¡VIVA!: Community Arts and Popular Education in the Americas

3.Out of the Tunnel There Came Tea:Jumblies Theatre’s Bridge of One Hair Project

When you set out to make art “for, about, and with the people” who live in a certain place; when you claim, furthermore, that “everyone is welcome!”; and when you happen to live in Toronto, then certain things follow. I founded Jumblies Theatre in 2001. The name Jumblies comes from a poem by nineteenth-century British nonsense poet Edward Lear, about creatures called “the Jumblies,” who cheerfully go “to sea in a sieve.” Jumblies Theatre consists of myself as artistic director; a core group of staff members and associated artists; a fluctuating assembly of other artists; and also a large assortment of participants, mostly volunteer. My work, and, thus, the work of Jumblies, is inspired largely by the British community play movement (as developed by the Colway Theatre Trust, now Claque Theatre, and brought to Canada by Dale Hamilton in 1990), which engages full towns or neighborhoods in large-scale productions about their histories and issues. I chapter 3 Jumblies Theatre’s Bridge of One Hair Project Ruth Howard Jumblies Theatre, Toronto, Canada Something that I thought about constantly while I was at the VIVA! gathering in Chiapas was the influence that context has on people. It was my first time really being outside of my own society , and feeling how deeply language, culture, food, landscape, climate, religion, architecture all constantly shape how we understand what’s going on around us, how we think about and see the world. There were many people at the gathering, all from different geographical and philosophical places—working diligently, openly and critically to communicate to each other about the work we were doing, which was making art with people in many different ways. I was surprised to learn that there isn’t a word for “community arts” in Spanish. Do we need one? I was confronted by many underlying assumptions that we all carry around inside us, and when these assumptions collided with the assumptions that underlay other contexts they became almost like canyons—cavernous and perilous to cross. I teetered on the edge of many of mine, trying not to fall in. —Noah Kenneally have adapted, adhered to, and departed from this model, while moving through several multiyear residencies in Toronto: employing artists from varied disciplines and backgrounds, creating new works to reflect the specific locality, combining the power of theater on an epic scale with intimate art-making, welcoming everyone who wants to take part and bridging differences of language, culture, ability, age, and class.1 In Toronto, Canada’s largest city with over four million residents, almost half of whom are visible minorities, the challenges of this work are intense. Jumblies’ 2004– 2007 residency in a west-end Toronto neighborhood reflects this diversity: settled by immigrants from Great Britain in the 1900s, Etobicoke has been transformed in recent decades by newcomers, particularly from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Korea, and Somalia. Housed temporarily in Mabelle subsidized high-rises, face-to-face with more affluent and older homes, Jumblies has, at the time of writing (2006), completed two years of a project in partnership with Montgomery’s Inn (a museum commemorating the first Anglo-Irish settlers) and Toronto Community Housing (where the most recent settlers live). Our overall Jumblies’ process follows overlapping phases of research and development, creation, production, and legacy. Allocating at least a year for each of these left: Mabelle high-rise, Toronto Community Housing below: Fabric collage of high-rises in Mabelle complexes, 2006 phases allows our company and the local people to become acquainted gradually, and for a meaningful creative and social process to ensue. Activities are introduced and sustained with various groups, and opportunities are sought and invented to cut across categories defined by age, culture, or economics. Artists and residents exchange, collect, and create stories, imagery, traditions, and themes, whether through recorded interviews, theater exercises, social rituals, or visual arts games. As material accumulates , a core of artists draw from it to shape a new work of art, generally performancebased with strong visual elements . Although our process is highly collaborative, it is not a collective creation, but contains a structure and hierarchy of authorship and decision-making both like and unlike that of Western theater. The production and performance process is, likewise , both like and unlike that of a regular professional theater production. The Etobicoke project has a particular directive to connect people across small distances but wide economic and cultural rifts. That this was...