We had the pleasure of speaking with Andrea Nann, artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company about her extensive community engagement project, The Ontario Shebang for this edition of the Arts Engage Canada newsletter.

The Ontario Shebang is a multi year, inter-arts, inter-cultural journey into a process that brought together artists and individuals from diverse backgrounds to be supported in a space for creative discoveries, and to explore collaboration and shared experiences. (Taken from The Ontario Shebang website). 

Who? (The Host Communities)

The Ontario Shebang took place in 4 communities across Southern Ontario: 

• St. Catharines (FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre)
• Guelph (River Run Centre)
• Burlington (Burlington Performing Arts Centre)
• Kingston (City of Kingston, The Grand Theatre & The Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning).

Timeline 

The time frame of each Shebang ranged from twenty-two months to four years.

The process in each community evolved over an extended period of time to allow participants to develop meaningful relationships, and to allow Andrea to adapt the process in response to feedback and reflection from participants. As a result, the Ontario Shebang uniquely manifested itself in each host community, creating an environment and process for discovery, exchange, collaboration and bridging. Each process concluded in a public, participatory, multi-arts presentation that featured people from various walks of life and lived experience. 

There were a number of different methods that the host presenters adopted to identify and connect with community partners and local artists. Guelph, for example, brought together programming directors from 5 local arts organizations, representing a wide range of art forms, and they each nominated an individual to form the core group of participating artists.  This collaborative nomination process expanded the community of support for the Guelph Shebang from it’s very start.

The Shebang's discovery process began with the commitment to do something that had never been done before and everyone had to be a part of the learning and exploration. Andrea explains, “Much of our journey was focused on getting to know one another, cultivating trust, and discovering new ways of maintaining a strong sense of self while being together.  Every individual was asked to make choices that would further the evolution of the group.  As the process deepened and the core artists entered unfamiliar territory, we observed amazing changes, amazing outcomes.  We started measuring the impact of people’s experiences, and looked for ways of translating what the process was and how the impacts might ripple out. How they would translate into the community and have impact on an artistic level".

The process demanded another layer of observer to become involved in the form of translators, who tracked the artistic process with the ability to see the Shebang through the eyes of the community. 

Reflection was a built-in and crucial aspect throughout the Shebang process. Reflection guided the shape of each project, allowing the translation of the project into the community to be an authentic and meaningful bridging experience.