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25th Annual High Performance Rodeo presented by OYR
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Thursday, January 6 - Sunday, January 30

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Legally blind, using a walker and struggling for hope, Kathy Houston admits she was at the end of her rope last fall. “I felt there was no hope. I felt destitute. I was searching for something to help me out,” Houston says. She recalls “stumbling” into the Mustard Seed Drama Club in October.

“There was a bonding with those people that I’d never experienced before,” she says, suggesting the Drama Club was a life-changing experience.

The Drama Club encouraged her to accept herself for the very first time and gave her the courage to try other things she had always found excuses to put off.

“The emotional stuff I was running into (in the Club), it scared the heck out of me. We learned to risk, we got encouraged, we got the support we needed, it was kind of like a life-journey drama class,” Houston says.

Through the High Performance Rodeo, Calgarians will be able to experience some of the works Houston and others created in the Mustard Seed Drama Club as part of the IN/Visible series.

The three IN/Visible events at the Rodeo are a crucial part of the This Is My City initiative, a program that provides Calgary’s homeless community with art-making opportunities and workshops throughout the year.

“The events show collaborations between artists and artists who are experiencing homelessness,” explains Aviva Zimmerman, who runs the Mustard Seed Drama Club and is co-ordinating the This Is My City events at the Rodeo.

On January 19, there will be two theatre performances. The first is by the Mustard Seed Drama Club, called The Opposite of Dismal: A Show and Tell. “It uses photography, video and theatre to describe all the best things past, present and future in the lives of participants,” Zimmerman says. “It’s an ongoing conversation. The project is not supposed to provide the solution to homelessness, but it’s meant to create opportunities for dialogue and creative expression.”

Houston says one of the things she shares in The Opposite of Dismal is the “best storyteller” she has encountered: her grandmother. Houston says one of her grandmother’s favourite stories was of her experiences in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion in 1917. “She told it so descriptively, I felt I was there,” recalls Houston.

The second show is a one-woman piece written by aboriginal artist Charlene Hellson, who brings an aboriginal perspective to issues of poverty and homelessness in her play.

Lastly, there will be a community discussion on January 26, which former Theatre Calgary artistic director Ian Prinsloo will facilitate. Panelists, including singer Max Ciesielski and Houston, will share with the community what art means to them and the purpose behind This Is My City.

And although it has passed, the first event in the IN/Visible series involved a performance on January 12 by the Drop-In (DI) Centre Singers, a group formed in 2008 under the direction of Onalea Gilbertson. Called A DI Wedding – The Musical, it explores true stories of homeless people who have gotten married while at the shelter, and what that entailed.

“We wanted to show the lighter side of the DI, the human side,” explains Ciesielski, who arranges music for the singers’ group, accompanies them on piano and composed some of the pieces for A DI Wedding. He says romance happens within the Drop-In Centre’s walls, and he even recalls a couple of weddings that took place — one in the park across the street from the homeless shelter and another at the Cecil Hotel.

“We feel it’s so important to provide more than a shelter, to feed the soul as well as the body,” Ciesielski says about the weddings.

Zimmerman emphasized that not all performers in the projects are homeless, as there is a range of socio-economic levels represented.

“We hope IN/Visible brings awareness to homelessness and challenges stereotypes about homelessness, that people aren’t defined by their socio-economic status, but by their creativity,” Zimmerman says.

One challenge Zimmerman continually faces is trying to find the fine balance between not stigmatizing the artists because of their socio-economic status, and still recognizing that their situation is part of the picture given the very nature of the project itself.

“The people who’ve participated have really appreciated the opportunity to create art. It allows them to think about things other than the daily stresses of their existence, and helps them find voices they didn’t know they had.