I am so excited to be heading to Montreal to chat about The Love Lettering Project and urban subversion with the at University of the Streets Cafe, through Concordia University’s School of Extended Learning!

On April 25 from 7-9. c’mon by Le Milieu (1251 rue Robin, Montreal)

More here …and below:

Urban subversions: How do spontaneous artistic actions transform our city and our selves?

Imagine you’re walking down a city sidewalk, surrounded by crowds of strangers, submersed in a concrete landscape of buildings and streets. Out of the corner of your eye an unexpected something catches your attention. Maybe it’s the burst of colour of a yarn bomb, a modified slogan on a prominent billboard, or a hidden envelope tucked away for whoever stumbles upon it. How does this spontaneous artistic action make you feel? What impact does it have on your day? On your experience of the city?

Anonymous and diverse, urban interventions are subtle yet powerful means of reclaiming the urban commons. But the question remains: what’s the point? Who engages with these fleeting projects and how? Can we ever know?

For this public conversation, we invite those who create urban interventions and those who experience them, those who love them and those who are more critical, to join us in discussing what motivates these acts of street art and how their impact might be evaluated and understood.

Guests:
Allison Gonsalves is an educational consultant and teacher. She also sings in a choir and volunteers for Rock Camp for Girls. In her spare time, she enjoys making projects that generate interactions between strangers. She likes thinking about ways to create learning spaces for big ideas and paradigm shifting.

Lindsay Zier-Vogel is a Toronto-based writer, arts educator and love letterer. Lindsay is the creator of The Love Lettering Project, a community-arts engagement project that has brought nearly 3,000 love letters to strangers over the last eight years. The Love Lettering Project was deemed one of the top 50 reasons to love Toronto in Toronto Life. She is currently working on a novel. lindsayziervogel.com and loveletteringproject.com

Moderator:
Alex P. Megelas is into researching the power of DIY tek communities, doing sports-for-the-people and drawing water-colour maps of dungeons. He’s in a band called Best Friends. He bikes around town. He has cats.

Okay, time for some goodness. It’s grey and dreary out these days and I’m finding it easy to let the small things get me down. Oh, and there’s this saccharine exclusive-to-couples day coming up where people equate love with roses and chocolates…BAH!

Sooooo, I’m proposing (ha!) to expand that definition of love in this sometimes tricky month.

If you email me your address (to loveletteringproject (at) gmail.com), I’ll send you a wee package in the mail with everything you need to write a love letter to your city/community/neighbourhood. You can photograph it if you’d like and send me a pic, then you can put it in the envelope marked love and go hide it for a stranger to find.

I’ll send out 200 love letter-y packages…first come, first serve.

Mail! Love! Hidden notes!

Take THAT, February!

Once upon a time, I was in my final year at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. It was the first year of the On The Move festival, a conference for emerging dance artists. It was the first year of the conference and everything was so new and so exciting. Potential was enormous. I met the editor of The Dance Current magazine, who invited me to come by her “office” (then her living room!) to stuff magazines into envelopes for the monthly mailing. I got paid in pizza and I got to sit around with established dance artists. It was all sorts of inspiring.

Fast forward a few years to when I was working at The Dance Current magazine. I wasn’t dancing anymore though I was choreographing and teaching in the school system and writing about dance. I was writing up a storm, finishing up my undergrad, and then graduate degree at U of T.

There was a lot of writing…a lot of dance writing. That then led to a gig at So You Think You Can Dance Canada. And then a gig writing the text for Susan Kendal’s choreography, and Shannon Litzenberger’s HOMEbody (with a month-long residency in Saskatchewan!) and Sylvie Bouchard’s Histoire d’Amour.

And then this year, I was asked to speak at the On The Move conference.

Oh, full circles. Damn, I love them.

I’m on the “Beyond performance” panel and will be part of the networking artist lunch:

A dance education offers so much more than just performance skills. It provides you with a perspective on dance, and a vocabulary to communicate that perspective. These panellists have careers that go beyond performance, to encompass teaching dance (Tina Nicolaidis), writing about dance (Lindsay Zier-Vogel), and producing multidisciplinary work (Sky Fairchild-Waller). Find out how each of these panellists has used their dance training to help build a multi-faceted career.