Camelle Davidson: Visual Expressions
From January to June of 2014, Camelle led an intergenerational collective in weekly Modern Batik making workshops. This program took place at a Toronto Community Housing building in the Glendower community (Birchmount/Finch). The project enabled the participants to develop and display artworks that told a visual story about their community, city, life, history and what they learned along the way.
Due to renovations at the community site, they had to move their program to another location at Victoria Park/Sheppard. Despite this unexpected challenge, Camelle did not let this obstacle stop the amazing success of the program. Since the renovation, she has a consistent weekly turn out of 15+ participants!
Camelle has continued to facilitate the program past the micro-grant timeline and the participants do not want the program to stop anytime soon. “One of the participants had depression and anxiety issues for years. Which has affected her whole life. She came up to me after one of my classes and thanked me for being there,” says Camelle, “great change was occurring.”
This program has inspired Camelle, even more than before, to apply for bigger grants, to curate her own art exhibit, and to pursue aspirations on becoming a certified schoolteacher. She also dreams of opening her own personal studio.
Camelle is currently displaying her artwork at the “Bending Spoons Gallery” at Vesuvio Pizzeria & Spaghetti House (3010 Dundas St. West). This exhibition is featuring AFCY Emerging Youth Artists and is running until January 5th 2015.
Leila Dey: The Dey Dreamers Program
Dey Dreamers was an artist development program for young women between the ages of 15-29 who would not have access otherwise to professional music services. Over 10 weeks, the program mentored young women as emerging recording artists by engaging them in full-day sessions at Sandbox Studios, in which they gained performance and recording skills from community artists.
After the completion of The Dey Dreamers Program, the participants have gone on to perform at many showcases, some of which include the events in partnership with AFCY. Benita Singh (pictured above), one of the Dey Dreamers participants, has performed on many stages including the 6th Annual Big Bam Boom Youth-Led Arts Festival’s live showcase at the AGO and at York University. Benita has also had her single “Dust” (which was recorded during The Dey Dreamers Program) feature on CBC radio!
AFCY has connected Leila Dey with Lawrence Heights Middle School’s Beyond 3:30 after school program to facilitate music production workshops. In addition, she recently sat on the jury for the 2015 Platform A micro-grant selection.
Leila says, “Through the micro-grant process, I learned how to stay on top of my budgets, how to run a program, how to stay committed, but most of all I learned how to put my dreams into action. I’ve always had the idea to help young people pursue their artistic dreams but never knew how that might look. I know The Dey Dreamers Program is not the perfect program, but the fact that I have a starting point and some experience with how I want the program to grow, is more than I could have asked for. The Dey Dreamers alumni and I have been working out ways to fundraise for another round of The Dey Dreamers Program to help another group of young girls pursue their dreams.”
g out ancestors life journeys and then adding star to symbolize key moments and then working to create gestures for those moments. Those maps are now being turned into a movement pieces experimenting with how repeated subtle gestures can become movement theatre and how that can, in turn, be translated to express these personal ancestral narratives. We have been playing with echoing back these stories by having the group shadow specific moments from one another’s stories and seeing how some of these stories can come together to intersect on stage.
For me, as a facilitator, this group of all-women participants has been such a joy to work. Their openness and willingness to jump into the process and explore has been so moving and inspirational. I look forward to working with this group again on further Jumblies projects, developing this workshop format for other groups.
Platform A 
