The Friday Files-news to enchant and inspire
Have you ever just put your whole heart into chasing your dream? Our scholar this week is Lucy Morgan, and her dream saw her become the first Brit ever to attend Quebec's Ecole Nationale du Cirque. A trained solicitor, she gave it all up when she received our Canada Memorial Foundation scholarship and joined the circus!
Lucy Morgan
We spoke with Lucy recently, and she reminisced fondly, "I sat at the University of London, looking through a grants folder to help with my crazy dream of becoming a professional ‘trapeziste’ and living in Montreal". By the time she applied for the CMF scholarship she had Victor Fomin as a coach, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest trapeze teachers of all time.
Thanks to the CMF scholarship Lucy lived in Montreal for her training, surrounded by the original Cirque du Soleil team, future stars and assorted creative spirits living in Montreal. She remembers her first apartment, which she took over from singer Lhasa de Sela.
She recalls, “I trained incredibly hard to became an international level trapeze artist. I was the first person in the UK to do a full twist in my discipline of swinging trapeze, traveled the world and had an amazing career. All people need sometimes is belief in their dream. The CMF miraculously believed in my dream and enabled all those fabulous shows I performed to exist. I always felt that the message was there in my performance for the audience to sense, that you can live your dream."
Today Lucy has returned to the legal profession, and is also a trustee of a circus company, Upswing Aerial. She still trains regularly.
She says the biggest take away from Canada is without a doubt its positive mindset, which has informed her work and life since then. She refers to it as "cultural positivity" and how refreshing it was to be exposed to positivity in times of resilience. Lucy firmly believes that students should all be exposed to this mindset. [Story contributed by Hasna Bloore, Academic Director]
"We change the world, one story at a time"
Ojibway author and storyteller Richard Wagamese
If the role of art, the written word, in our lives is is to educate, to reflect a moment in time in society, and to inform and provoke, then it follows that the new book, Monday was a simpler time: Reflections on a Pandemic, is art, good art. We recently caught up with Jane Davidson, director of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, who talked with us about this new anthology and how her authors and editors have contributed generously to help bear witness and share stories to make sense of the current COVID challenges.
Graphic by artist Charly Mithrush and cover design by Derek von Essen. Reproduced with kind permission from Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Art
Forced to cancel the Festival -- itself a magnificent thing, set in an open air cedar and fir pavilion amongst the trees of British Columbia's gorgeous Sunshine Coast -- Davidson shared that her inspiration was to avoid competing on the already overcrowded digital landscape. Instead, she has presented a carefully curated and highly readable selection of works from a diverse range of Canadian writers, all of whom share a love of British Columbia and the Festival. The collection includes short stories, poetry, and visual art by well-known writers including Ivan Coyote, Farzana Doctor, Jillian Christmas, Michael Christie, and more.
We've dipped into a few samples from the review copy, and enjoyed it enormously. We've added the book to our "must read" list, and hope you do the same. Copies are available to purchase here. You might also want to subscribe for updates about next year's Festival plans -- it is Canada's longest running summer writer's festival, the setting is unequaled, and the representation of Canadian artists well worth while each year!
Meryl McMaster, Harbinger of Sudden Departures Variation II, 2015
A photograph from artist Meryl McMaster’s 2015 series In-Between Worlds forms the inspiration of the art therapy exercise on the theme of transition available online via the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Stephen Legari, their full-time art therapist since 2017 (the only North American institution to have one!), created 11 exercises for digital use in March. Art therapy and the prescribing of tailored museum visits actually started in the UK in the mid-1990s as a form of social remedy towards healing and agency. The approach focusing on process (rather than results) and done with a gentle attitude towards self seems a wonderful mindset for self-care to adopt as we enter a second lockdown in the UK. Why not try it for yourself? Or listen to an interview with Stephen about art therapy conducted by the art publication Hyperallergic?
McMaster’s transporting, surreal imagery can equally be entered through her digital Canada Gallery exhibition As Immense as the Sky. The creative re-staging is the latest iteration of the travelling show, which has toured from Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto), Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain (Montreal), and Ikon Gallery (Birmingham). Reflecting on her mixed heritage (being of the Nêhiyawak (Plains Cree) and Siksika First Nation, as well as British and Dutch descent), McMaster meaningfully sites her self-portraits, wearing significant and stunningly crafted garments. Dreamlike, the photographs plumb incredible depths of ecology, politics, as well as personal, colonial, and modern histories within their compositions. The curator’s notes from Verity Seward reveal the meaning within, as does the interview done by Ikon Gallery.
Meryl McMaster, Of Universes We Have Just the One, 2019. Garment made from metallic survival blankets as an emblem of gathering and community.
The Canada Gallery show beautifully expands the exhibition beyond visuals, also providing both an accompanying soundtrack to the show's introduction page from Polaris-award-winner Jeremy Dutcher (whose 2018 album connecting to his own ancestry is well worth a listen), as well as poems paired with select photos. Written by McMaster herself in English and Cree, the poems are recited in Cree by Dorothy Thunder (Faculty Service Officer, Cree Language Program, University of Alberta). However you choose to engage with McMaster’s artwork, through therapeutics, interviews, visuals, writings, poems, or music, the experience will transport you elsewhere. [Story contributed by Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin, Digital Communications Consultant]
Meeting Nigel Miller, you know instantly he's a runner, and a people person. Speak to him for just a few more minutes, and you'll also know he's an avid reader, plugged into news and current affairs perspectives from round the world. He's in our spotlight this week, in his role as Vice Chair of both the Canada-UK Foundation and Canada Memorial Foundation.
In his day job, Nigel is Senior Advisor and former Chief HR Officer for the global communications marketing consultancy, Edelman. His work there focuses mostly on helping organisations inform, engage and ultimately mobilise their employees, particularly during times of change.
Previously HR Director for Coca Cola Enterprises, based in London, and head of Global Talent for Anheuser-Busch InBev, Nigel’s career has spanned Public Affairs, Marketing and, most recently, Human Resources. We asked Nigel how he got his start in the people business and he said "I often counsel younger employees to initiate springboards in their career – pathways from one experience or focus to another. Mine was when I moved from an external, Public Affairs focus with Labatt in Canada to an internal, People and Culture, focus with the newly formed InBev, at their headquarters in Belgium. Although I had always considered employees and their level of engagement key to an organisation’s success, this suddenly became my singular focus. And this experience, over time, helped me to transition into HR."
In addition to his volunteer governor roles with CUKF and CMF, Nigel also volunteers with the NHS to provide direct support to medical staff on the hospital ward during the COVID challenges. He previously served on various charity advisory boards in his native Canada, including Special Olympics, Easter Seals, Events Halifax and the Toronto Waterfront Foundation. Nigel has two grown children, and lives in London with his wife Jennifer. Most weekends you'll find them outdoors rambling through the English countryside with their 9-year-old border terrier or indoors sharing the newspapers and conversation.