Waxing Poetic in the 905 Region

STORY BY MARK ELGIE

Jennifer Chambers, Creative Writing professor at Sheridan, reciting some of her poetry. She felt more comfortable with it as others got up and performed. Photo by Miranda Newman.

From those up on stage comes poetry, hip-hop, strumming on acoustic guitar. From those in the audience, laughter, or sometimes silence. Every act at the 905 Road Show, however, was followed with applause.

The 905 Road Show, a group of artists who travel around the 905 region, stopped at Davis Campus last Wednesday night.

“So far they’ve been to Markham, and they’re in Brampton today, and they’re going to be in Mississauga in the near future, and North York next year in 2016,” says Ian Williams, a Sheridan English professor and coordinator of the event.

“The interesting thing about the road show is it changes composition from venue to venue. So there’s a core group and then there’s some artists from that particular region who join.”

Jennifer Chambers, professor of Creative Writing at Sheridan, was among those who performed poetry for the night, joined by a student, Alicia Morris.

“I loved it! I thought it was really diverse in terms of art, in terms of people and style, I thought it was really riveting in lots of ways,” says Chambers.

“I felt really like I wanted to be there and I wanted to see. The more other people performed, the better I felt, like ‘Okay, I’m calming down, I can do this.’ So yeah, I thought it was really fun.”

Chambers felt apprehensive about getting up to perform at first, but said she had a bit of preparation due to reading poetry at the Sheridan Creates conference last month.

“I felt terrible doing that. So it kind of prepared me for this. I also felt a bit better because my student, Alicia Morris was with me, so I could kind of make it feel more like a teaching activity than a performing activity. So that helped me a little bit as well,” says Chambers.

The event November 25 was not the first time the 905 Road Show, run by Diaspora Dialogues, has held an event at Sheridan.

“We had a creativity cabaret about two years ago we hosted here at Davis. And it was such a success that we thought that we would want to have another go around at that,” says Sean McNabney, associate dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

“Certainly the kind of enthusiasm we saw from everybody tonight speaks to the importance of this kind of event, because I think that as an institution that really fosters creativity and speaks to creativity, an evening like this where there was such a variety of modes of expression, media being used, forms of presentation, just sort of speaks to the creative process.”