This is an archived event from Culture Days 2024.
Images
Community Gathering & Reading
In-person
Performance Poetry & spoken word Writing & literature Culinary & food Theatre StorytellingDate and time
Location
The Theatre Centre
1115 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON
Directions: Find us at 1115 Queen St W. on the corner of Queen and Lisgar. There’s street parking in the area and bike racks on the eastside of the building. If you’re travelling by TTC, take the 501 Queen streetcar to Abell St or Dovercourt Rd.
Access
Free.
Offered in English.
Wheelchair accessible and is a relaxed performance.
About
Invitation from Artistic Director Aislinn Rose:
Dear Friends,
I’m going to be blunt: I’m in a place of despair, and I want to talk about it.
September… we were going to host a town hall. I decided I didn’t want to host a town hall. What (of the world’s many woes) would we even talk about? And what, at the end of the day, would it accomplish? The thing that has actually been on my mind over the past several months, and the question I keep coming back to is how do I leave a place of despair, and move toward a place of hope? What would that even mean? And I realized the best thing I could do for myself was to ask my community to gather with me, to eat some soup, and to help figure it out.
Maybe you, too, are in despair, and despite your desire to see no one and go nowhere, a community gathering would be good for your heart too. Or maybe you’ve made this journey toward hope and have some advice for the rest of us. Maybe you just like soup. I’ve invited some friends and community members to write rapid responses (whatever that looks like) to the proposal that hope is a verb, it requires action, and the action comes from a belief that those actions matter. Meanwhile despair, hope’s opposite, is the enemy of action. Why take action when nothing we do matters anyway?
And so friends, I hope you’ll join us at The Theatre Centre on September 23rd. I’ll be hosting (because doing stuff matters!) and we’ll have soup and other foodstuffs to share. We’ll hear some words from some wonderful minds, and my hope is that we’ll each leave that night with a personal action in mind that we will take into the world, because it matters to someone. And even if it just matters to you, that’s enough. But ultimately, the most important piece of the puzzle of this gathering is that we gather.
— Aislinn
This event is part of The Theatre Centre’s 10 for 10 programming (ten unique offerings over ten months), which celebrates ten years since we moved into our forever home on 1115 Queen Street West. The Theatre Centre’s 10 for 10 programming is generously supported by the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund.
Links
- Free with RSVP theatrecentre.org
Organizer
The Theatre Centre
The Theatre Centre is a nationally recognized live-arts incubator and community hub. Our mission is to offer a home for creative, cultural and social interactions to invent the future.
We make work that spans disciplines and genres; work that pushes the boundaries of what is considered “art”. Our programming and our role as a community space are inextricably linked. Art is not made in a silo: it is connected to the world around it.
We offer one of the only spaces in the neighbourhood where folks can pop in for a coffee, spend the day working, or just hang out (no purchase necessary). It is a community hub and a place to gather; a place where you — regardless of class, race, ethnicity, religion, or ability — are welcome to be. You don’t have to identify as an artist or performer to use the space. We want you to feel at home here.
We believe art is political.
We believe resources go further when you share them.
We believe cultural spaces are public spaces.
We believe in offering artists time—time to try, time to fail, time to discover all of the things their ideas will not become.