Condo Towers and Buried Streams: Stories from The Housing Show
by Gabriel Levine & Shelby Shapiro
» download essay [pdf]
Videos from The Housing Show
"Home is where I can be naked." These videos document The Housing Show: a collective creation by students in the Drama program at York University's Glendon Campus (Toronto), directed by Gabriel Levine. We began with a simple question: What does home mean to you? Through a process of interviews and workshops, the collective has put together a public consultation, using experience, testimonial and documentary to plunge into the ongoing crisis of affordable housing and its impact on the people of Tkaronto (Toronto). Through a mix of puppetry, multimedia, music, absurdity and drama, we invite you to ask yourself: how can we live together in this city, and on this land?
1. Highlights from The Housing Show [runtime: 10:31]
2. The Housing Show, full production [runtime: 1:31:12]
Gabriel Levine is a writer, teacher, musician and theatre artist living in Toronto. He has released numerous recordings on Constellation Records and other labels, and his puppet-theatre projects have toured to festivals in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. He co-edited
Practice (2018), published in the MIT/Whitechapel series Documents of Contemporary Art, and his book
Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings (2020) was recently published by MIT Press. His writing has appeared in the journals
Performance Research,
PUBLIC,
Topia,
Journal of Curatorial Studies,
Canadian Theatre Review, and others. He is co-curator of Toronto's Concrete Cabaret, and is currently Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Drama and Creative Arts, Glendon College, York University. [website:
gabriellevine.net].
Shelby Shapiro is an English and Drama Studies major in her fourth and final year at Glendon College, York University. She is the President of GUESS — Glendon Undergraduate English Student Society, organizing several writing workshops and events at the college. She was one of the original creators of The Housing Show, writing the song "Buried Streams" and the final land acknowledgement. She is currently curating and compiling documentation of
The Housing Show.