Category Archives: The Neighbourhood Theatre

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Connectedness

Title: Connectedness

Name: Karlene Goffe

Placement: Pointe-St- Charles Art School

Connectedness is the result of a participatory experience as artist-in-residence with a group of seniors at the Pointe-St-Charles Art School.  Family heirloom was the map of an exploratory and reflective journey with self as a collective unit creating solace, sharing knowledge and spawning conversation of a lifetime within a space. This compassionate engagement captured memories and expanded self-expression that enabled us to bring together what is valued, pass on what is prized and to keep what has given us comfort.

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Teen Zoned

Title: Teen Zoned

Artists in Residence: Susan Attafuah-Callender, Julian Duarte, Olivia Siino,

Placement: YMCA Pointe Saint Charles Teen Zone

Statement: 

The piece aims to explore the issues of vulnerability as well as the struggles that were present within the triad that made up our placement: the Teen Zone supervisors, the teens and ourselves (the artists).

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Kintsukuroi

Erin Rose Finkelstein

Girls Club at the Pointe-Saint-Charles YMCA

Artist statement:

This intermedia piece was inspired by the work I’m doing with the Girls Club at the Pointe-Saint-Charles YMCA. One of the things that really struck me about working with these people was the moments of vulnerability I witnessed and was a part of and how hard those moments can be to navigate when it is your first time grappling with such overwhelming experiences. Witnessing these people go through some really tough stuff for (presumably) the first time reminded me of my first forays with my personal struggles. It only felt right for me to reflect on my experience of being these people’s age rather than the things I witnessed because, at least for me, the best way I could communicate with them was to try and remember how it felt to be where they were so as to interact with genuine empathy and relate personally rather than as a distanced “adult”.

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Love Me Tender

Elizabeth Gale- Volunteer Placement at Hand-in-Hand at Saint Columba House in Pointe Saint- Charles

Artist’s Statement:

Love Me Tender with music by Elvis Presley, is a self revelatory piece surrounding the past semester of my placement of volunteer work at St. Columba House’s community education program Hand-in-Hand for intellectually challenged, aging adults in the Montreal community in Point St. Charles. Hand-in-Hand provides a caring and accepting environment for the participants to learn autonomy skills and have stability and security in times of their lives where loss of physical abilities and difficult transitions of aging are a part of daily obstacles. I have had the privilege of volunteering in the music program on Wednesday mornings, where we sing classics with guitar and dance to old time favourites.

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Photo by David Ward

Voice-to-voice, Hand-in-Hand

Lyanna Labelle-Rocha

Placement: Hand-in-Hand Choir at St-Columba House

Title of Piece: Voice-to-voice, Hand-in-Hand

Blog Post: A community is simultaneously separate individuals and a collective: it is both the plural and the singular at once. This soundscape explores and plays with the voices of the individuals I encountered while my stay at Hand-in-Hand’s choir. It mixes laughter, conversation, tension, anxiety, and finally a melodious union- all things felt both by myself and the members. The soundscape expresses my journey from becoming starting outsider at the St-Columba to becoming a part of a collective- beginning first with anxious tension and ending with a release of

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Seb’s Spooky Story

Sebastien Burk

Share the Warmth

When I told people I was volunteering with a children’s choir, the most common response was “why are you doing this to yourself”. When I told people I was hired at my local Tim Horton’s, the most common response was “good for you”. Ironically, each common response was the opposite of how I personally felt about both experiences. I used this as the inspiration for my piece. By adapting my personal experience into a campfire horror story, I hope to point out the absurdity of demonizing children while many adults do not know how to behave themselves. Shout out to the amazingly talented Helen Park for collaborating with me one the drawings used in the piece.

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Dear Future Generation

 Zeina Razzouk
Artist Residency – St.Columba House Head Start Program
Through theatre, I find a remedy. Because of its flexible nature, theatre offers so many possibilities. All one needs is a performer and a spectator. Even with a simple setting, theatre can achieve so much. Theatre is an intimate art form to me and I find myself lost and found in the process of my art. Through my art, I can transmit a message, a powerful one too. I always find myself working for and with kids. I strongly believe that kids are sacred. Yes, sacred. With them comes a new generation and there is nothing better then a new generation flourishing with a pinch of sunlight, water, oxygen, and fertile soil. Yes there will be rain, dryness, suffocation, and impotent soil but through theatre, anything can heal.
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TNT – Consummation

Pointe St. Charles Art School/ L’École d’Art de Pointe-Saint-Charles is a community-driven Fine Art School inviting students from all levels and walks of life to come and achieve the skills to express themselves through art in the contemporary world.

Julia G. N, student of The Neighbourhood Theatre project, completed her placement here, and fell in love with the intimacy a small art school concept can offer individuals. The school offers you the sense of creative encouragement and security needed to foster artistic growth, learning, and expression.

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The Right to the City Event at Share the Warmth

This is a rough video sharing the final performance (mostly the music) by Theatre students in the Right to the City course, a tethered teaching initiative in Pointe Saint-Charles, a postindustrial neighbourhood in Montreal’s south-west.

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Saturday November 29 – Audio tour / Exhibition of projects and short performances

Français à suivre. Download as PDF.

Pointe Saint-Charles “Shares the Warmth” as Concordia Students partner with local organizations

On November 29th, three classes from Concordia University will be showcasing work done this semester in Pointe St-Charles. The event is open to the public and features an audio tour of the neighbourhood followed by an exhibition of projects and short performances. The audio walk departs from the Pointe-St-Charles Library (1050 Hibernia) at 1pm and the exhibition is at Share the Warmth (625 Fortune) from 2:30-5:30pm.

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Living Scrapbook

By Anne-Marie St. Louis

The Living Scrapbook is an innovative, artistic form I’ve been developing, a multimedia project that would hopefully involve, represent and serve the community. The idea came as I explored Pointe-St-Charles, recorded my impressions of the neighborhood and gathered as many photographs, sounds, quotes, painting and maps as I could find.

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Photo by David Ward

Impressions of Point Saint Charles from the Inside and Out

By Emilie Cassini

My Individual Impressions project has two parts. The first past is a small compilation of impressions of Pointe St-Charles from inside and out; a collection of quotes about the neighbourhood from people who live within the neighbourhood and from people in my own class who are studying the neighbourhood from without.

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Silence: A Ghost Story

Set in various locations of the Atwater library–including the atmospheric basement and boiler rooms–this piece mixed live storytelling and projected video, historical fact and creative fiction to illustrate the historical past of the Mechanic’s Institute of Montreal in relation to the current day Atwater Library and Computer Centre. Through this process, we hope to bring to light the many creative aspects that make up this complex place in a fun, entertaining way. Original Ghost Story and Concept by Katherine Downey in subsequent partnership with Anaberta Argueta, Christopher Carignano, & Molly Hotson.

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Cabaret: The Story of Imaginative Community at the Atwater Library

Artists’ Statement: as musicians, actors and puppeteers we wanted to create a live musical, visual, and experiential performance to help foster the message of the library as a place of fun and imagination at “the heart” of the neighbourhood.  Collaborating Artists:  Emily Schon, Morgan Nerenberg, Iva Delic, Luisa Muhr.

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Photo by David Ward

A Poem by Molly Hotson

By Molly Hotson

I wrote this poem in the hopes that I would be able to effectively relay my personal experience and journey thus far with the Atwater Library. To me, the Atwater Library’s identity is everchanging. Beginning as the Mechanic’s Institute of Montreal, the library has now developed into a centre designed to bring the community together through education and outreach. The more I learned about the Atwater Library, the more I realized that it was impossible to describe the library in just a few words. And so, this poem was born.

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The Story of the Atwater Library

By Emily Schon

In 1821 a group of concerned men—including Reverend Henry Esson, the Governor of Lower Canada and the Sheriff of Montreal—gathered to discuss what they called the “riff-raff” problem.  The Reverend and his men were concerned that the proletariat where throwing away their pennies in the of gin mills and bear pits! Thus began the struggle of the Montreal Mechanic’s Institute to educate modern man!

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TNT Haiku

Photo Haikus

By Morgan Nerenberg

Photo Haikus are an ancient poetic form, while Twitter is a cutting edge social network. Both however are linked by having extreme limitations on the length of any single “post”.  I chose to combine this two forms while also adding in photography. By “searching out Haikus” I was able to take photographs that then were to subject of a short poem, and then posted to them Twitter. Original Concept and Realization by Morgan Nerenberg.

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