Passages: A Moving Experience
Passage: A Moving Experience is dedicated to our friend Fernando Lara and the thousands like him who have been denied a fair claim to asylum in Canada, and endured many injustices including the withdrawal of their human right to health care while in Canada.
The story of global migration has not been an easy one to tell and it cannot be told without first acknowledging that that this story takes place on the occupied lands of many Indigenous Nations.
At the heart of the story of migration, lies racism, white privilege, xenophobia, prejudice, classism, gender and sexual discrimination, and many intersecting forms of oppression. Although this may sound extreme to some, these persistent realities are both the cause of most of the world’s migration, the root of the poor treatment of many newcomers, and the reason we allow our own government to remove all humanitarian aspects of our immigration system with barely a peep of dissent.
Passage is the result of three weeks of 70 children, youth and artists bravely delving into a heartfelt investigation of the difficulties that immigrants and refugees face in building a new home here in Toronto. This work could not have been done without confronting our own accountability in this system that perpetuates these oppressions. Through the development of this play, as artists building trust amongst each other, we created a space in which transformative moments could happen and ground the critical analysis of this play.
We are grateful for all of the knowledge and wisdom that was shared by our guides and artists, which called us to engage in deep listening, asking the right questions, and building safer spaces for these important dialogues that have furthered the evolution of our process for future peace camps and campers.
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