in MabelleArts preparation for the mid-winter parade. http://mabellearts.ca/

I look forward to the new creative encounters with Jumblies and their ventures in 2011.

Mixed Company Theatre in Theatre Passe Muraille

On November 6, 2010, I facilitated the presentation of Mixed Company Theatre's work in Theatre Passe Muraille. The evening belonged to the Project Humanity http://www.projecthumanity.ca/about.html and their show The Middle Place http://www.themiddleplace.ca/, which is a verbatim theatre and was created in collaboration with shelter youth in Toronto. Each night after the Middle Place show at TPM, Project Humanity featured one other theatre company that similarly uses theatre arts to raise social awareness about the diversity of youth experiences in our city. Mixed Company, which uses Forum Theatre technique to engage their audiences in dialogue about various issues of social justice, presented excerpts from the show Holding Boundaries, which was written by Duncan McCullum in collaboration with the Bouncing Back community initiate in 2009:
http://www.mixedcompanytheatre.com/for_community_leaders_cobblestone_events.html

I facilitated the audience's interventions during a dialogue between Liza, a brand new youth shelter resident, and T, the old time resident who some people call vulture. This particular scene from the play was exploring the issue of "Love Bombing", a technique used by gang members to lure young, vulnerable females into prostitution. During the audiences' suggestions and discussion, we collectively explored psychological issues that youth faces in shelters as well as addressed systemic issues that might prevent young people from getting back onto their feet. Further, I facilitated a discussion about the unique benefits and opportunities that Forum Theatre offers to its audience by giving them a chance to actively change the action on stage and by seeing the consequences of such change enacted by actors.

It was a great evening of sharing strategies on the power of theatre to engage young people in dialogue about the challenges some young people face when on the streets and out of their home.

Trouble with the word "theatre"

I am a theatre artist who uses the techniques, strategies, and the pedagogy behind theatre arts as methodology for creating dialogue, for exploring and learning, for developing community, and creating steps for more just and equitable society. I understand this mission with my heart completely and I do not need any explanation. This mission is also clear to other community-based theatre artists who work in the same or similar philosophical/pedagogical realm. However, the word "theatre" has a strong connotations in minds of people and thus, they may not understand it being used in other context than in "theatre as a building with proscenium stage, acting troupe, hierarchical production structure, and paying audience."

I have recently contacted a temp agency looking for opportunity to get work in non-profit administration/project coordination/implementation using my facilitation, coordinating and organizational skills from various community-based projects I worked on in the past. The director of the temp agency who interviewed me was trying really hard to see how my artistic skills were transferable to other areas. However, I could see that the two words "theatre" and "arts" blurred her mind. After me mentioning several times that I am an educator, skilled in group facilitation, interested in working in non-profit sector with various communities, she looked up, thought for a moment, and then said: "I am sorry, I do not think I have anything for you. But, there are so many theatre companies in Toronto, you should contact them."

It was obvious to me that even though she was used to people coming to her when changing careers and looking for transferring their skills from one sector to another, she could not comprehend that someone with theatre arts background and education could actually do something else than work in traditional theatre.

My thoughts on this page are not about one director of a temp agency in Toronto. It is about the larger picture of our society and how we view/perceive/hold arts in our lives. There are those of us who work hard to bridge the gap between arts and people and advocate not only for accessibility but also for arts as life and for the notion that each one of us can create and appreciate art. And, there are those of us who also work hard to keep the separation and the illusion that art is removed from ordinary folks who can only - if properly advices or educated - appreciate it when the art is done by the expert artists.

I do not wish to create divisions of "us" and "them" and say that one is better or more beneficial. I would like to see the two streams or philosophies of approach to life and arts as mutually compatible, able to live and thrive side by side, informing each other and growing and supporting each other. However, I am re-thinking the use of the word "theatre" in my resume and in articulating the vision of my work in Toronto community arts.

I would be very much interested in knowing how do you articulate what you do and whether you have any thoughts on this.....