Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 45

stump

saddle

lobe

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. September 21, 2013.

One Trunk! Post Mortem!

So the One Trunk Festival of New Hybrid Performance was nearly two weeks ago...and I wanted to make note of it before my recollections got too tattered.

There were three pieces, the first of which revolved around the Louis Riel statue at the Legislature.

The final piece featured Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers performing to Keri Latimer's music in front of a screen with images by Kristian Jordan superimposed by text by Chris Rutkowski.

The second piece on Central Park was the one I contributed work to, as did cellist Natanielle Felicitas and visual artist GMC Chomichuk.

I got up and read my little essay on the park/on the process of working collaboratively. I'd forgotten how very bright stage lights can be and so stood there and talked to the dim outlines in the audience. As though I knew them very well.

I felt a bit less lonely when I finished and exited stage right, where the performers, Andraea Sartison, Ardith Boxall, and Gwen Collins (who put together the piece with with assistance from dancer Tanja Woloshen) were waiting. As I moved past them in the muffled dark, they touched my arm, patted my back, and whispered good job.

I got back to my seat just as Greg Chomichuk flicked on the light to his overhead projector at the far end of the stage. He spend the remainder of the piece drawing (re-drawing?) the three paintings he'd created in-situ on . After thirty seconds, Sartison, Boxall, and Collins came out onto the darkened stage point and watched him draw.

Then the music began. The three performers began to dance, mimicking the children-at-play audible in Felicitas' recording and described in my poem.

The final part of the performance saw the three performers approach a music stand and recite this part of my poem.

Which, frankly, was fucking awesome. Every poet should have a chorus of women reciting their work! (But I do have to say that the Central Park piece prioritized the text best. But that's a writers' bias talking...)

I was trying to take pictures and listen and see and analyze so my memories of the piece...are a little blurry. (I wish I'd thought to shoot video, even just on my phone...)

The third piece was situated in Elmwood Cemetery. Video/puppeteering duo jaymez and Grant Guy took the sound recorded by Andy Rudolph, the video/stills of Deco Dawson, and the writing of Melissa Steele, and came up with a piece with flickers of light and sound and colour, with just-visible outlines of parents and children, with clippings and snippets of text somehow on top.

Melissa Steele's introduction to the piece was complicated by the fact that Guy and jaymez had a lot of set up to do. Keep talking, they said, when at one point she glanced behind her, to the assemblage of low and high-tech tools, to see how they were doing.

Once the all three pieces had been presented, there was a brief intermission where I got a cup of tea, did some multi-disciplinary chatting and leered at the Greg's paintings, which were on display in the lobby.

And then it was the strat-planning part of the programme, where organizers asked the audience What next?

And I think I can answer for all of us, artists and audience members, when I repeat: Keep talking.

Chokecherry dilemma

This is my third summer volunteering for Fruit Share.

A week or so ago, I signed up for a chokecherry pick, which was sort of serendipitous because I'd recently returned from a trip to Asesseppi Provincial Park where the wild chokecherries had been ripe.

After fantasizing about filling my hat with berries and making provincial park-flavoured jam, I realized that A) it wasn't right to steal the bears' food (we saw lots of bear scat that seemed to be mostly chokecherry pits) and B) it wasn't right to harvest anything in a provincial park.

Public land = hands off.

So I refrained from picking but retained an image of beatiful purple chokecherry syrup, which a bunch of people on my FB page had raved about.

Anyways, the chokecherry pick happened to be my first of the season, so I was looking forward to the easy comraderie that seems to come from chatting whilst-in-a-tree.

I arrived, talked to the homeowner, and set up my ladder. Twenty minutes later, I was still the only picker present. I checked my email and discovered that the other two pickers wouldn't be able to make it.

And there I was with four trees full of chokecherries, which take some time to pick.

After frantically and unsuccessfully trying to find friends to come help, I picked until it was dark and left with about 5 litres of fruit.

Normally, when on group picks, I volunteer to deliver the third of the harvest that Fruit Share mandates goes to community groups. And, because it's convenient to my house, I usually drop the fruit at Resource Assistance for Youth (or RaY) on Sherbrook, an organization that works with homeless youth.

But this pick was different. First, it was late, and I knew that RaY only accepts donations during the day. Second, although chokecherries look appealing, they are not a fruit to be eaten directly off the tree.

They've got a strange tart flavour and a furry texture, but more than that, the stones are poisonous: "It is thought that the leaves, twigs, and stones of both wild and cultivated species contain cyanide-producing glycoside." (Nova Scotia Museum).

RaY likes fruit that can be put in a bowl and grabbed whenever the youth they serve are hungry. So apples are fine, but crabapples, for instance, are sort of useless. (I convinced someone working in the kitchen once that it was easy to make applesauce out of the crabapples when it looked like they were going to reject my donation...)

Berries that not only have to be processed but that also are actually poisonous when eaten raw would NOT have gone over well.

So I slowly processed the berries over the next few days, making both syrup and jam. I used the Mennonite-grandma recipe my co-worker shared with me and was happy with the results.

But I still had about a third of the berries left last night. And I decided to make jam out of it and then drop the jam off at RaY some time this weekend.

My solution doesn't meet the letter of the Fruit Share rule ("Take 1/3 of the fruit to a community organization of your choice within 24 hours.") but I think it obeys its spirit.

In other news, I've a couple of Fruit Share picks coming up tomorrow, apples and, also, veggies from a u-pick-it farm. It'll be a busy Saturday, but I find climbing into trees very satisfying.

For years, I always felt like I was missing out on local fruit and veg. I don't garden, beyond a small kitchen garden, and our property isn't large or sunny enough to support a fruit tree.

I always tried to hit farmer's markets and stores that carry local produce, but since joining Fruit Share (and signing up for a share via Jonathan's Farm, a CSA that delivers to Wolseley), I know I will always have lots of local fruit and veg.

My thanks to Fruit Share for existing and to Eudora, whose chokecherries they were, for registering her trees!

Unicity: Melanie Dennis Unrau

Melanie Dennis Unrau is just about to publish her first book.

Her launch is set: September 30 at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg.

Between now and then, she has to pick a set list, rehearse said set of poems, figure out her thank yous, decide what to wear. She has to send out invites to most everyone she knows. She has to decide if she wants her two children in attendance and, if not, who will take care of them during the launch... [...]

In these anxious-yet-heady weeks before her book is launched,  Melanie took the time to answer a few of my pesky questions.

* * *

As a writer (someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone), how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

Here’s a big surprise from one writer to another: I love to be alone.

Performance is one of my growing edges. Fortunately, I’ve had some good practice over the past several years as a magazine editor giving radio interviews, as an academic presenting papers, and as a parent reading bedtime stories and novels to my kids (I like to do voices). But it still doesn’t come easily to me. I have rituals for speaking or reading in public that involve lots of practice ahead of time, a realistic and meticulous plan, cozy and comfortable clothing, conscious breathing, etc.

My best reading-aloud experience was in a recording booth: I loved hearing my own voice so loud all around me, so full and clear. I aim for that sound whenever I read.

What do I get out of it? I get better for next time.

What do you want people to know about Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems?

It’s a book of poems about mothering, and about the tension between making art and mothering.

It’s also a book about births and deaths—obvious ones like the births of children; hidden ones like the deaths of desire or of dreams; and the in-betweens like the never-asleep-never-awake state overtired parents live in, or the non-event of delivering a dead fetus. Late in the editing process for the book, I arrived at some lines for the prologue poem: “a mother’s job is to know / what matters and keep it alive // a poet’s job is to feel / for a pulse.” There are questions about life and death, what it means to really be alive, whose life matters, and who’s keeping track that surface again and again in the book.

It’s a feminist book, challenging the notion that women are completely fulfilled through motherhood. Winnipeggers struggled this summer to wrap their heads around the story of a “good” mother who drowned her children; these poems resist the image of the good, happy mother and show the dark and bright sides of (white, middle-class, Canadian) mothering. My poetry is influenced by feminist poetry and theory about motherhood. Readers will see references to the work of Sara Ahmed, Adrienne Rich, and Debbie Keahey; I was also reading Lola Tostevin, Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook and other poet-theorists while working on the book and on the life-project of being a feminist mother.

When I started writing “the unborn poems,” poems that mourn the loss of a pregnancy, I was focused on capturing the raw grief I was dealing with at that time without falling into empty sentiment or cliché. I worked and reworked those poems, delivering them silently to my writing group for feedback—I couldn’t read the poems aloud. Reaching for language to describe the mixtures of beauty and pain, fulfillment and loss, happiness and depression experienced by a parent of young children became a focus for the whole project.

The book has five sections: the first three (“little bird,” “little pumpkin,” and “little guy”) are organized around the arrivals of three children; the fourth section, “happiness threads,” is a series of poems that play with the form of an online parenting forum; “love poems” look out with still-bleary eyes on the other side of the years of parenting infants and toddlers, assessing the damage and finding joy in unexpected places.

What would you tell a stranger about Winnipeg?

I’ve wanted to leave Winnipeg forever, yet I’m still here. When I meet someone who’s visiting Winnipeg I usually offer to tell them what they should do, then realize I’m not sure what to say. I tell them about whatever cultural events or festivals are coming up. Then I tell them about some parks to visit—the Whiteshell, the beaches, the city parks. Then the WAG and the other art galleries, then restaurants and neighbourhoods like Osborne, Corydon, and Wolseley.

I tell my hater relatives in Toronto that of course it’s cold and there are lots of mosquitoes, but I live within walking distance of downtown and grocery shopping and restaurants in a neighbourhood with giant elm trees. I can afford to make very little money because housing prices are low. I can see The Weakerthans perform at home, and almost all the people I love live here.

Tell about the pleasures and perils of academic writing and/or editing. (And how does it inform your poetry?)

So far, my experience has been that academic work sparks ideas and creativity for poetry. It was while I was doing my MA that many of the poems for this collection were written. I think I need the constant intake of new ideas—and it helps that I study literature. I’m inspired by innovative feminist poets, as well as YA novels and picture books. And, as I’ve already mentioned, I’m a geek about theory. Of course there are tough days and deadlines, but academic work is almost all pleasure for me, and the synergy with the poetry is a bonus.

Editing is another story. I find writing and editing tap the same energy. When I’m busy editing for work (most recently for Geez magazine, also as a freelance copy editor and proofreader), I don’t write, at least not poetry. I write editorials, blog posts, newsletters, and book reviews. I like the editing work a lot, but I have to reserve some time and energy for poetry.

I’ve seen how a mediocre piece can become something really terrific with help from a good editor. I have appreciated having excellent editors like Clarise Foster and Catherine Hunter, who ask the right questions and push me to make the poems and the whole project better.

For the past few years, you’ve been working amidst/among visual artists. Specifically, visual artists who are mothers. Were you ever tempted to throw away language and start working with paint or clay instead?

No, I’m too uptight to switch like that, although I love working in visual media. I think visual artists are more comfortable moving between media—the fact that they studied painting or ceramics in art school doesn’t keep them from writing a poem or doing a performance piece.

The Mother Artists’ group at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art has challenged me to do poetry as visual art. For a show last year, I typed and stitched a poem onto flannel fabric; this year, I wrote a poem I was working on for the book, “petit point (by royal albert),” on a china plate. The “happiness threads,” which I wrote in collaboration with my artist friends, began with a visual concept; I worked within the constraints of my own online forum to generate plain-text poems with emoticons and a customized colour palette.

It reminds me that poetry is visual art. I think I have more affinity with the visual artists than fiction writers, and for now I workshop my poetry almost exclusively with my MAWA group (I don’t have a writing group right now). I’m working on paying even more attention to the visual aspects of my poems, and also on poetry as performance.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen writers who’ve worked with tech-based constraints such as the poem-in-140 characters or the prose-poem-as-daily-status-update. But you’ve elected to work with a form that is simultaneously loose and tight – the newsgroup or chat room. Lots of abbreviations, yes? But also endless midnight threads...were there any challenges working with/from this particular form?

The funny thing is, I’m a bit of a luddite—a Facebook abstainer and cell-phone-ophobe. When my second child was born I realized I needed to be able to get my hands free once in awhile so I wanted to learn how to wear my fussy baby in a sling or other baby carrier. So, I joined the Winnipeg Babywearers, a group that meets monthly and also has an online forum.

When I started on the forum, I was completely lost. I’d never done online chatting or anything like that before. The abbreviations the mothers used—the babywearers were all women—puzzled me. Think LOL, IMO, etc., plus a whole bunch of parenting- and babywearing-specific language. For example, I could tell DH meant something husband, but what was that something? I had a lot of fun imagining funny acronyms that were much more interesting than the saccharine “dear husband,” “dear daughter,” “dear son” translations I eventually found in an online glossary. I never really got into using abbreviations, but I did become a frequent poster on the forum, asking questions, sharing tips and recipes, and relating to a whole circle of friends I would have been lucky to recognize in a face-to-face encounter.

In some ways, we were an excellent support system for one another. But there were negatives: already isolated and lonely, spending my days with little children and my nights copy editing in my house, the forum became another thing that kept me from making healthier choices for myself, like going out or writing poetry. Plus, I was tired of the gender politics (where were the dads?), the heteronormative environment, the middle-class privilege and racism tied up in the collection of expensive and exotic baby gear.

It was not long after I finally gave up the forum that I had the idea for the “happiness threads.” My art group at MAWA had been talking about doing an artwork a day for a month. I pitched the idea to start right away and I began writing poems based around the acronyms from the forum. I had a list of the ones I wanted to use and I just went. I’d never had such a concrete plan for a series of poems before, nor had I ever been so prolific.

The play with the abbreviations didn’t really feel like a constraint, although I was certainly thinking of the procedural work of poets like Margaret Christakos and Rachel Zolf when I came up with the idea. I did begin with all plain-text formatting (no italics or underlines or other fancy stuff, except, of course, emoticons), but I have had to bend a bit on that to make sure the threads can be interpreted by readers.

The “happiness threads” were easy to write, but are they easy to read? That’s been the challenge. I wrote the poems cumulatively, assuming the reader knows all the abbreviations that come before each poem. If you read them in order, you should be able to decipher all of the coded language without using the glossary. But when we made the book we decided to put the glossary first so that readers know it’s there if they need it. I’ll be curious to see what people think of it.

At an early stage in the project, I made a poster of the poems with help from a designer at the U of W, then put it up in an academic show on campus. One of my old babywearer buddies who had also been on the forum read and loved it. In a way, I think the poems are a success if they resonate with the speakers of the specialized language I was writing in, but I hope other readers will also be able to find a way into the language. Or maybe they can make up their own meanings like I did.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

For work, I just finished reading Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze. For fun, I’m reading The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman—a modern Canadian novel and a Governor General’s Award winner in the 1950s. It’s about a Jewish immigrant family that escapes pogroms in Europe only to face more hardship in Canada. With the kids, I’m reading C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series.

I wish I could tell you about the great poetry project I’m working on, but I feel I’m between projects just now. The Happiness Threads book collects ten years’ worth of poems on the theme of mothering, and now I’m ready for something new. I’ve finished my term as a magazine editor, finished the introduction to an academic book I’m working on, sent the kids off for their first day of school, and now it’s time to figure out what comes next. For the next several months, I’ll be blogging for Rhubarb magazine at rhubarbmag.com/blog.

More Central Park-ing

Central Park, an urban park bounded by Ellice and Cumberland Avenues and Edmonton and Carlton Streets in downtown Winnipeg, was founded in 1893.

The city’s Public Parks Board originally called Central Park (and the three other parks established at the same time) "ornamented squares or breathing spaces.”

The land, which was mostly gumbo in summer, was purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company for $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in debentures. (An elaborate form of credit now replaced by the expression, “the cheque is in the mail.”)

According to the Historical Buildings Committee, “thousands of loads of manure and soil were brought in and, while settling subsequently occurred, this new base created extremely lush lawns and gardens.”

Though at various points there was also a bandshell and tennis courts, one of the main features of the park is/was the Waddell Fountain, which I mentally refer to as ‘the resentment fountain.’

The fountain was named after Emily Margaret Waddell, a childless temperance worker who lived two blocks away from the Park. She died in 1909 but a rather unique stipulation in her will wasn’t triggered until 1911, when her husband Thomas wanted to re-marry.

He was shocked to discover that upon his remarriage, her will required him to donate $10,000 to the city for a fountain.

This being Winnipeg, he didn’t…exactly…have the money, his funds being tied up in a real estate deal. But, eventually, he came up with the cash-o and the fountain was completed in 1914.

By the 1980s, the neighbourhood surrounding the park had changed. Instead of the stately-pleasure-domes of the upper-middle-class, the park was slowly surrounded by large apartment complexes and fell into what city planners like to call disrepair.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t still heavily used by residents, just that the fountain was sort of broken. And there would often be people struggling with addictions sitting quietly on the benches, watching the children play.

In 2010, a variety of funders, public and private and community-based, raised five million dollars for a fancy reno that includes the city’s largest splash pad and wader pool, an AstroTurf soccer field and a two-story slide/toboggan run fronting on Ellice. Oh, and the resentment fountain works again.

Two weeks ago, in the midst of a mini heatwave, musician Natanielle Felicitas and artist Greg Chomichuk and I were assigned to go make collaborative art at Central Park.

Each of us approached the hundred and twenty-year-old park differently. Natanielle wandered around recording the sounds of the park and thinking musically. Greg hauled three plywood panels and a bag of markers to the park and plunked himself down on the grass.

I alternated wandering around, looking at the trees and talking to people with stretches of sitting, scribbling in my notebook. When I needed help in my thinking about the trees, arborist Christopher Barkman agreed to come walk with me. When I needed help with my thinking about the neighbourhood and the city that surrounds it, I did some research.

After a week, we turned our materials in to Gwen Collins, Ardith Boxall and Andraea Sartison, who crafted the piece you are about to see with help from Tanja Woloshen.

Each of us approached this work with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Each of us approached collaboration with a slightly different idea of what it meant and what it could mean.

But I think I can safely say safely say, without having to put a lien on your imaginations, that you’ll enjoy your time in Central Park, both the literal and the figurative versions.

* * *

This is my intro for the collaborative artwork on Central Park presented this Sunday at 2 pm as part of the One Trunk Festival.

Reprint: One site, three artists, endless possibilities

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION 
By Kevin Prokosh
  
The idea behind the inaugural One Trunk Festival is to send teams of artists to a Winnipeg site and create individual pieces that will fit into a larger collaboration presented Sept. 8 at the West End Cultural Centre.

Andraea Sartison, the artistic director of the fledgling festival, assembled three crews consisting of a musician, writer and visual artist, including the trio of sound artist Andy Rudolph, filmmaker Deco Dawson and author Melissa Steele, who were assigned to capture the essence of the Elmwood Cemetery.

"She failed to mention the cemetery was under lock and key and surrounded by this giant fence at least 10 feet high and very sharp on top," says Rudolph, 29. "I started climbing with my equipment and felt kind of weird breaking into a cemetery. All I was stealing was some of the sounds whistling through so I didn't feel too bad, although I was totally trespassing."

Rudolph, who calls himself a hired gun for weird musical collaborations, began wandering around the rows of gravestones in search of a location to record. The sounds of crickets, birds, passing trains and the odd siren were hardly inspiring. Then it hit him that his approach was wrong and that he should let silence speak for itself.

"I found a good spot along the river where there were two really big tombstones which acted like two perfect receiving dishes for audio," says Rudolph, whose recent project was an inter-species collaboration between belugas and humans in Churchill. "There was a ton of sound pooling."

His microphone picked up this unidentified sucking, creaking sound that intrigued Rudolph enough to return to the cemetery for another midnight visit.

"The sound was a little spooky," says the drummer. "There was definitely some groaning and shrieking but it was mostly coming from the neighbourhood across the river. I recorded a more immersive, environmental sound and put those exciting train noises to build over top and built a bit of a narrative."

Rudolph submitted his 15-minute soundscape with Dawson's video and Steele's 10 pages of poetry to theatre artist Grant Guy, artistic director of Adhere & Deny, and projectionist Jaymez, who together will fashion a presentation.

"The festival is mixing inter-disciplinary artists together, which is essentially what I do all the time," says Dawson. "It was one of those things that you couldn't say no to because it is everything that I believe in as an artist."

The other performances will be made up of the contributions of science writer Chris Rutkowski, photographer Kristian Jordan and Nathan's lead singer Keri Latimer, who all were inspired by the Louis Riel statue at the legislature while the threesome of graphic novelist Greg Chomichuk, writer Ariel Gordon and cellist Natanielle Felicitas went to Central Park.

"I was interested in how these different artists will interpret the same place," says Sartison, who directed the fringe hit Hamlet as Told on the Street. "The focus for me is about process and product and to build a community of artists who are interested in this kind of collaboration."

She would like the One Trunk Festival evolve into an event like the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver or Edmonton's Nextfest, which showcases the voice of the next generation of artists.

"It's not a final premiere performance but an interesting collaboration between some of Winnipeg's finest artists. It's about working together and building a foundation for things to come."

One Trunk Festival takes place at 2 p.m. Sunday at the West End Cultural Centre.

A Nice Cup of Tea

I have been drinking hot sweet milky tea since I was eleven. I love everything about it.

I like going for walks with a cup of tea in my travel mug. I like sitting at my desk and writing with a cup of tea at my elbow. I like making M make me tea. (And, when the girl is old enough, I will teach her to make me tea.)

Over the years, various people have tried to shame me over the amount of sugar I use in my tea. And I mostly shout at them until they go away.

A few years ago, realizing that my metabolism was slowing down and that I do use too much sugar, I foolishly tried to cut out some out.

After a week or two I realized that I was fiddling with the one thing that consistently makes me happy. And that I relied on the boost the sugar was giving me in addition to the caffeine.

Well, today on Facebook, someone shared a link from a 1945 essay George Orwell wrote about making the perfect cup of tea.

And I was mostly in agreement with him until I got to these two paragraphs:

"Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again."

I promptly got M's attention and read the offending paragraphs to him, mostly because I wanted him to feel better about himself.

I felt good about making him feel good, until he said, "See!?! You should try going two weeks without sugar!"

I stared at him, flabbergasted, and retorted, "Only if you cut the sugar from your coffee!"

"Fine!" he said.

We stared at each other.

"Starting when?" I asked.

"Tomorrow morning," he answered.

And now I'm going to have to do it. Because of George Orwell and M and my bloody metabolism. All of which is to say: WAAAAAH!

Central Park-ing

Evening. People come out
of unaired rooms, of breadboxes
& bachelors
with flickering TVs
& the temperature drops
a blessed degree.  On the edge of the field, a cluster
of women in hijab, one of them fluttering
a white paper fan. The women clap as a toddler wobbles
towards them, as if she’s in the middle
of a dance floor.

By the elderly fountain
that had its hips and knees, its star finial finally,
finally replaced, an old man offers to sell me
his life story
but gives the latest chapter away:
his plan to send an iPhone to his daughter in Iraq
before he dies. He rolls his eyes dramatically, all the teeth
in his impish grin gleaming
in the last of the light.

Behind him, a girl bows
so reverently
to the splash pad’s cold jets her forehead
touches the ground. Nearby, two stumps.
Growth rings almost lost
in the long grass. The arborist kneels
& puts his nose to cut edge: elm!

Evening. As the wet footprints
on the fountain’s stony lip finally,
finally disappear, the women cheek-kiss farewell
& summon single children out of the masses
of arms & legs running after soccer balls
on the AstroTurf.

* * *

Here's one of three parts of the poem I wrote on Central Park for the One Trunk Festival of New Hybrid Performance.

We only had a week to come up with something, so I suppose it's only fair that the performing arts companies now only have a week to make my poem, and GMB Chomichuk's three drawings, and Natanielle Felicitas' cello composition into a performance of some kind.

See you September 8 for the performance? Here's the official blurb:

"Winnipeg’s artistic communities unite to present an afternoon of performances inspired by one another’s interpretations of the city we call home. Featuring the work of Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, Grant Guy, Deco Dawson, Keri Latimer, Natanielle Felicitas, Melissa Steele, Ariel Gordon, Chris Rutkowski, Andy Rudolph, Andraea Sartison, Tanja Woloshen and more.

Join us for a town hall meeting following performances to discuss the development of an annual hybrid performance festival and the growth of collective creation and interdisciplinary work in Winnipeg."