Arts & Culture Integrating Activity Acknowledgments

This year was off to a now-familiar start as the resurging pandemic cast a pall over the culture that caused me to wonder if we would be able to shake it off, creatively speaking. But the Integrating Activity students rose to the occasion, proposing projects which decidedly looked beyond the obvious limitations of lockdowns and online learning to eventually come up with the most eclectic and imaginative collection of final projects that I’ve ever witnessed.

After settling on a theme of Cause and Effect, the students set out to corral their ideas into creative projects all while reflecting on different cultural works such as museum exhibits (we saw “How Long Does It Take for One Voice to Reach Another?” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and “Terror Contagion” at the Musée D’Art Contemporain), a contemporary film (we screened Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza”), and, above all, plays (we saw two plays out of three possible ones put on by students of the Professional Theatre Program at Dawson: “Our Class”, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and “Chaos”).

The students then presented their creative research and the projects began to take shape: sculpture, design, filmmaking, choreography, creative writing, drawing, painting, collage, even scrapbooking. Subjects ranged widely from the personal to the abstract, from the cutting edge to the familiar, and touched on communication, connectivity and consequences. There are amusing projects and challenging ones, lyrical works and think pieces. In short, there’s something for everybody, and I couldn’t be more proud of how well this group came together to produce these hard-won and brilliant efforts.

On behalf of the Winter 2022 Arts & Culture Integrating Activity class, I would like to thank Natalie Olanick, Robert Stephens and Cheryl Simon from the ALC Program, as well as Kimberley Barfuss & Mike Hughes of The Professional Theatre Department for their continued guidance and support. Special Thanks to IA student, Cadence Patton, for doing yeoman’s work on putting together the Arts & Culture AFC Festival web page.

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— Matt Holland