Documenting Engagement

Documenting Engagement is a video documentary project that examines the practice of community-based arts and the potential of digital video to document the aesthetics of community engagement. The project brought together 9 mid-career, community-based artists from across Canada for a 3-week residency. The artists worked with senior artists and producers to assemble their own footage into short videos.

Produced in 2005 by the Pacific Cinematheque and the Roundhouse Community Centre Association with support from the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Text adapted from Linda Frye Burnham's article, Social Imagination: Documenting Engagement in Canada, available on the Community Arts Network. To view the complete video works in English and French, visit the Community Arts Network website.

Glen Anderson, Voices in Stone

This video documents Vancouver community based artist Glen Anderson's experiences creating community mosaics. He notes in his video that “the aesthetics of where we live don't necessarily need to be entirely guided by planners, developers, bureaucrats, design professionals where efficiency is more important than context, art or community.”

Pat Beaton, 1001 Cups of Tea

Pat Beaton is a Vancouver-based visual artist who focuses on the natural environment in the urban setting. In her video she describes the creative process involved in the Mount Pleasant Community Fence Project, a community-carved cedar fence that surrounds the Fraser Street Neighbourhood Gardens overlooking downtown Vancouver. She notes in the video that “gardening together helps to dissolve barriers that can isolate us from one another. We are brought together on a whole cultural level by the plants that we grow.”

Ruth Howard, Those Dreaded Dichotomies

Ruth Howard is a theatre designer and artistic director of Jumblies Theatre in Toronto. This video documents her observations on her four-year residency at Toronto's Davenport/Perth Neighbourhood Centre, and the neighbours' collective “memories” of a prehistoric lake. She notes in their video that “I have to be pushed out into a scary place, and into an exciting, challenging place, doing something I've never done before, just like everybody else.”

Karen Jamieson, Letter to Skidegate

Dancer and anthropologist Karen Jamieson made this video with Tanya Rae Collinson, a Haida videographer and editor from Haida Gwaii, B.C. The video documents the process of a western dance artist collaborating with the Haida community of Skidegate to create an expression of spirit of place, a dance/performance/ceremony to honor Haida elder Percy Gladstone and the meeting of two different cultures. Jamieson notes in this video that “I was a conduit for something that needed to be said. It was a though everyone had a fragment - just a piece - of the puzzle. And some things are just too sacred to be recorded on camera.”

Paula Jardine, Public Dreamer (22 years in 7 minutes).

This video, by Paula Jardine, founding artistic director of the Public Dreams Society in Vancouver, is a collage of her professional community art practice in neighbourhoods from Edmonton, Alberta, to Victoria, B.C., where she now lives. She notes in her video: “What is the role of the artist in sacred secular spiritual expression? Artists need to be involved in all the important events of our lives.”

Edith Regier, Reparative Culture

Edith Regier is director/artist-in-residence of the Crossing Communities Art Project in Winnipeg. This video documents the project, which is a visual forum to create dialogue through art with women and girls marginalized by justice issues. She notes in her video that “I think of there being a continuum between prisoner and free citizen. I think about if we can access a social imagination. And, if so, can we imagine alternatives to incarceration?”

Carmen Rosen, Shedding Light on the Ravine

Carmen Rosen is a performance artist and founder of Still Moon Arts Society and Mortal Coil Performance Society in Vancouver. This video documents her work of inspiring and celebrating the cleanup of the creek and ravine in her Vancouver (mostly Chinese/Canadian) neighbourhood. She notes in her video that “I have been creating with my neighborhood for four years, but the work has just begun. We're just beginning to tap into the potential of an active and engaged community.”

Cathy Stubington, Something from Nothing

Cathy Stubington is a puppeteer/theatre director and is artistic director of Runaway Moon Theatre in Enderby, B.C. Her video documents a community play that she initiated with people from the town of Enderby and from the neighbouring Spallumcheen Band of the Shuswap First Nation. She notes in the video that “when an idea starts from nothing and you turn it into something, you can make anything happen. If people imagine together another reality we can create the world the way we want it to be.”