Tag: connection

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Opinions

Don’t leave the world behind

Graphic by Jenny Kwan

Pay attention to the world around you.

I abandoned social media a long time ago. I barely use most of the apps installed on my phone. I don’t always have my phone in front of me, although it’s almost always within my proximity. I didn’t realize how much I depend on my phone until I watched Netflix’s Leave the World Behind. This movie is about a family who rents a house outside of New York City for a little getaway. They witness unusual events that start to perturb them. Upon their expected return, the family realizes that they were on the brink of a civil war.

The movie was a wake-up call. To be honest, I didn’t immediately understand the moral of the story—I found myself with more questions than answers by the end. After perusing comments about the film’s trailer video on YouTube, it dawned on me. And I was terrified.

Leave the World Behind is about an apocalypse. I don’t watch thrillers often, but out of all the apocalyptic ones I have seen, this movie is, by far, the most realistic. Like Rosie, the protagonist’s daughter, a lot of us are consumed by our personal needs more than what is happening elsewhere in the world, like war. It is terrifying how preoccupied we are with our own affairs that we neglect what really matters. What I learned from the movie is that I don’t want to be oblivious.

I might not drive, but I still rely on Google Maps when I walk somewhere I’ve never been. Like Clay, the husband, I probably wouldn’t know how to find my way home if I had no access to public transportation. I’d most likely be lost without GPS, and that’s a fear that I didn’t even know I had before watching Leave the World Behind.

In the movie, the satellites are hacked. As far as the viewer knows, everyone within the New York state loses signal so that no one can turn to the internet or the television for news about what’s going on. The characters are confused and scared, as they don’t know the cause of the blackouts. All they know is that something is definitely wrong.

Although some events are extreme and might even be far-fetched, this type of apocalypse could happen to us. We live in a world where hacking is possible. Like in the movie, should our satellites be hacked, the Tesla cars in the world could probably drive and crash on their own. We might not all drive a Tesla, but most of us use a smartphone that can do so many things for us. Should there be a blackout, we’d have to rely on cash when some people prefer to use their debit or credit cards to make transactions. We rely heavily on smart services, but the story begs the question: Is this smart?

Despite how disturbed Leave the World Behind left me, I realized how important it is to pay attention to the world around us, especially the one outside our immediate perception. It is important that we learn to enjoy life outside of technology. It is important for us to have different monetary means in case the systems are down. It is important to have emergency supplies because you never know. And most importantly, it is important for us to be kind to one another, especially in times of crisis. I learned that we shouldn’t leave the world behind because this could very well turn into us being left behind one day. And that would be terrifying, to say the least.

Categories
Arts and Culture

Black and white and quiet all over

Graphic by Keven Vaillancourt / The Concordian

Free theatre workshop brings mime to attendees of all experience levels.

On Tuesday, Feb. 27, Concordia hosted a “Mime as Non-Verbal Communication” workshop. Open to all regardless of affiliation with Concordia, the workshop described an exploration of body awareness, self-expression, and clown communication.

Hosted by Sue Proctor, a professional clown and mime with over 30 years of experience, it was an opportunity for those interested in learning more about the style and techniques of mime performance in a beginner-friendly setting.

“[Non-verbal communication] is such a significant part of how people communicate with each other,” Proctor said, describing the importance of the physical expression mime relies on.

“It’s very useful for people who have difficulty with language, either because they’re from another language or have difficulty with talking,” she said. “It’s a very fundamental way for humans to communicate.”

Some attendees at the workshop included Allyson Gray, a recent graduate from Concordia’s translation program who loves all things artistic, and Maya Kanitkar, a third-year biochemistry student at McGill who is playing a mime in an upcoming student production of Big Top Down. Other attendees included a theatre therapist, a post-doctoral student in dance, and both former and current acting students. 

After everyone arrived, Proctor encouraged them to go around the circle and introduce themselves. She then led the group in a few rounds of mime ball, where attendees passed around an imaginary ball to each other. When she received it, she demonstrated how the ball she was holding could change size, weight, and elasticity before passing it back to an attendee, allowing others to determine the specifics of the ball they were throwing.

She continued to lead the group through exercises exploring movement centred around specific parts of the body, such as walking around the room and instructing attendees to be guided by their heads, shoulders, feet, hips, or nose.

Proctor touched briefly on the history of mime and some of the predominant techniques of performance. While many schools teach mime purely through physical instruction, Proctor explained that she best learned to mime when first visualizing the object she was working with in great detail. 

She explained that it’s easiest to start working with actions you have already built muscle memory around, before guiding attendees to partner up and work to mime a daily activity. 

The workshop concluded with everyone sharing something new they had learned from Proctor.

“Aside from it being a great learning experience, it was a fun atmosphere,” said Gray. “It was a place to experiment and learn without being afraid of judgment,” she said. 

Kanitkar echoed similar sentiments. “I really enjoyed the whole ‘we’re trying things out together’ atmosphere,” they said. “It was a lot of fun to experiment with expressing different ideas in a new form of communication.”

Proctor’s passion for mime was evident to attendees, and her support of everyone present created an environment that encouraged exploration and wholehearted effort.

“I love making an invisible world visible, of creating something out of nothing, of creating a shared vision with people when there is nothing in the room,” said Proctor.

Categories
Arts

When it comes to Ellen Belshaw, art imitates life

How an alumna’s internship in Mexico blurred cultural boundaries

“I purposely went to Mexico without a curatorial concept in mind, so that I wouldn’t be trying to make the art that I found fit into my preconceived ideas,”  said fine arts graduate Ellen Belshaw. Instead, “my ideas would be shaped by both my experiences in Mexico City and shaped by the works of the artists I met with.”

Belshaw spent three months last spring interning at SOMA, a non-profit contemporary art education organisation in Mexico City. SOMA is an eight-week program conducted in English for international artists, curators, critics and art historians. It introduces participants to the dynamic art scene of Mexico City through visits to museums, openings and artists’ studios.

Through a series of seminars and workshops hosted by famous Mexican and international artists and curators, Belshaw came to know five artists: Marcela Armas, Daniel Monroy Cuevas, Lorena Mal, Armando Rosales and Rogelio Sosa. She selected these artists to be a part of Lo que sabíamos pero no pudimos decir,  or What we all knew but couldn’t articulate, currently displayed in Concordia’s FOFA Gallery.

“The staff at SOMA were a big help in connecting me with artists who I was interested in visiting at their studios,” Belshaw said. “Following each of the studio visits with different artists, I asked them to recommend me at least one other artist who they thought I should meet with, based on what we had connected on. That way I was more likely to get a wider range of artists, not just one social circle, but rather branching out into different circles, more like a web.”

The exhibit’s welcoming art piece is Rosales’s Actual State. At first glance, viewers may be confused by the several half-spheres of concrete scattered across the floor. By taking a closer look, the objects become clearer: they are sandals, which the artist invites viewers to wear.

Rosales suffers from bouts of dizziness and vertigo. His aim is to convey a personal story and a beautiful message… when people put the shoes on and attempt to stand up straight, they experience a loss of balance.  Furthermore, if people try to walk alone in these shoes, they will eventually fall, but if they request assistance or if others choose to help, they will succeed.

“The main theme of the exhibition lies somewhere in the space between connection and disconnection,” Belshaw explained. “How things can seem to be connected or disconnected at different moments, and the factors that create those apparent divisions. Often, the difference between disconnection and connection isn’t something concrete (pun intended), but other times it can be very substantive. In a way, I would argue that the desire to connect is what fuels many human drives.”

According to Belshaw, other common themes between the works in this exhibition are tension, movement, borders and a range of sensorial perceptions, but that does not mean viewers can’t draw their own conclusions.

An echo of the border and tension themes would be Armas’s Resistencia. The installation is made up of several metal wires, positioned in a way that alludes to the border between the United States and Mexico. At first, one only sees white dots delimiting the border. However, the viewer is separated from the artwork by yet another metal wire which could burn the viewer if touched.

When asked what inspired her to put on this specific exhibit and name it as such, Belshaw said her personal experience in Mexico played a significant role.

“My experience as a non-Spanish speaker in Mexico and how I was often able to find ways to communicate with many non-English speakers who I encountered also helped form the concept for this exhibition,” she said, adding that she started “thinking about how language is so important to interpersonal connection, but isn’t the only way to engage with others and what else allows us to connect.”

It wasn’t until Belshaw was back in Montreal that she took the time to step back and think about her internship in Mexico City. She started to realize the common threads across the different artworks and began forming the concept for Lo que sabíamos pero no pudimos decir.

“Different things attracted me to each of the selected artists in the exhibition,” Belshaw said. “Seeing their work and talking to them about each of their practices brought me that satisfying sense of this is why I do what I do. These are views that I want to help them share; a raison-d’être in such a crazy world where sometimes it’s hard to justify putting energy into art production and administration.”

***

A detailed essay on the connections between the artworks will be available at the FOFA gallery on Oct. 18. The exhibition is open everyday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. until Oct. 19.

Categories
Opinions

The division between the West and the rest

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin.

The media’s late response to the attack in Somalia highlights our sense of disconnect

When a truck bomb in Mogadishu, Somalia, detonated on a busy street on Oct. 14, it claimed more than 300 lives. It was the country’s deadliest attack in years, according to Al Jazeera. Despite this, there was a severe lack of response from Western media. It is a reaction I believe to be common when a deadly attack happens in a country far away from our own.

I consume a lot of news, and yet I didn’t hear about the attack in Somalia through mainstream news outlets until days later. Now compare the media coverage of the violence in Somalia with attacks in places like England, France or the United States. In the latter cases, Western mainstream media often talk or write about the topic for weeks, whether it’s to condemn the violence, commemorate the victims or investigate the root cause. Stories about the Las Vegas shooting, for example, are still being told by the news media almost a month later. Yet our extensive local coverage was not only because four Canadians were killed in the attack, but because it happened in the West.

News stories thrive on tragedies, but more importantly, on the connection the audience feels to those tragedies. It may seem unfair that attacks in the Western world get more coverage than similar events elsewhere, and it is somewhat. That being said, I don’t believe it is because the Western world values certain lives over others. I believe it is about feeling more sympathy for those we relate to more.

Unlike after the attack in Paris in November 2015, there was no Facebook campaign allowing you to make your profile picture filter the Somalian flag. To me, it seems simple why this did not happen. The Paris attack quickly became worldwide news, while Mogadishu did not. It’s a shame the Somalia attack didn’t receive the same attention on social media, but I don’t believe Facebook would devote their resources to a cause that isn’t considered major news in the Western world.

According to the Global Terrorism Database, the vast majority of terror attacks occur in the Middle East and North Africa. When war-torn or unstable countries like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq appear in the news, it is often through stories of casualties caused by war or terrorism. Since tragedy is all we hear about in these nations, we have become desensitized to the violence taking place there.

In comparison, the type of stories we hear and read about from countries like England, France and the United States are more varied and highlight our shared cultures. As such, hearing about major terror attacks in Western countries is like hearing about one here in Montreal—it feels like home.

Now don’t get me wrong: it isn’t a good thing that the Western world is like this. I do believe we should care for the well-being of people around the world. However, it is also not surprising that we tend to disregard regions that are plagued with harsh political climates. The bottom line is, when we believe violence is common place in particular countries, we are less likely to mourn when these attacks happen.

It hurts me to write this, but it is one of the ugly truths of our society. In the Western daily news cycle, there is no time for events that the audience shares no connection to. When the local connection to the story is lost, so is its ability to resonate with us. As unfortunate as this is, it’s what leads attacks in the Middle East and Africa to be depicted as minor stories.

It is a terrible shame that terror attacks claim the lives of people in those regions. It’s a shame that the lives claimed in future attacks will not receive much air time in the Western news media. However, that is simply the way the world works. We sympathize with people who we connect with.

At the moment, our connection with people in troubled regions of the world is severed. In order for this connection to be re-established, we need to understand that violence isn’t and shouldn’t be the norm anywhere in the world. Regardless of the fact that we are different as human beings, our compassion for one another must bring us together in dark times.

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin

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