Putting the mega quarry on stage

Dale Hamilton has witnessed the sheer power of an engaged community, and it’s truly a sight to behold.

The artistic director of the Eden Mills-based Everybody’s Theatre Company, Hamilton is one of Canada’s leading proponents of “community engaged theatre,” an art form that combines performance and civic engagement. On Saturday, October 27, she will begin workshopping what will hopefully become a community play about the proposed Melancthon mega quarry.

There’s a reason why the word “community” has already shown up four times in this article. Without that word and all it represents, Hamilton’s plays would not exist at all. To illustrate, it’s helpful to look at the Everybody’s Theatre Company’s first major project, which started Hamilton on a 20-year journey to where she is today. Called “The Spirit of Shivaree – the Eramosa Community Play,” the project took place in the early 1990s near the town of Rockwood, Ontario, where a controversial estate home development was at the time proposed to be built on some prime agricultural land.

The key to Hamilton’s process is that everyone who wants a part in the play gets a part in the play. In Rockwood, over the course of a year, Hamilton and her group held countless workshops and “community soundings,” gathering stories, writing songs, exploring themes and shaping a narrative.

She then took all of that information and wrote an allegorical play that dealt with themes of land use and development, and that play, featuring a cast of dozens of local people, was performed to capacity crowds in the ruins of an old mill at the Rockwood Conservation Area, over the course of one festive week.

And what happened after that was perhaps most interesting. Many of the people who had been involved in the play remained engaged; four cast members even ran for Council in the next election, eventually forming a voting bloc and managing to defeat the development proposal. When their decision was appealed, footage of the play was screened at the resulting OMB hearing, which ended in their favour.

“The theatre project is just the spark,” says Hamilton. “People go through this and they get hooked.”

In the years since, Hamilton has done plays like this in several different communities across Canada, always stressing that the process is as important as the finished product.

Early this year, she received funding from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council of the Arts to bring her brand of theatre to this area, to tackle the mega quarry issue, which she sees as ripe for this kind of treatment. The project, at this point, is entitled “Digging Deep.”

On Saturday, October 27, from 1:30 to 3:30 pm, the first of four workshops scheduled for this fall will take place at the Honeywood Schoolhouse. Focusing on songwriting, the workshop will be run by professional songwriter James Gordon, who has worked on many of Hamilton’s projects in the past.

“James can take a group of people with no musical experience and by the end of the day they will have worked together and come up with a beautiful song,” said Hamilton on a recent visit to Creemore.

On Saturday, November 3, Hamilton herself will host a “Story Gathering Drop-In” at the Honeywood Schoolhouse. From 10 am to 5 pm, people are encouraged to drop by with their stories and photos about local history, or their thoughts about the proposed quarry. For this workshop and all others, it’s important to stress that Hamilton is not just looking for people opposed to the project. Pro, con or undecided, all are welcome and encouraged to take part.

“This is not meant to be a propaganda piece,” she said. “We would defeat the purpose of the project if we made one group out to be bad guys. There are always two sides to every story, and they’re both important.”

The third workshop will take place on Saturday, November 10 at the Station on the Green. Hosted by Ayrlie MacEachern, this one will focus on creating dance and movement pieces that could be used in the play.

Finally, on Saturday, November 24, artist Sandi Wong will host a visual arts workshop at the Honeywood United Church, with the goal of creating drawings and 3-D models about the mega quarry. As with all four meetings, no experience is necessary.

More workshops and meetings will follow in the spring, with things eventually being whittled down into a play that Hamilton forsees as a form of “promenade theatre,” where cast and audience travel on schoolbuses between scenes and the fields of Melancthon are used as backdrops.

“Why wouldn’t we take people right to the scene?” she asked.

When it comes to casting, Hamilton hopes to cast the net as wide as possible. In one project that she was involved in during the amalgamation of Guelph and Eramosa Townships, in which the two political entities were depicted as a husband and wife on their wedding day, one of the municipality’s mayors played the husband, a relative newcomer to the area played the bride and a longtime resident played the mother of the bride.

“The more connected people are to the issue, the more passionate their performances are,” she said.

For more information on the Everybody’s Theatre Company, visit www.communityengagedtheatre.ca. Hamilton herself can be reached at 519-856-9891 or by emailing dale@hsfx.ca.