Last year I received a request for a collage that would express “The Vengeful Spirit of John Lennon.” Baffled at first, I turned to Lennon’s lyrics and quotations for inspiration.
The Vengeful Spirit of John Lennon (2024)Left corner detail,The Vengeful Spirit of John Lennon (2024)
“How do you sleep?” and “Daddy come home!” seemed apt sentiments for the theme, so I inscribed them on strips of fancy paper and tucked them into the pockets alongside other Lennon citations.
Detail from The Vengeful Spirit of John Lennon (2024) focused on right half of the collage.The Vengeful Spirit of John Lennon (2024)
Viewers ofThe Vengeful Spirit of John Lennon can decide if it supplies enough resentful energy to fulfill the commission. However, none can deny that it provoked an artful challenge!
Many images of women and encouraging slogans are arranged on a circular green backing to create a collage. Some figures are dancing, doing yoga, jumping, holding children, and modelling.
An hour before Zumba class last Friday, instructors Mike Tan and Kim Melecio temporarily ceded their stage to a glorious mess of pictures, wrapping paper, stickers, and press-on jewels.
In this collage, numerous images of women and several uplifting quotes have been placed on a circular black backing. The women are dancing, knitting, cooking, singing, and giving speeches.
As the dancers started choosing materials and arranging them on the backings, I loved hearing stories about the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and female artists who have inspired them.
Close-up of the centre of the green collage focuses on seven pictures of women of varying ages, an image of a tiger lily, and two LGBTQ+ Pride Flags, one of which displays the words “Y’all Means All.”
It was also beautiful to witness how members helped one another as a matter of course, natural as breathing. This can be seen in Mike’s video of the collage activity, for it captures the intuitive collaborative energy that makes the dance squad sparkle.
This Zoomed-in section of the second collage features two phrases: “You are my home” and “Take time to make your soul happy.” Images of women surround the slogans.
I love how our Zumba circle composes enchanting mosaics of kinetic and visual art, breathing hope into every step and image. Celebrating International Women’s Day with this creative community meant a lot to me, and I adore the two collages that flourished in the care of many hands.
This close-up of the green collage focuses on a quotation, which reads, “When one of us shines, we all sparkle.” It comes from a previous post inspired by Mike and Kim’s class, (Thank you for requesting the quote, Mike! Thanks also go to Nicole for bringing the sparkly jewels!).
Shelton Ponder presents a copy of his book Beyond the Fences (2024) in Liberty, MissouriCatherine Raine
I am a White woman who grew up in a border state[1] in the last quarter of the last century, but I did not learn my hometown’s complete history until I watched a play called Mr. Gantt Modified[2]in 2022. Written and performed by African American historian and poet Shelton Ponder, the play uncovers layers of White-stifled truths that I should have known. White silence about segregation enabled my ignorance when I was in school, but responsibility for removing it lies on my adult shoulders. Learning from Mr. Gantt Modified has hastened a personal journey from the hometown I thought I knew to the one where “Colored Men” and “White Men” signs[3] once loomed over bathrooms in the courthouse. The town where Frank Hughes Memorial Library refused service to African Americans. And the town where Garrison School pupils were given old textbooks with missing pages from the White schools.
Not long after watching Mr. Gantt Modified, I visited the Liberty African American Legacy Memorial with the play’s author. As we sat together on a stone bench, I lamented the absence of civil rights history in my early schooling. Ponder responded, “Students are taught what people want them to know, so they won’t learn what they need to learn.” Although it should not fall on Ponder to tell White people truths that were buried for their comfort and convenience, he generously shared stories about my hometown’s segregated past that its schools did not want me to learn. My gratitude is deep, for I needed to know what Liberty was hiding to truly understand where I come from and who I am. Because walls of silence shrouded its racist legacy, I grew up in half of Liberty, a fragmenting experience that has divided me from true community and home.
Coming of age in Liberty’s White bubble meant that I emerged half-grown and carried the bubble mentality into adulthood. The psychological immaturity that has shied away from self-knowledge is contextualized by Abraham Lateiner’s essay “Grieving the White Void” (2016). It describes how “the silent White acculturation process” impairs cognitive growth and self-awareness, causing Lateiner to consider himself “superior in the arts of logic and reason” yet unable to “see what was right in front of me when it implicated me in systemic oppression.”[4]
Lateiner’s portrait of inflated self-regard helped me see how much I overestimated my understanding of African American history. Because I assigned myself At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968[5]and The Autobiography of Malcolm X[6] as well as fiction by Black writers, I considered myself informed. In my late twenties, I volunteered for AmeriCorps in Baltimore, where I witnessed stark inequity in American education; however, racial naivety kept me from deeply connecting this learning to the place where I was raised. Though aware of Liberty’s southern roots, I accepted its wholesome presentation as a little town with porch-blessed homes and an old college on a hill. Taking Liberty at surface value, I avoided thinking about realities that contradicted its image; up until recent decades, its folksy hospitality was reserved for White people and masked hostility towards sharing civic equality with Black residents. Ponder’s poem, “See My Country Town,” highlights this inconsistency in its portrayal of late 1940’s Liberty:
When Momma and Daddy sent me/ . . . to live with Gramp, Marie, Billy & Johnny . . . /it was to a country town/called Liberty, Missouri/with all its small time ways/where colored went here/ white went over there . . . /See my country town/stronghold and southern sympathizer/segregated and stand-offish.[7]
Early White conditioning ill-prepared me to recognize the town Ponder’s poem depicts, for I had never heard any adults at home, school, or church discuss segregation. Also, I had wrongly assumed that Liberty did not have Jim Crow laws because Missouri is not Deep South, and by this sleight of mind, segregation magically jumped over the town where Ponder and I grew up a generation apart.
Listening to Ponder’s memories of segregated Liberty has sharpened the lens on details that accentuate both the resourceful spirit of mutual support within the Black community and the petty cruelty of exclusion from White-claimed social spaces. For example, while African Americans shopped at the three drugstores on the Liberty Square, “Beggs would not allow us to sit at the soda fountain counter. Rexall did not have a fountain nor stools. Chapplers gradually accepted us to sit at the counter.”[8] Also, the Plaza Movie Theater “refused to let us sit on the stools in the concession stand” and Black patrons were relegated to the balcony. “We actually had the best seats . . . although that was not the intention of the owner.”[9]
Subjected to an oppressive system, resistance fed solidarity among the people whom segregation targeted: “I knew who I was,” said Ponder. “The entire Black community was family. We looked out for each other, and this strong community gave us pride and safety.”[10] At the community’s heart was the school at 502 North Water Street: “We had a Colored school/named Garrison School/being content cramped & crowded/with love, lessons & learning/we were taught/by wonderful colored teachers.”[11] A dynamic hub that nurtured belonging, it delivered “a damn strong foundation in academics.”[12] Students who learned together in multi-grade classrooms made lifelong friendships across age groups, and family-like relationships with Garrison’s educators fostered interpersonal learning. Ponder recalled how Principal Clarence Gantt used to say, “Put the books away!”[13] before conducting an open discussion that interwove history, poetry, Civil Rights, and life advice. His technique modeled the critical thinking, respect, and support that were absent in society at large:
We cared for one another. The greatest thing we learned at Garrison was that somebody cared about us. Our mentors were much more than former teachers. They are a part of me. What they taught became a part of your life and remained with you. The Garrison connection is a strong continuous thread of relationships that runs through all our lives.[14]
Three years after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed “separate but equal”[15] education unconstitutional,[16] Ponder transferred to Liberty High School as a freshman and graduated in 1961. However, attendance held little appeal: “I detested the integration because I wanted to graduate from Garrison School as my ancestors had since its founding in 1877.”[17] Ponder “had a smoldering inside, but . . . [he] would have to make the best of it, smoldering within, or not!”[18] because his mother and aunt would not allow him to quit school. Most of the LHS teachers were “congenial, and some were genuinely fair,”[19] but Spanish was the only class Ponder enjoyed.
As for freshman English, the teacher “put students down with degrading comments,”[20] like the time she informed 15-year-old Ponder that his way of phrasing ideas was not to her taste. Ponder’s classmates feared the teacher, but he refused let her remark pass. He stated, “I do not need your English to make it in this world!”[21] Not expecting confrontation, she tilted her head in confusion, too rattled to formulate a barb: “My words, which were not whispered, rocked her. She was quiet and the whole class was too. Then she continued with the lesson.”[22] Raising a hand and curling his fingers inward to represent a crushing repressive force, Ponder observed: “The education at LHS was not enlarging. It was constricting students into shape.”[23] The English instructor failed to mold Ponder’s voice to fit her paradigm, but the belief that she was entitled to try revealed arrogant presumption that sabotages learning.
Although integration of students proceeded in Liberty, exclusionary hiring practices signaled administrative unwillingness to disturb the status quo when threatened by the idea of Black educators teaching White children. For Garrison teachers who lost their livelihoods in 1958,[24] the Civil Rights Act of 1964 arrived too late for Title VII to protect them against employment discrimination. As detailed in Mr. Gantt, Modified, when Garrison School could no longer offer classes from first to eighth grade,
Those teachers who had been here for years, their contracts were not renewed. They were not going to go into Franklin or Ridgeview or Liberty High School . . . . They would have to go back to Kansas City and find a job if they wanted to continue teaching.[25]
Unwelcome in Liberty’s overwhelmingly White public school system, consummate educators who had devoted their talents to the Garrison community were forced to seek work elsewhere, making Liberty’s loss the KC School District’s gain.[26] This unjust decision reverberated for decades, reinforcing the White hegemony that made Liberty an attractive destination for White families in flight from Kansas City to suburban districts north of the Missouri River, where the schools were “safe” (code word for majority-White schools).
In 1977, my parents moved from Kansas City’s Brookside neighborhood to a Victorian house in Liberty. Our suburban relocation was part of a massive demographic shift that caused schools to re-segregate in the Greater KC area.[27] In Brookside, my kindergarten and first grade teachers at Border Star Elementary were African American women, but once I was enrolled in the Liberty School District, I never had another Black teacher. Nor did I have a non-White principal or vice-principal throughout my time at Franklin Elementary, Liberty Junior High School, and Liberty High School from 1977-1987. I loved my teachers, but commitment to building a diverse team of school personnel seemed as lacking in 1987 as it did in 1957.
In 1958, Principal Gantt was “the only person retained”[28] from Garrison School by the Liberty School District, but his contract contained an insult. A beloved educator with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math and education, Mr. Gantt was offered the job of study hall monitor at Liberty High School. Racism’s tainted vision insisted that his place was keeping teenagers quiet for an hour instead of cultivating young minds and inspiring excellence. Administrative failure to recognize Mr. Gantt’s gifts cost LHS students the chance to be guided by a professional in a role commensurate with his quarter-century of service to “the best school for African American students in the state of Missouri.”[29] Furthermore, the shabby treatment Garrison’s last principal received was thrown in sharp contrast by his motivation for accepting the position: he wanted to be on site to watch over his former students as they navigated the uncharted territory of integrated education.
Revealing no outward resentment over the change in professional title, Mr. Gantt chose to protect the young people in his care when he could have understandably walked away in disgust. Why would he want to work in a school system whose implementation of Brown Versus the Board of Education robbed Black teachers of respected positions while their White counterparts lost nothing? Ponder explained:
Black folks in the community were pissed about Mr. Gantt accepting what was perceived as a demotion. But there was no difference from what Mr. Gantt had been when he was Principal of Garrison. He had the same demeanor at Garrison as he did at Liberty High School.[30]
When Mr. Gantt presided over study hall at LHS, he “had a message for us in his eyes, which was, ‘You’re the person you’re supposed to be by doing what you’re supposed to do.’” The message was no different from what he taught as instructor and Principal at Garrison:
We learned who to be. We were representing something more than ourselves. We weren’t saints by any means, but we came from Garrison School, and we knew how to conduct ourselves . . . because that’s what we did all the time.[31]
Nobody should ever be subjected to the injustice Mr. Gantt experienced, but his selfless choice to prioritize student welfare over professional disappointment nevertheless “showed us and Liberty High School that this is how we are, not how racism makes us out to be.”[32] The decision also reflected his striking character as a person and educator, for he lived the caring philosophy that made Garrison special. Mr. Gantt’s mentor, Professor James Gay, had counseled him to respond to “things you cannot control” with “a firm sound decision to do the best you can.”[33] With this spirit in mind, Mr. Gantt performed his duties at LHS with customary poise and classiness: “I did not walk with my shoulders drooped. I was not angry. I did not carry displeasure on my sleeves nor on my shoulder. I stood as I had always stood. I was an educator.”[34]
Reflecting on Mr. Gantt’s sacrifices, Ponder said: “I’ve often thought what a burden it must have been to constantly contain his feelings.”[35] Although he had every reason to lash out against the abusive treatment he endured, “Mr. Gantt was always in control of himself. He never cursed, and he never had an outburst.”[36] When some White students started acting up in LHS study hall, testing him with “various pranks,”[37] their attempts to provoke his temper fell flat.[38]
Mr. Gantt’s unflappable dignity also informed teachable moments in the staff lunchroom, like when a White teacher asked, “Clarence, what do you think about all these demonstrations and boycotts?”[39] Paraphrasing Booker T. Washington,[40] he replied, “If I’m standing in a ditch, and you’re standing on my shoulders, we’re in the same ditch.” In places where racist customs prevail, White power structures resort to low-down practices like employment discrimination to maintain the myth of their “natural right” to be elevated above the group they want to put down. For example, if Liberty School District administrators really believed that a white skin tone magically confers effective teaching skills, why were they afraid to hire African American teachers in 1954?
When Ponder studied at Garrison School, the best lesson he absorbed was the profound care that its educators imparted, and the worst lesson I never learned was that Liberty had cared so little for children in Ponder’s community. On a walk from the Legacy Memorial to the Liberty Square in 2023, we passed Franklin Elementary School, heading north on Gallatin Street. At that point, Ponder said,
I don’t like to dwell on the disparities, but we had to go down from the North End to Franklin to play basketball after hours because the Liberty School Board did not give us basketball goals or other playground equipment. They didn’t want us to have anything.[41]
The contrast between outdoor amenities for Garrison School and Franklin Elementary School was glaring: “Franklin was given basketball goals, swing sets, a softball pitch, a merry-go-round, and even tennis courts.”[42] Franklin’s grounds had (and still has) plenty of space for wide-ranging recess games, whereas Garrison’s playground consisted of a stretch of tarmac squeezed between the school building and Water Street. A glance at both sites today shows Liberty’s blatantly inequitable investment in the buildings, grounds, and facilities for White schoolchildren and African American schoolchildren prior to integration.
When I attended Franklin Elementary School from 1977-1981, I enjoyed the same recreation facilities that Ponder described, and it never occurred to me that this largess had originally been reserved for White children and denied to Black children, turning the provision of playground fun into a racist swindle. As a Franklin pupil, I was also unaware that African American children from the nearby South End neighborhood had been barred from learning at my school until 1958.[43] Instead, they had to walk nearly a mile across town to Garrison School, a journey that necessitated crossing the Liberty Square, where White adults posed a constant threat. As Garrison alum Ms. Theresa Byrd recollected, “In my route, I went up through town and frequently I was ridiculed, or relegated off the sidewalk, told to get in the street, called the N-word, was spat at.”[44]
Just as Franklin staff in the late 1970’s never spoke about the school having been a Whites-only institution from 1938 to 1958, Liberty Junior High School kept its secrets too. Built in 1923, the edifice initially accommodated White high school students until 1954, and then it served as an integrated high school until 1972, when a new LHS complex was completed further west of town. From 1972-2013, the former high school building was Liberty Junior High School, and since 2013 it has been Heritage Middle School.[45]
From 1958 to 1963, Mr. Clarence Gantt worked in the very same building where I attended seventh to ninth grade from 1981 to 1984. However, I did not know his name then. Nobody told us about the last principal of Garrison School who was offered a job as study hall monitor at LHS. Nor did we know that he took the position because it would situate him to support Black students learning with White students for the first time in Liberty’s history. Instead of celebrating Mr. Gantt’s expert stewardship of Garrison School and steadfast dedication to young people in wake of integration, White school administrators controlled the narrative of his success by never telling it.
Silence about Mr. Gantt’s exemplary courage has deprived three generations of Liberty’s children of a storied role model[46] and erased civil rights history that unfolded in the very classrooms they inhabited. Official neglect of his story remains unamended to this day, as can be seen (or rather, not seen) in a recent video celebrating Heritage Middle School building’s Centennial (1923-2023). The congratulatory clip neither refers to the building as the site of pivotal social change nor includes interviews with residents who transferred from Garrison to LHS in 1954.[47] Both then and now, storylines dictated by systemic racism have excluded African American leaders like Mr. Gantt, creating a loss for children and adults of all backgrounds.
When I advanced to Liberty High School in 1984,[48] racial justice curriculum did not meet me there. Civics class never alluded to Liberty’s school integration story despite its relevance to American history and rich oral history resources available in town. A cursory paragraph in our textbook touched on Brown Versus the Board of Education, but if African American and White students who graduated in 1958 had visited our class, listening to their lived experience as teenagers would have brought the 1954 ruling home and sparked meaningful learning.
Just as my high school did not invite its alums to teach us history, it also let the 30-year anniversary of school integration pass without comment or tribute. I was fifteen years old in 1984 and honoring the Brown Versus the Board of Education victory might have encouraged me to reflect that thirty years of integrated education comprised a shockingly short time compared to 125 years of segregation,[49] including when it was illegal to teach enslaved African Americans in Missouri.[50] Instead, LHS closed the door to historical reflection in 1984, possibly because the system wanted to deflect attention from past wrongs, such as cheating Garrison School of resources, refusing to hire teachers from Garrison after integration, and exiling Mr. Gantt from the principal’s office and classroom. By opting to save face for the White community, my school missed the chance to acknowledge, apologize, and make reparations for treating African Americans like second-class citizens.
It has been thirty-seven years since I graduated from Liberty High School, and it has taken me almost as long to learn lessons close to home about neglected heroes like Mr. Gantt, whose story has lifted my understanding from a ditch of buried truths. When I was a child and teenager, White silence isolated me from the larger and epically more truthful history of my own hometown. As an adult, I believed myself knowledgeable about social justice, all the while failing to notice the Confederate statue that still looks down on the South End district where Mr. Gantt lived. Breaking silence to confront systemic racism goes against my early training as a White Southern Baptist girl, which is why I must practice speaking out. My sense of wholeness as a human being calls for honestly facing difficult truths that Liberty’s White institutions have preferred to keep hidden. Knowing only half of Liberty’s history has been like knowing only half of myself.
[1] In the context of the U.S. Civil War, border states included Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The Making of America (National Geographic Society, 2002): https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/union-confederacy.
[2] S. Ponder, Mr. Gantt Modified (1987), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g8Zcs4eMdU.
[3] The ladies’ restrooms also had signs for “Colored Women” and “White Women.” S. Ponder, personal communication, June 23, 2024.
[4] A. Lateiner, Grieving the White Void (2016), paras. 33-34. https://abelateiner.medium.com/grieving-the-white-void-48c410fdd7f3.
[5] T. Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968 (2006).
[6] A. Haley and M. X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964).
[7] S. Ponder, Write Out of My Heart: A Poetry Collection (2019), Poem 41 “See My Country Town.”
[8] S. Ponder, personal communication, April 28, 2024.
[26] However, the KC School District also mistreated job-seeking Black educators. As Bradley Poos explains in Desegregation at Kansas City’s Central High School: Illuminating the African American Student Experience Through Oral History (2014, PhD dissertation), “Following the Brown decision, black teachers across the country lost their jobs. Many of these teachers were better educated and more experienced than their white counterparts, yet black teachers were the first to be dismissed and the last to be hired. This was most certainly true in Kansas City” (p. 97).
[27] Ibid. “Between 1967 and 1977 is . . . when the KC, Missouri School District’s overall student population fell by nearly thirty thousand students, and the majority went from white to black. Many of the departing students and their families were leaving the KC, Missouri School District for the surrounding metropolitan suburbs” (p. 174).
[28] S. Ponder,Mr. Gantt Modified (1987), YouTube, 1hr:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g8Zcs4eMdU.
[29] Clay County African American Legacy Inc, Garrison History, para. 3. https://ccaal-garrisonschool.org/history.
[30] S. Ponder, personal communication, June 23, 2024.
[35] S. Ponder, personal communication, August 23, 2022.
[36] S. Ponder, personal communication, June 23, 2024.
[37] S. Ponder, Mr. Gantt Modified (1987), 1hr:47, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g8Zcs4eMdU.
[38] The pranks did not continue after Student Council members told disruptive students that they must respect Mr. Gantt. S. Ponder, personal communication, June 23, 2024.
[39] S. Ponder, Mr. Gantt Modified (1987), 1hr:47, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g8Zcs4eMdU.
[40] “It is not possible to for one man to hold another man down in the ditch without staying down there with him.” Washington, B. The Story of the Negro, the Rise of the Race from Slavery, 1909, p. 124.
[41] S. Ponder, personal communication, September 4, 2023.
[42] S. Ponder, personal communication, June 23, 2024.
[43] Garrison School students in ninth to twelfth grades transferred to Liberty High School in 1954, and first to eighth graders stayed at Garrison until 1958. S. Ponder, personal communication August 24, 2024.
[44] Adler, E. Confederate Statue Haunts Blacks in Missouri Town (2021). https://www.startribune.com/confederate-statue-haunts-blacks-in-mo-town/600031559.
[45] Liberty Public Schools, 100 Years of Heritage (2024). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyNxnFbTrUw.
[46] For example, when I was 13, I witnessed how differently people treated my father after he lost his hair and gained a prominent scar on his forehead due to brain cancer surgeries. If I had heard Mr. Gantt’s story of strength in the face of prejudice, I would have felt comforted.
[47] Liberty Public Schools, 100 Years of Heritage (2024). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyNxnFbTrUw.
[48] Liberty High School moved to a new building in 1972. Liberty Public Schools, 100 Years of Heritage (2024). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyNxnFbTrUw.
[49] According to Liberty’s official website, Liberty became an incorporated town in 1829 (para. 2). https://www.libertymissouri.gov/2120/History-of-Liberty.
[50] L. Greene, G. Kremer, & A. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage: Revised Edition (1993), p. 98.
I loved attending “Storytelling with the Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre” at the Aga Khan Park. Anthony Gladue from Kehewin Cree Nation was the first of two featured Indigenous storytellers for this Nuit Blanche event that shared the evening’s line-up with a Whirling Workshop, Haiku reading, and musical performances celebrating the theme of “Unearthing Our Interdependence.”
With a warm smile, Gladue welcomed the audience gathered in a semi-circle around a portable outdoor fireplace to listen to the story of a young man from a forest village who doubts his competence, courage, and worthiness to be loved. On one memorable day, he is the only person who dares to engage with powerful beings who have frightened and scolded his community. Pushed to the edge of terror, the protagonist excavates a beautiful song from deep within. He sings loud and true, astonishing himself and all who listen.
When Gladue performed the unassuming hero’s song, his voice expressed the pain and transformation that come with self-doubt and claiming your spirit in spite of it. As the storyteller explained later, if you feel insecure about your singing, dancing, or hunting like the young man in the story, “Remember to respect the learning process. These skills take time to build.” He added, “Wisdom is learning every day from experience and the choices that you make, good or bad. Spiritual growth comes from doing the right thing as the result of this wisdom. Connect with something outside of yourself and think with your heart.”
My heart is grateful for Gladue’s generosity and kindness when he said, “We sat around a fire together to listen to a story. We’re family now.”
Example from a Collage Workshop at a College,Teaching and Learning Symposium, February 2020Weijia’s Collage (2019), ESL Writing Class The collage represents that the person has multiple eyes on her. This means I am from a different culture and country, and now I try to adjust myself to many different aspects to adopt the different environment. Detail from Weijia’s Collage (2019) The two mouths show that I need to learn a second language to help me be able to live in the different country with better life.ESL Class, 2019Wellness Approach to Stress Management, 2018Wellness Approach to Stress Management, 2018Wellness Approach to Stress Management, 2018ESL class, 2018ESL class, 2017ESL class, 2017Mandy and Srishti’s Collage, 2017 symposium at Centennial CollegeShannon’s Collage, symposium 2017Alyssa’s Collage, 2017 symposiumESL class, 2015Nitzia’s collage (Never Give Up) ESL class, 2015Chuck’s Collage, Engagement week winter 2015
Not long after my first Zumba class last winter, an instructor advised, “Remember that my movements are a mirror image. My left hand is your right hand.” My intellect understood her meaning, but my body didn’t get it. During a song, I would hesitate while thinking, “Wait, does this move start on my left or the teacher’s left?” Glancing from the stage to the bold dancers at the front, I became more uncertain about which foot went first. Becoming familiar with the routines eased confusion, but I rarely trusted myself to relax into the movement.
At the start of a recent class one year later, I listened as if for the first time to Mike’s suggestion for newcomers: “Follow our movements like you’re looking in the mirror.” It sounds simple, but the repetition of this tip deepened my understanding in a revelatory way: “Stop overthinking and experience your dance in connection to the human mirrors on stage.” A wall of anxiety dissolved when I allowed my head, arms, hips, and legs to reflect the moving patterns I saw in front of me. Separation between mind and body thawed. And learning Zumba more holistically hushed self-critical thoughts like “You’re too old and fat to belong in a class with all these graceful beings. You call yourself a dancer?”
When negativity strikes, I love how Mike, Kim, and the dance squad strike back with embodied positivity, serving as mirrors of movement and models of joy. When I feel slow and withdrawn, I am grateful for a collective reflection that shimmies with energy and panache. Zumba’s mirror offers more grace than the two-dimensional version, for everyone in the room is a dancer in its eyes.
Our three-dimensional mirror neither judges nor produces copies. Within its generous frame, we dance together as souls with multiple demographic labels. No two dancers are alike, yet we learn who we are from each other, nourished by a wider field of expression. When one of us shines, we all sparkle.
Photo of the author at the Light: Visionary Perspectives exhibit at the Aga Khan Museum. Image shows her upper body and arms reflected on a blue background. The arms reach out and are outlined in yellow, orange, red, green, and blue stripes.Photo that shows the author’s dance-happy mood. The image depicts a smiling woman with pale skin and grey and brown shoulder-length hair. She is wearing purple glasses, a tan sweater, and a puffy brown winter jacket.
Photo shows a wavy rocky shoreline with three grey boulders and a tree stump in the foreground. Across the top of the frame is the reflection of trees with bright orange leaves mixed with some green conifers.This image contains a triangular shape in the lower left corner, which is the edge of a white lakeside dock. Extending from the top left corner to the lower right corner is the watery reflection of a long black tree branch with many smaller branches fanning out from the central one. In the top right corner are amorphous reflections in orange and green in the blue-grey water.The photograph depicts a misty dawn beside the lake shore. The upper third of the photo shows a clump of trees with indistinct forest in the background. A band of cool blue mist covers the transition from shore to water, and the lower two-thirds of the frame contains impressionistic reflections of trees in the water. The water’s colours are white, turquoise, and dark blue.A triangular wedge of a grey dock fills the lower left corner of the frame. In the middle lies a calm dark blue lake. Across the top of the frame is a band of distant trees topped by blue sky that contains white clouds and dark clouds in different sizes.This image shows the same misty sunrise scene as the one described two pictures ago, but the colours are different. A ghostly band of dark purple mist connects the trees to their reflections in the water. The water’s colours are yellow, lavender, and purple.
Garden Mosaic Moment. Photo shows a grey fragment of concrete with a raised pattern of squares in the lower half of the frame, a grey stone in the upper left, and a small pink stone in the upper right. Between the grey and pink stone rests a glass marble with swirls of blue and yellow. Small green plants and a few brown maple keys fill the negative space between the objects.Meadow Way Milkweed. The photo provides a zoomed-in view of a milkweed pod with brown felt-like milkweed seeds with white strands fanning out in different directions. The seeds have burst out of the pod and fill the majority of the photo frame. Some green leaves and a few brown stems offer background texture.Tree Beside Meadow Way Trail. In this photo, the silvery-brown base of a tree extends from the top left to the bottom left and middle of the frame in a steep curve. Beyond the trunk, a patch of green meadow can be detected between the low-hanging leaves in shades of dark and light green.Park Near Kingston Road and Birchmount, Scarborough. The photo depicts three trees in a park. On the left, the tree has partially shed its orange leaves, which cover the grass. The middle tree is larger and mostly leafless. It has a striking shadow that extends from its trunk to the bottom right corner of the frame. The tree on the right is also bare of leaves for the most part. A small section of blue sky is present in the distance.
Photo shows a flower painted on the pavement of an alley. Following the line of a crack, a green stem has been added with spray paint, and magenta petals have also been painted around the maintenance cover hole to complete the flower image.
Imagination
transforms cracks to stems,
makes steel circles bloom.
Image portrays a discarded white wooden door that lies on the lawn outside a house.
Rain-softened by time,
lock opens to soulful green
guests it once refused.
The photo is a close-up of the previous image of the discarded door. It shows splintered wood and gaps where the lock used to be. Green clover fills some of the gaps, sprouting through the hole as well as growing in a patch to the left of the door.
Image shows a large fountain shaped like a chess piece with jets of water falling in arcs to the pool at the base of the fountain. A thick canopy of trees topped by a blue sky and fluffy white clouds are in the background.The photo depicts the Credit River curving to the right and disappearing into a forest. A blue summer sky appears in a V-shaped wedge between the trees and above the water. The lower right section of the photo contains rocky reddish-brown land at the river’s shoreline.In the lower left corner of this image is the left hand of the photographer partly submerged in the bubbly current of the Credit River. The photographer’s thumb rests against a stone.The photo shows three leaves in green, yellow, and a hint of orange that have fallen into the river. The water’s current can be seen flowing over the leaves in a wavy pattern.The photo contains an image of the photographer. She is wearing a orange and brown striped blouse with a V-neck. She has shoulder-length brown hair, purple glasses, and a smiling expression.
Back Garden Gate in an Alley (Photo shows a wooden fence with a large orange wooden disc with two stylized figures playing horns. The top of the image is framed by dappled green leaves).Cat-like Crayon Monster Mural (Photo depicts a purplish-blue monster who is gathering up large green and yellow leaves while gnawing on a yellow crayon that doubles as a tower of a castle).Two Squirrels Scamper on Second-Story Balcony Next to Red Outdoor Staircase (Image shows one of the squirrels climbing up the side of the balcony to reach its floor while the other squirrel regards the viewer further up in the frame, having already ascended to the balcony floor).
Photo taken in Scarborough. It shows three white leaves with green patterns in the middle resting at different angles on a bed of raindrop-dotted green leaves.Still from a video taken in Bloorcourt, Toronto. Image shows a magenta cone flower with an orange, black, and white butterfly visiting it. In the background are long green leaves and part of a decorative steel fence.Photo taken in Scarborough. Magenta Cosmo flowers cast shadows of themselves on the sidewalk to their left, creating patterns in the interplay of negative space.
Lavender Puddle Beside the Parking Lot, Jack Goodlad Park with Reflected Telephone Poles, Scarborough Ontario (2024)Purple Iris Beaded with Droplets, Liberty Missouri (2024)Raindrops on Hosta Plants, Liberty Missourii (2024)Edges of Hosta Leaves Create Curtain-Like Effect, Liberty Missouri (2024)Rainfall Rushes in Gutter in Shades of Olive, Brown, and Black, Liberty Missouri (2024)
Nantucket Street, Scarborough (2024). Image shows a large willow tree with branches beginning to show long vine-like leaves. The top half of the tree is reflected in a wide blue and slate-gray puddle that covers part of an empty parking lot. Smaller puddles reflect sections of the trunk in the water.Nantucket Street Willow (2024). The photo frame is filled with the twisting shapes of willow branches and their hair-like leaves hanging down against a light blue sky.Outside Victoria Park Subway Station (2024). A streetlight illuminates an inky dark blue sky and countless individual lines of light falling at different angles (which are how the camera interpreted the snowflakes).Snowfall Under the Streetlights, Victoria Park Subway Station (2024). This abstract mages shows extended lines of gold neon light in diagonal patterns against a background of teal and dark purple.Nantucket Street Willow (2024). In this image, the camera lens is focused on the top half of a willow tree whose dark curving branches support thick cascades of narrow green and yellow leaves. A close-up of intensely yellow leaves are flying horizontally across the very top of the frame. Small patches of blue sky are visible behind the willow.Nantucket Street Willow (2024). This willow photo is similar to the previous one. The difference is that it is more narrowly focused on the central thick branch and the seven or eight smaller branches that curve in different directions away from it. The flowing leaves seem thicker at closer range and the patches of sky look bigger.
Sheilagh and I’s first JourneyDance of Manifestation and Vision Board Workshop took place in 2018, and it has returned every January since! On Sunday the 15th, fourteen women danced and collaged at The Pink Studio, sparking engagement with goals, wishes, and desires for 2024. According to tradition, Sheilagh led the movement component first, and I followed with the vision board experience. I loved the studio’s energy that afternoon: lively and playful yet grounded in reflective expression.
For this year’s workshop, I tweaked an element of my facilitation. As the last song of Sheilagh’s set mantled peace over the people stretched out on the floor, I placed piles of images in six different spots by the dancers instead of concentrating them in one big pile.
After the music stopped and Sheilagh prompted participants to sit up in their own time, I introduced the vision board activity and stressed the importance of following instinct when choosing images. I also encouraged folks to expand the hunt for materials to all six piles if the closest one didn’t provide the right Yes! moments. Although not anticipating conflict, I added, “Two people rarely reach for the same image at the same time, but if that happens we can resolve the issue with a dance battle!” Laughing, Sheilagh declared, “I want to see this dance battle!”
Once the art-making started, I was happy to observe how the smaller piles strewn across the room gave rise to organic groups of three or four who encircled the supplies like campers round a fire. Soon the community sank more deeply into the work, and it was lovely to hear people chatter, laugh, and be silly as they chose their pictures and experimented with ideas. As I walked around checking if everyone had what they needed, I enjoyed proffering backings, glue sticks, scissors, and stickers.
When the session’s end drew near, all were invited to present their vision boards to the entire group. It was exciting and uplifting to witness multiple narratives threaded into the artwork, and many beautiful details have stayed with me. The following memory snapshots contain only a taste of the experience, for rich meaning infused every piece:
Considering cat adoption, one person placed images of cats in a corner of her board. After scissors released the felines from an illustration, she fashioned fancy cat-hats styled with plumes and bows from a 1970’s book of paper dolls.
Another woman affixed an old library-book pocket and its attendant card to her piece. The last date stamped on the card was from 1992, a year which held personal meaning for the maker. Thanks to her vision and preparation, the library pocket received new contents: strips of paper printed with poems that she had brought especially for the workshop.
Also playing with hidden elements, a different participant put stickers on her backing and covered them with a paper showcasing kaleidoscope patterns in pink and blue (gluing down only one edge). She lifted the flap of the patterned paper to reveal the stickers, which contained words naming emotions connected to entering a new stage of life.
Another attendee spoke of how strongly she resonated with a quotation from the Women Artists Diary that she pasted to her vision board: “Not fragile like a flower. Fragile like a bomb!”
Acting on the wish to embrace creativity more in 2024, another participant traced her hand over a vintage dressmaking guide, cut it out, and glued it in place as a reminder to use her hands to make art. Later, the negative space from the paper she left behind inspired the completion of “Dancing Hands, You Are Beautiful!” (2024) pictured below.
Finally, one woman’s vision board featured Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi’s words about the wisdom that passes from soul to soul. This verse had spoken to her from a calendar page, destined for her collage. As she read the poem aloud, silence filled our gathering, itself a soulful manifestation of movement, connection, imagination, and hope.
Dancing Hands, You Are Beautiful, Catherine Raine (2024)
