“It’s exciting,” Howard says. “Once you’ve worked on something like this, it’s hard to go back to doing it any other way.” Scarborough is a district that encompasses an extraordinary social disparity, from the wealthy ‘Anglo’ area of the Bluffs, to Kingston/Galloway, indentified as one of Toronto’s most ‘at risk’ neighbourhoods. It includes high-rise social housing and a strip of fourteen old motels on the Kingston Road, now home to prostitutes, drug dealers, coke addicts and families from overflowing homeless and refugee shelters. It houses Toronto’s largest and most concentrated First Nation community, and the world’s largest Tamil diaspora. Scarborough is home to the Guild Inn Sculpture Garden, “a stunning, strange place” that houses surreal fragments of old Toronto architecture – marble columns and stone lions, assembled by an early 20th Century philanthropist. And it also has the Cedar Ridge Creative Centre, a craft centre and art gallery in an old mansion, whose gardener’s cottage became Jumblies’ home for three years. “The mixture of all those things was irresistible,” says Howard. In the Jumblies way of doing community theatre, a project takes place in four phases – research and development, creation, production and then legacy. “We moved into the cottage in February 2008. We let people know that if they invited us, we’d come and do a workshop. So one of the first invitations came from the Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities, who wanted us to work with a group of Tamil Seniors. “The important thing in this first stage is to get to know different sections of the community as well as possible. One of the exercises we used early on we called ‘nesting’. It was something to spark people’s interest, and something that was easy to replicate with different groups. “You start with four concentric circles. In the centre is the indvidual. The first circle represents the people they live with – the people who are close both physically and emotionally. The second represents people who are emotionally close but physically distant. The third is the people who used to live where you live now. And the fourth are people in your neighbourhood whom you don’t know. “Once someone had completed these circles, they would pick one person from each circle and draw a picture or write a story about them. We cut out paper shapes that could be curled up so that they looked like Russian nesting dolls. The biggest doll was always the
stranger in your neighbourhood. People would write about the bus driver, or the people they saw from their window. “When we had done this with several different groups, we put them on display in the Art Gallery. Then we carried out more activities in the gallery with people who came to see them, so the display was evolving all the time. We ended up with hundreds of the little dolls, which we could then use to tell stories or for little puppet shows.” These activities took them to the end of their first year. And this point, they had met a lot of people and made some strong connections, particularly with some schools and with the Tamil seniors. But they had yet to make more than a tenuous connection with the First Nation groups or with motel dwellers, so those became their number one outreach priorities for the second year.
Giving a Spine to the Story It was now, at the start of the second year, that Howard introduced the idea of using Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a backbone for the work going forward. “I had had it in mind all along that that was what I wanted to do. It’s a play I have always loved. But I needed to find a way to make it relevant and accessible. “The first step was to distill it into a story. ‘Once upon a time, there were two princes who were the best of friends…’ That sort of thing. Then we trained people as storytellers. “Once a group had heard the story, we would ask them to choose an image that stood out for them and draw a picture. We’d put those on squares of paper, colour coded for the different seasons in which the story takes place – black for the winter segment, yellow for spring and so on. We’d arrange them in a big square, with the story line going one way and pictures
A Winter’s Tale: synopsis A Winter’s Tale tells the story of two childhood friends, King Leontes of Sicilia and King Polixenes of Bohemia. Polixenes is persuaded by Leontes’ pregnant wife Hermione to extend a long stay in Sicilia. But Leontes becomes convinced that the two are lovers. Possessed by jealousy, he first tries to poison Polixenes, who flees, and then throws Hermione in gaol, declaring his unborn child illegitimate. Leontes sends to the Oracle at Delphi for confirmation of his suspicions, while Hermione gives birth in her prison cell to a daughter, Perdita. Leontes orders that the child should be taken away and abandoned. Too late, the Oracle sends word that Hermione is innocent and the Leontes shall have no heir until his daughter is found. Hermione falls into a swoon and Leontes, wracked with remorse, is told that she is dead. Perdita has been left on the shores of Bohemia and brought up by shepherds. Sixteen years pass and Polixenes’ son, Florizel falls in love with her, not knowing who she is. Forbidden by Polixenes to see each other, the two flee to Sicily. When Leontes hears Perdita’s story, he realises she must be his daughter. As they celebrate, a ‘statue’ of Hermione is restored to life.
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