The Media Intern position was available to a full-time student, ideally post secondary film or media arts student intending to return to school in September 2010. It was funded by Canada Summer Jobs.

This work draws inspiration from the Personal Legacy Process as described in the Arrivals Project.

For more information on The City of Vancouver’s Dialogues Project visit:

http://olympichostcity.vancouver.ca/mediaroom/feature-stories/opening-a-dialogue.htm

*courtesy of Actors Equity Association

The Story Box Project Featured at the Surge Festival
August 6 – 28th, 2010
W2 Storyeum – 151 West Cordova St. (at Abbott St)

Opening Reception:  Friday, August 6th from 7pm till late

Regular Exhibition Viewing
August 7 to August 28, noon-6pm. Wednesday to Sunday, Free admission

At the heart of the City’s Great Beginnings Initiative is the desire to go back to its roots and give each of the founding neighborhoods something to talk about. In one such community, the DTES Story Box Project highlights its rich and storied cultural diversity through oral and written tradition. Unique object/artifact boxes illustrate stories from various voices which are intermingled to create a new and visceral experience.

The Storybox Project at the Surge Festival is the sensational finish to a process that involved over eighty members of DTES community based writing groups who developed their individual stories utilizing personal artifacts as inspiration and illustration. The manifold stories held common threads bound to universal themes. StoryBox at Storyeum presents five such themes as representative of the powerfully spoken words by the most demo-diverse voices working in concert with some of Vancouver’s brightest lights in media arts.

urban ink, an interdisciplinary theatre company connected artists with residents  to create five video and sound installations:

A solely aural exploration of the Story Box themes, AudioVox simultaneously looks at the relationship between chaos, order and form. [Frederick Brummer/Rupinder Sidhu]

Resistance for Existence exposes four different realities of people forced to hold firm against adverse forces even as they need to shift their perspectives in order to survive. [Cease Wyss/Shawn Chappelle]

Natural beauty and magic have been lost within the distractions of materialism yet we conjure different illusions & myths to help make sense of things in Web We Weave. [Su-an Ng/Sepideh Saii]

A suspension of story, image and object triangulate as audience members weave their way inside and outside the Mother Tongue musings of four multilingual tellers. [Justin Sekiguchi/Lenke Sifko]

ShadowBox presents a random interplay of silhouetted actors with the stories and key phrases from StoryBox’s eighty participants. The results of this 6-month project are revealed to pedestrian onlookers in W2 Storyeum windows. [Krista Lomax/Sammy Chien]

Media Artists: Frederick Brummer, Shawn Chappelle, Su-an Ng, Sepideh Saii, Justin Sekiguchi, Rupinder Sidhu, Lenke Sifko, Cease Wyss, Krista Lomax and Sammy Chien.

Contributing Artists: Julia Aleynikova, Samuel Beaudry, Colin Beiers, Hendrick Beune, Afuwa Granger, Lenore Herb, Jezebel S. Jones, Quest Kabuki, Bill Lim, Joan Morelli and Antonette Rea. Community Group Animators/Facilitators: Hari Alluri, Lesley Ewen, Mutya Macatumpag,  Omari Newton, Irwin Oostindie, Quelemia Sparrow and Naomi Steinberg.

The StoryBox Exhibition has been curated by urban ink and W2, with financial assistance of the City of Vancouver, and produced in association with: Vancouver Society of Storytelling, Raycam Community Centre, Interurban, Fearless City Mobile, Musqueam Nation Writer’s Group, DTES Women’s Centre Writing Group, Carnegie Centre’s Thursday Writing Collective, Life Skills Centre, Native Court Workers’ Saturday Family Storytelling, Ugnayaan Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance, Surrey Urban Youth Project, Gathering Place Megaphone project, Association of Chinese Canadians for Equality and Solidarity Society (ACCESS).

Give us your feedback and enter our draw to win a fantastic Downtown Eastside Entertainment package including tickets to a Firehall Arts Centre show, Dinner at Boneta or a Rockin’ StoryBox/Surge Souvenir Tee.

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View Trailer of W.I.F. archival website

Directed by Marie Clements (Governor General Nominee-Burning Vision) and Kathleen Flaherty (CBC Radio), with dramaturgy by Paula Danckert (Playwright Workshop Montreal) and featuring award winning designers in a live design mix including; Tim Matheson, Noah Drew, John Webber, Sandy Scofield, Jonathan Ryder, Richard Wilson, Rosemary Georgeson, Julie Moore and David Kerr. Written by Marie Clements with Rosemary Georegson, Eileen Lorenz and the WIF Participants.

Performed by Rosemary Georgeson

In the beginning there were stories and like all surviving stories this one begins with a storm. On September 7, 1962, the fishing packer The Loretta B keeled under a violent westerly blow submerging five men and one woman to the dark sea.

The sinking of the Loretta B joins a long legacy of fishing tragedies that have ended in the drowning of men and women but in this one Eileen Lorenz, on the eve of her 18th birthday was a survivor. After being tied to fish crates by her husband and fellow crewmate, Eileen was set afloat, as one by one, four men including her husband and brother surrendered to the ocean, their bodies never to be found. After six hours in the eye of the dark storm, Eileen Lorenz was plucked from the water to bring in this new day one year older and eight months pregnant.

Women in Fish weaves this tragedy together with the bigger tragedy of the worlds fishing industry. This story reveals women’s contributions to what was once a top industry. Little is known about the strong role women played in this industry, from waiting on shore to owning and operating their own vessels, as cannery workers and raising their children on the boats.

Women in Fish was produced by CBC as a radio documentary and a 4 part radio series and has been short listed for a prestigious Jack Webster Award for Best Documentary. Women In Fish: hours of water opened Think Vancouver in 2005 with a performance at The Vancouver Aquarium. The live version begins touring in the summer of 2010 and includes an installation as a memorial of the contributions of women to the industry, youth programming activities, public workshops and a live performance of the award winning story.

For More information or to book contact touring@urbanink.ca
Tour Ready Summer 2010

From Where We Speak

We were very pleased to partner with Kuper Island School year to create a fully developed year-long program involving multi-level mentorships, intergenerational exchange, ancestral exploration, intercultural weaving, and mythic storytelling.

Los Angeles based actor/writer director Thomas Kellogg launced the program with an intensive playmaking workshop involving professional and community artists and inter-island highschool students utilizing his innovative Mentor Artists Playwrights Program (MAPP). Working with the MAPP program mentors and junior mentors urban ink director Diane Roberts followed up with an introduction to the personal legacy process that encourages ancestral exploration based on archival research and intergenerational interviews. Multidisciplinary guest artists supported the work by offering workshops to enhance participants playmaking process.

Crossover themes including earth, space, ancestors and islands, were explored documented and ultimately presented using web based technology and live performance.

Production History
Galiano Island Community Hall November 1st & 2nd, 2008
Heart of the City Festival, Vancouver November 7th& 8th

A Stage Adaptation
Written by M. NourbeSe Philip

It is 1781. Somewhere off the coast of West Africa a fully provisioned ship, theZong, captained by one Luke Collingwood, rides at anchor in preparation for a voyage to Jamaica. As is the custom its cargo is fully insured. Instead of the customary six to nine weeks, this fateful trip will take some four months on account of navigational errors on the part of the captain, resulting in some of the Zong’s cargo being lost and the remainder being destroyed by order of the captain.

The owners, being fully insured, make a claim for the destroyed cargo. The insurers refuse. The ship’s owners begin legal action against their insurers to recover their loss. Gregson v. Gilbert is the formal name of the case more colloquially known as the Zong case.

“But this is a story that can only be told by not telling it and how was I to `not-tell’ the story that had to be told. ” (M. NourbeSe Philip, Introduction to the Zong! manuscript)

The adaptation of this haunting poetic work from trial transcript to poetry then again from page to stage will integrate visual art, spoken word, video, song, rhythm, dance and improvisation based in Afrisporic traditions. It will ultimately be realized as an environmental participatory ritual theatre and performance installation scheduled to premiere in Vancouver in 2012.

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November 22nd 7pm at W2 Space, 112 W. Hastings, Invitational showing

VIEW: The Co(Lab) Ancestors slideshow

The Arrivals Collaborative Exchange was the final phase of The Arrivals Project; a multidisciplinary performance project exploring root cultural practices, ancestral embodiment and deeply meaningful cross-cultural exchanges. Using the methodology of the Personal Legacy Process (PLP), 18 artists have been drawn from across the country to participate in a profound cultural exchange for the purposes of deepening our understanding of the PLP process—providing leadership training and developing a shared vocabulary around ancestral based creative work. In addition to the training, the group will plant the first seeds for a new cross-disciplinary cross-cultural multi-media performance work.

Invited to the project were emerging and established artists from Aboriginal and diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds who have a strong history of working or an expressed desire to develop cultural works that touch on ancestry, language, indigeneity, hybrity and/or contemporary and historic collisions.

Read more about the Arrivals Cross Canada Workshop Series

WATCH:
The Co(Lab) interview for Van Stage
Interview with Diane, Heather and Danielle
Live On The Drive interview with Mayahuel Tecozautla, Chimwemwe Miller, Gwen Armstrong and Diane Roberts

Co(Lab) Participants/Performers:

Christine Comeau, Halifax
Liliona Quarmine, Montreal & Antigonish N.S.
Emilie Monnet, Montreal
Chimwemwe Miller, Montreal
Mayahuel Tecozautla, Toronto
Zainab Amadahy, Toronto
Gwen Armstrong, Winnipeg
Leigh Anne Perry, Winnipeg
Charlene Hellson, Calgary
Mutya Macatumpag, Vancouver
Valerie Sing Turner, Vancouver
Dominique Bourassa, Vancouver
Mia Amir, Vancouver
Leonard Linklater, Whitehorse
Raistlen Jones, Whitehorse
Amber Walker, Whitehorse
Jude Wong, Whitehorse

The services of Mayahuel Tecozautla were made possible through Theatre Ontario’s Professional Theatre Training Program, funded by the Ontario Arts Council.

The services of Leigh Anne Perry were made possible with the generous support of the City of Winnipeg through the Winnipeg Arts Council.

The Co(Lab) would also like to thank Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Gwaandak Theatre in Whitehorse and Alberta Playwrights Network in Calgary, and the W2 group for their partner support and The Canada Council Equity Office & Aboriginal Arts for their generous support.

LISTEN TO: CBC Airplay Interview with Diane Roberts and Amber Walker (Whitehorse)

“I am so grateful for the Personal Legacy experience – it is transforming my life….and I have connected with all of you in a way that doesn’t happen in day to day life…through heart, mind and spirit….we are now sisters in spirit….” Charlene Hellson, Calgary workshop

“I felt it was a beautiful and perfect blending of creative process and personal, spiritual journeying. It was great to physicalize my ancestral research—take it out of my head—and see where it could intersect with my own creative processes as a physical artist. It was great to be engaged in my physicality in such a personal and meaningful way. ” Jude Wong, Whitehorse workshop

Download the Primer Document and The Flyer of The Arrivals Project

• • Montreal Workshop March 4th-8th
    Playwrights Workshop Montreal – Download Flyer
  • Winnipeg Workshop Flyer April 22nd-27th
    aceArt – Download Flyer
  • Calgary Workshop Flyer May 27th-31st
    Alberta Playwrights’ Network – Download Flyer
  • Whitehorse Workshop Flyer July 23-28th
    Gwaandak Theatre – Download Flyer
  • Toronto Workshop Flyer July 2nd-5th
    Theatre Direct – Download Flyer
  • Vancouver Workshop Flyer August 5th-9th
    The Firehall Arts Centre – Download Flyer