Diaspora Dialogues

This past Thursday, DD hosted an event at Harbourfront Centre to explore the dynamics of character development. Panelists of the evening included Priscila Uppal, Ins Choi and Cherie Dimaline. The discussion was moderated by the Globe and Mail’s Kate Taylor.

The evening started off with the panelists selecting identity cards (one word identifiers contributed by the audience) to create a character based on three attributes: physical, social and cultural. The discussion began light-hearted with questions about how identities are defined, and the panelists revealing that most often times their characters are based on people they already know. When writing a play, Ins shared that he usually has actors in mind for specific characters and would develop the characters peppered with each actor’s mannerisms and personality traits.

As the night went on, the panelists touched upon the difficulties of creating characters outside what they know, in terms of ethnicity and cultural backgrounds; physical handicaps and deformities. Kate painstakingly researched Jewish history and culture, as well as consulted her Jewish friends when writing her award-winning novel,Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, which in the end paid off. She told the audience that she was quite confident when writing about her characters after all the research she conducted until her Jewish experts shattered her ego letting her know—“that would never happen,” or “a Jewish person wouldn’t say that!” Even though she received plenty of constructive criticisms from her friends, it is what, Kate thinks, made her story believable.

The discussion was very engaging with the panelists telling stories and personal experiences about their own conflicts with cultural and racial stereotypes. It almost felt as though the audience was a fly on the wall listening in on a group of intimate friends’ discussing how they tackle building characters in their writing. This was certainly a great way to cap off the night with an informative and thoughtful conversation that pertains to everyday life and revealing the thought process of artists as they create memorable characters.

Diaspora Dialogues and Harbourfront Centre present Buy, Sell, Trade? The Currency of Identity

Thursday November 10, 2011

A discussion exploring identity and representation issues in storytelling featuring a moderated panel that includes novelist Priscila Uppal, theatre artist Ins Choi, and writer-in-residence at U of T’s First Nations House, Cherie Dimaline. Moderated by the Globe and Mail’s Kate Taylor. The audience will contribute one-word “identifiers” that the panel will randomly select and use to collectively to build characters and discuss challenges that arise in storytelling.
7pm | Studio Theatre | PWYC

Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer and York University professor. Among her publications are eight collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology (2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), and Winter Sport: Poems; the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy(2009). Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She was poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic games. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.” For more information visit priscilauppal.ca.

Ins Choi is an actor and a playwright who was born in Korea, grew up in Scarborough and now resides in Toronto with his lovely wife and their two kids. His play Kim’s Convenience, which won the Best New Play award and the Patron’s Pick at this summer’s Toronto Fringe festival will launch soulpepper’s 2012 season this January.

Other theatre credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Death of a Salesman, Window on Toronto, The Cherry Orchard, Oh What a Lovely War (Dora-nomination, soulpepper); Lady in the Red Dress (fu-GEN—Dora nomination); Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, The Odyssey(Stratford); Banana Boys (fu-GEN—Dora nomination); The Comedy of Errors (CanStage); Hongbu and Nolbu and the Magic Pumpkins (YPT).

Upcoming: (re)birth: ee cummings in song (Global Cabaret Festival), Enter the Shadow: the life of a b-boy (Harbourfront Centre), 2000Candles (the Arts Engine), Kim’s Convenience (soulpepper).

Cherie Dimaline is the writer-in-residence for First Nations House at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Red Rooms, was published in 2007.

Her work appears in two 2011 McGraw-Hill Ryerson texts; an anthology of love stories called Zaagidiwin (Ningwakwe Press); in a limited edition volume of gothic stories about Toronto produced for the 2009 Luminato Festival (Diaspora Dialogues) and will be featured in several upcoming collections including Exotic Gothic 4 (PS Publishing) and a book of traditional Metis Rogarou tales (University of Alberta). In 2010, she published Seven Gifts for Cedar, a children’s book geared towards Aboriginal family literacy. Her novel The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy will be published in 2012 by Theytus Books.

Cherie and her husband live in Toronto where she is the editor of First Nations House Magazine and a member of the founding editorial board for Muskrat Magazine, an online indigenous publication.

Kate Taylor is a feature writer in the Globe and Mail’s Arts section, writing on cultural affairs.

Born in France and raised in Ottawa, Kate studied history and art history at the University of Toronto before completing a Masters in Journalism at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

She is also a prize-winning novelist. Her critically acclaimed 2003 novel Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen won the City of Toronto Book Award and was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, taking the award for best first novel in Canada and the Caribbean. Her 2010 novel A Man in Uniform was nominated for the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award.

In 2009-2010, Kate served as the Atkinson Fellow, researching Canadian cultural sovereignty in the digital age for a series of articles that appeared in the Toronto Star.