BEAUTY AND TRANSFORMATION
Friday, May 26
Orpheus Theatre (SAIT campus)
Beauty and Transformation is much more than a multimedia show – it’s also about what happens when someone cares enough to try and stop another person’s pain.
Presented by Vancouver-based photographer Brian Harris, Beauty is a 90-minute long photo, video and soundscape assemblage that takes its audiences through the countryside of India and into the hearts of those who reach out to stop blindness caused by cataracts.
Harris, 55, says his own transformation began in the 1980s, when he met a Buddhist monk and travelled with him to Thailand.
"Since then I’ve tried to structure my life in accordance with the Buddhist principle of right livelihood," he says. "We work in areas of the world that I have a deep connection to, both photographically and spiritually."
The "we" Harris is referring to is the non-profit Seva Foundation headquartered in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1978, Seva reports it has to date supported 2.5 million eye surgeries to prevent curable and preventable blindness in countries including Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Tanzania and India.
Beauty includes more than 500 photographs that Harris has taken in the north central plains of Chitrakoot, the mountainous region of Ladakh, and a tea estate in West Bengal.
In addition to the photos, Harris collected sound-bytes and video footage of the Hindu and Buddhist culture of India. Although Harris is an accomplished photographer, he says the most compelling part of Beauty is its main characters.
"The central focus for this show is four people," he says. Those four people are connected to four main themes. The first is Wisdom, where 86-year-old Mahaji leads his spiritual community in the care of 100 cows and one elephant, as an act of devotion to the Divine Mother.
Beauty is about Raja Banerjere, the fourth generation owner of Makaibari Darjeeling Tea Estate in West Bengal. Through organic, biodynamic, perma-cultural and fair-trade practices, Makaibari has been transformed into a model of how to reorder society into an equitable community, in harmony with nature.
The focus of Vision is the Chitrakoot eye hospital's sight program, which has its roots in the spiritual service of a wandering saint in the early 1950s. Now, the two-hospital, 250-acre compound serves hundreds of people each day, with more than 45,000 eye surgeries performed in the past year.
Compassion is about Cynthia Hunt, who has lived and worked for 15 years in Ladakh's remote villages, providing for the villagers’ health and education needs. There is a fire that blazes within her, complex and difficult to discern. People have gone to India to help her. None have been able to keep up with Hunt's relentless pace or been able to match the number of hours she works in a day. She is a most remarkable human being. |
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