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Guiding Principles for DTES Community Arts Program

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CACV intends to develop Guiding Principles for our DTES Community Arts Program.

Thank you to Vancouver Moving Theatre for sending this information about the principles they subscribe to in their work in this neighbourhood.

Please comment below.

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Here are 12 guiding principles for VMT’s DTES community engaged art practice:

 

  • Involves culturally diverse professional artists engaging in their art practice with the Downtown Eastside community;
  • Creates art from inception through completion with, by  and for that community;
  • Partners artists and arts organizations with non-art organizations;
  • Builds projects of all sizes and shapes, from performing to visual arts, media arts,  processions and community celebrations;
  • Supports community members with a variety of art-making and capacity-building opportunities;
  • Integrates art-making with a community’s stories and issues, images and traditions, assets and hopes;
  • Intertwines process and product – all part of the art
  • Works in  respectful, inclusive environments;
  • Encourages everybody involved – from novice to master – to give of their best;
  • Relates to the whole community, Anglo, Asian and Aboriginal;
  • Results in a transformative experience;
  • Leaves a legacy for the future

VMT’s community-engaged artistic practice focuses upon the historic Downtown Eastside community situated between Burrard Inlet and the old False Creek Flats, Victory Square and Raymur Ravine. We endeavor to engage patiently and respectfully with the many layers of the neighbourhood’s community members, cultural landscape and social systems.

For Terry and myself, community art is about artists working with communities and communities working with artists in a variety of collaborative relationships. It’s about creative marriages between artists and communities that give birth to new art made with and for specific communities. It’s about bringing together individuals and groups to work in  mutually beneficial relationships.  It’s about valuing and building upon what’s already in place: a community’s diversity and the wisdom it has accumulated. It’s about engaging respectfully and patiently  with a community’s many layers and finding creative ways to respectfully bridge its differences .  It’s about supporting arts creation that celebrates, challenges, commemorates, educates and heals. It’s about moving through over-lapping phases of research and development, creation, production and  then leaving a legacy when the projects conclude – for the community, the next generation of artists and communities facing similar challenges.