Creativity - Tessa Mendel, founder of the Women's Theatre and Creativity Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia - Interview

"For the open house, 80 women turned out and I was expecting something like thirty. I would say that there are several hundred women right now who are connected loosely with the centre. All of our workshops have been more than full. There's been a high level of involvement, interest and excitement."

Although Mendel had sensed a need for the centre, the high level of interest and participation in the nascent centre has overwhelmed her. "Sometimes, working in the theatre, you get the feeling that you've really got to work hard to get somebody out there. You've got almost an antagonistic attitude towards the audience because it feels so hard to survive. The warmth of the response and the support that's been offered has been amazing and given me a feeling that this is one of those things coming at the right time for this city. The number of women who have said that this is what they need is incredible."

A native Haligonian who has directed and taught plays at theatres and universities in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Ontario, Mendel calls the centre a safe place for individualized sessions and workshops where women can discover and nurture their creativity. "The basic building block is this belief that everybody has the power to discover their creativity, that it can be an important force in our lives."

There were other reasons, beyond perceived interest that traditional theatre tended to bypass women's experience. "It's not just their stories being bypassed" she adds, "but perhaps their ways of creating art haven't been focused on so much. In a way, the idea of this was to create a context where those kinds of processes, which perhaps we don't even know what they are yet, might be given room to be explored and expressed."

Since most of the work originates from personal experience, Mendel felt more comfortable working with women and thus recognized the need for women to have safe space like this. "We deal with things we would have a hard time dealing with in a mixed environment. That's why I use the term safe space. But, it's women-centered, not women-exclusive. "We will do projects and are doing projects that involve men in various roles, but the focus is on women."

Homesickness and a desire to work within her own community led Mendel back to Halifax to start the centre. "In the theatre you spend a lot of time working with communities that aren't your own. Starting something like this, it felt to me that the base of being with people that you know, where you're from and what has meaning to you, so there's already those built in connections, was important." More than that, Mendel felt the city was just the right size for this initiative. "It's still a small enough city that there's support for that kind of project and people do get excited about new projects, but its also large enough that this doesn't seem weird or people are ready to accept ideas of things that haven't been done before."

Mendel says there were no direct examples or inspiration that served as a template for the centre. It was her accumulated experience in the theatre, which included the development of a theatre company in Toronto's public housing communities which created plays by, for and about youth, that inspired her. "This is, for me, an experiment in combining things that haven't been combined before. There are theatres where social issues/popular theatre is being done, theatres focused on women only - producing work by and for women, and people who do workshops for personal development of women. This [centre] tries to combine all those things. Not incidentally combine them, but believing they are intrinsically related. I believe that you can't separate the personal from the social from the creative. We have to be able to do all those things together."

More importantly, Mendel believes that the centre must be accessible to all women interested in exploring their creativity. To that end, she is willing to discuss alternative arrangements with anyone unable to pay the full workshop fees and actively encourages representation from all walks of the community. At the same time, Mendel is trying to build a sense of community in the centre. "There's a loosely constructed committee of 20 women and as more come, they become involved in working with different things or committees, so it becomes a sense that the centre is larger than what we're doing but actually is this feeling that is being built here, so that people can get involved in all sorts of different ways."

That sense of community will serve the centre well in the future as it is the participants who will dictate its development. "It's not something that's being offered with the question 'do you want this?', the question is 'what do you want this to be?' We have a vision that we've come in with but we're developing it based on the needs of the women who come here."

In the short time since its foundation in September, the centre has offered a number of workshops, exploring expression, creativity and creative blocks. Among them, a twelve week course focused on the use of creative forms, like embodiment, improvisation, storytelling and movement to explore personal issues in a collective context and two weekend sessions led by Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal. Mendel says they will proceed to a creative performance workshop in January: a collaborative play writing project currently in development with playwright Christopher Heide. "[We are] working with war brides, looking at how their experiences of today and experience of coming here during the war reflect on each other, really looking to tell their untold story, because there's been so much focus on the men's experiences. That kind of project is a collaborative play writing project but the final aim is supposed to be a performance."

Mendel's hope is that projects like this will eventually lead to the formation of a loose-knit ensemble: a group of women who share certain values and ways of working that come together to create pieces on an as-needed basis. She offers no predictions as to the impact the centre will have on the city's performing arts scene. The main goal, for now, is to break boundaries and reconnect art with community. Once done, perhaps it may then have an impact on the city's performing arts community.

She is also determined that the centre, still comfortable with its small, intimate downtown digs, not develop beyond its capacity to sustain itself. "It's very important to me that the development is organic rather than jump in, want to do everything straight away, then burn up and don't have any staying power. We're trying to have each step be very based and take it as it needs to be taken."'

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