(Crowd at TELL! event. Photo by Phi Doan)
TELL! began as a community artist gathering that our late founder Majdi Bou-Matar hosted in the early years of MT Space. He founded MT Space to centralize marginalized and racialized artists and stories after being repeatedly turned away from other theatre spaces for his accent and his “look”. TELL! was another way for him to create community however he could.
During the pandemic lockdowns, we brought TELL! back as an online gathering place for people to connect with the community and share, when we weren’t able to do so in-person. When we returned to in-person events, we saw TELL! as an opportunity to bring together community after so many months under the pandemic restrictions. But it’s not as simple as just opening doors and inviting people in. Especially when we do work in spaces that weren’t always made for us.
When we host our TELL! events, we know that the people coming in are of so many different backgrounds. With the state of the world these days, people are bringing their baggage with them too. We all are craving community to help get us through our days. MT Space can’t be everything for everyone, nor should we be. We’re still a small company despite our years of presenting theatre and the IMPACT international festival.
To be fully transparent, at our latest TELL!, our team had to deal with an incident of workplace violence. Some community members had entered the space with personal conflicts unrelated to MT Space, which resulted in a heated, verbal confrontation. Our team members stepped in to try to defuse the situation by pulling it out and away from the event. This left all but one of our staff continuing to host TELL!, while everyone else on the team was spending significant time de-escalating the situation.
This created an unsafe space for other attendees. If you are feeling any residual effects from the June TELL! Event, please get in touch with us so we can share some of our resources with you. As part of our ongoing efforts to build capacity, the MT Space team will be continuing more conscious de-escalation training.
We ask anyone entering MT Space events to consider what they are bringing into the space, and to leave personal conflicts outside the communal space that we are trying to create.
To be in community can be messy at times but rewarding in the long run. We all bear responsibility in that regard – to make the conscious effort in making this space safe and welcoming. This sometimes does require setting boundaries, and MT Space will ask those bringing violence of any kind into our spaces to leave.
This is why we often answer the question of space with another question: how can we create this space together? A healthy community is a self-sustaining one. A safe place that allows mistakes, but also focuses on healing.
A healthy community isn’t perfect. It is a continuous process of change and growth. We only recently added the potluck element as a suggestion by one of our co-workers, and we have seen such wonderful cooks and bakers come out as a result.
As we prepare for our upcoming season – which explores themes of intercultural exchange – we hope people who attend our events don’t see themselves as just visitors, but part of the community process. We want our audiences to be provoked into meaningful social/political action and justice, and to sit with us in discomfort and be challenged thoughtfully in discourse.
To help answer those questions about community we all have:
What can I do to bring people together? What’s missing from this space? How can I help?
Welcome to TELL! We hope you can be part of it.