The View from Montreal: Only Connect
Kelli Hanrahan
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect...
--E.M. Forster, Howards End
Well, I’ve been in Montreal for just over three months now., making the journey from Prince Edward Island to Québec just as fall was settling into winter. It might have appeared to be poor timing to start a new life here just as the deep freeze was beginning, but my timing has been perfectly appropriate, and my winter has been filled with many charms and adventures.
When I arrived it seemed as if the city opened her doors to me with a warm and welcome ‘Bienvenue.’ I have never really ‘fallen in love with a city’ as I have with Montreal. It must be that French thing; there is a certain ‘joie de vivre’ in the air and a sophistication in both personal dress and demenour. This is a city with style, and as a a girl who loves costume, and design, and personal expression in all its shapes and forms, I feel I am truly in the right place, in this city of fashion, dance, and poetry.
Montreal lives and breathes culture and creativity. I am endlessly inspired poetically, and feel very supported in my artistic pursuits. This support comes in no small part from the provincial government, which strongly supports the arts and thereby makes professional training not only easily accesible, but also quite affordable. Combined with a still relatively affordable place to live (though prices are going up), this is truly a place where one can not only survive, but also thrive as a an artist.
I came to Montreal mostly because it is a city of dance. I began training in modern dance in Vancouver in 2004, but suffered the dreaded dancer’s fate of an injury fairly early into my training. However, with some time off, and a return to my homeland, combined with necessary physical theraphy, I am now back on my dancing feet, seeking new steps to explore. My artistic journey in Montreal began at Studio 303, a professional dance training studio in the downtown area. I took a Voice and Movement workshop, which was a combination of vocal exercises, bodywork, and improvisation exercises. The group, primarily comprised of women who were from various artisitc disciplines shared two wonderful weeks of exploration and expression; connections were formed, and we were all left feeling inspired and opened in our spirits and creative selves.
I found myself in a fortunate financial situation upon moving to the city, so insted of having to scramble to find work, I have been able to focus on dance training, writing, and some volunteering, keeping my schedule full and active during the long, cold days of winter. I am volunteering at the office of Ascent magazine, which is a quarterly yoga, spirituality, arts and social activism magazine that is inspired by the teachings of Swami Sivananda Radha. Ascent has been a great ‘base’ for me to learn the ins-and-outs of magazine publishing, and the office provides with me a supportive community, as well as animal companionship of beloved Mr. Cat, the office pet and resident.
Ascent has also provided me with my first (paid) writing assignment, a book review about an HIV-positive man who traveled the world teaching yoga in communities that were strongly afflicted with the AIDS pandemic. It is an eye-opening read, and I am finding the process of reading with a review in mind to be a more engaged and rewarding experience than just reading purely for pleasure or research.
My other volunteer posting is at the Mile End Community Mission. Thanks to the editor at Ascent, I was pointed in the right direction to a place where I could teach yoga to children in a community-based setting. I have long been a student of yoga and had completed a weekend workshop in teaching yoga to children back in 2005, but never really did anything with it. I am particularly interested in sharing my yoga skills with children because of my concern that many of them are growing up attached to computers and video games, completely disconnected to their bodies and spirits and their inherently energetic and creative selves.
Teaching kids’ yoga has been incredibly challenging,; I am learning just how hard it is to be a disciplinarian, while also keeping the kids’ attention and focus, and inspiring them to do the yoga. For the most part, the kids are wonderful, and I feel the important thing is that they are actually participating. The Mile End Mission is a community centre that offers after-school care programs for kids, runs a thrift store, and generally provides a community meeting space for learning, gathering, and hosting events. Every Monday afternoon, my dear friend and co-ordinator, Trixie, has new items of clothing for me from the thrift store, and I’ve jokingly said that I no longer need to go shopping, now that she has become my personal shopping assistant.
The Mile End Mission has provided a great community space for me to share my skills, and further develop my community-building spirit. I recently hosted a hula-hoop making workshop with children and their parents, and we had all shorts of coloured hoops spinning round the community centre in a the most creatively chaotic way. I have this idea to form a community- based, kids and parents ‘circus’ of sorts. I think with a little yoga, some hula-hooping, a few dance moves, and some costuming from the thrift store, we can create all shorts of wild imagainings. Community-building should be about fun, no?
One more experience I’d like to share to the Edwards readers about my experience living in Montreal has been the recent Edgy Women Festival of performing arts. Hosted by Studio 303, and bringing in international women performing artists from disciplines ranging from dance and theatre to electronic music and spoken word, this festival provides a gathering place for women artists to create, share, and explore with one another in a lively and playful setting.
I had two girlfriends staying with me while they visited Montreal, so I thought taking them to an evening of the Edgy Women Festival would provide a more interesting perspective than the usual tourist fare. Our evening began with a visit to the Beauty Salon. Set up as a 50’s-style beauty salon, complete with pink hairbrushes, shampoo bottles emblazoned with such with words of inspiration, a cornucopia of nail polishes, and three perfectly-coiffed ladies in traditional beauty salon dresses, the Beauty Salon was both performance art, visual art installation, and interactive experience. It was also a bonafide beauty salon experience; participants had their choice of hand massage, manicure, or even moustache or sideburn application.
The Beauty Salon is a production of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times theatre, a gay/lesbian/queer-based theatre production company. This particular production was an exploration of ‘femininity as a performance,’ and emphasized the role of the performer and audience being reversed, as the audience became part of the performance once they took their seats in the Beauty Salong chairs. The ladies of the Beauty Salon were perfectly suited to their roles which included pampering, relaxation, and even sexual sugestión, as one of the ‘estheticians’ spread her legs showing her Dr. Seuss underwear as she applied nail polish. The highlights were, of course, the manicures and moustaches, which produced a tangible result to be taken home as a memory of the Beauty Salon and the Edgy Women Festival.
I was encouraged by my friend to get a moustache, and went for it just to see what I would look like as a man. After talking with a few other audience members, we came to the conclusión that I looked great with a moustache, but that I still looked and felt quite feminine. Queer or lesbian, I am not, but open to exploration I am, and the Edgy Women festival both supported and encouraged this spirit of expression.
To conclude, I am reminded of a message conveyed to me by one of my teachers in the Voice and Movement workshop. The message was simply ‘Only connect,’ a philosophy that can be extended to the idea of creating art in ensemble, to community building, to the electronic communication age, and to the simple connections formed and maintained among frienships over the years. I have found that my world continúes to get smaller and smaller no matter where I go. I have friends here in Montreal that I knew from British Colombia, and from Prince Edward Island, and even within my short time being here some of the new friendships have shown very interesting synchronicities and connections amongst communities and experiences. I continue to have the ‘it’s a small world after all’ experience when I meet someone new, and discover how we may be more closely connected than we first think. It is a confirmation that we are very closely connected no matter where we go, and communities may be big or small, but the important thing is always to connect, to express, to share, learn and grow together.
Photo Credits: "Pont Jacques Cartier" (cover), "Montreal Deli" and "Snowy Steps" courtesy of Anthony Kerr; "Beauty Salon" and "Moustache" courtesy of Kelli Hanrahan (all permissions granted).
Other articles by Kelli:
- Love Our Mother: Feminism and the Divine Mother (December 2006)
- Cooperation: Necessity is the Mother of Invention (August 2006)
- The Divine Feminine: A Woman's Quest (February 2006)
