“Black joy is Black liberation, and I think you can take the Black out of it and joy still is liberation for anyone, you know, like to feel good feelings, that's freedom. And I think that's something that everyone should embrace whenever they can, but you have to learn it.”

Part 1

We end this season of Desire Paths on a playful note with comedian and storyteller Liza Paul as she shows us what it means to play in the city. Liza begins where it all started for her – at her parents’ house, where a sense of play and imagination was instilled from a young age. She then takes us to her creative home at the Theatre Centre, a place where a philosophy that prioritizes access not only gave Liza a stage to first shape her work, but a programming role that allows her to continue giving artists, especially comedians of the future, the opportunity to take the stage. And in a surprising final location – an unusual spot in the middle of the city – Liza reveals the secret sauce to a good time, showing us that you just need the right attitude, and people, to fully unleash your inner joy.

Liza Paul is a storyteller, comedian, curator, and producer who loves laughter, life, music, family, stories, all things bashment, impromptu dancehall-flavoured a cappella street jams, and pum-related non sequiturs. She has trained at the Second City (Improv Conservatory + 2017 Bob Curry Fellowship Program) and is the co-creator of pomme is french for apple (Best of Fringe 2012, Toronto), which has also played in Winnipeg, Edinburgh, and New York. Liza and her pomme partner in crime, Bahia Watson, are developing a variety show called MASHUP PON DI ROAD (coming summer 2022). She has worked with Soulpepper Theatre Company, anitafrika! dub theatre, bCurrent theatre, and the Watah Theatre, and is a content creator for programsound.fm, launching late July 2021. Liza is currently the Associate Artistic Director at the Theatre Centre, where she curated the inaugural Comedy is Art festival in 2019 and is working to continue to program as many comedy shows by women of colour as she possibly can.

Part 2

For the second part of the episode, Liza is joined by Adil Dhalla, Director of Community for Reset, a social enterprise he co-founded that inspires people to play through pop-up experiences around the city. Together, they discuss what it means to have permission to play, how play can be seen as a revolutionary act, and envision ways to better foster the city as a playground so that we can work towards collective joy through the lens of justice and social recovery as we begin to reemerge from the pandemic.

Adil Dhalla is a community organizer, social entrepreneur, and artist. He is the Director of Community for Reset, an organization that he co-founded in 2015 that inspires people to just play through their pop-up playground experiences. He is the Board Chair for the StopGap Foundation, a national charity that makes communities more accessible through physical ramps and awareness. Prior to Reset, Adil was the Managing Director at Artscape Daniel’s Launchpad and the Executive Director at the Centre for Social Innovation. Adil has been recognized as a DiverseCity Fellow and a Common Futures Fellow. He resides in Tkaronto and lives in a cohousing community - The Clarens Commons - along with his partner Shilbee Kim and 5 other individuals. @adildhalla @helloreset

“Access needs or even just like planning for disability and access is not a one size fits all. It can be really harmful when there's just a document or a toolkit that's like ‘here’s access planning 101’. There can be so many conflicting access needs – you can't anticipate a certain body or a certain kind of disabled person being in this space or participating in this space.”

In our fifth episode, artist Pree Rehal guides us through the spaces in the city where they feel safe and cared for –from their homespace, to Allan Gardens, to the Paperhouse Studio, an experimental arts studio and community space. Along the journey, Pree is joined by their sibling Harmeet Rehal, and facilitator Cara Eastcott, as they collectively discuss access intimacy, disability, and transformative justice, and what it means to honour crip time.

How can we rethink notions of time and space to design brave places where we can be our authentic selves? What has the pandemic exposed about the everyday challenges of folx with disabilities and how can learnings transform organizational structures? And what do futures of the disability justice movement look like to create more space for intersectionality moving forward?

Pree Rehal (they/them) is an artist educator currently based in Tkaronto, originally from Tiohtià:ke. They're a child of immigrant settlers from Punjab. Pree's work is an ode to their extended youth as a trans and non-binary person, while also painting love letters to their inner child, and affirming their queer, disabled, fat self. Their main medium is watercolour, but Pree also embroiders, creates short films, zines, and performs drag. They have an interdisciplinary arts practice under the name Sticky Mangos and co-founded the Non-Binary Colour Collective. They are also the editor and designer of CRIP COLLAB, a collaborative zine for Disabled artists. Pree's work has been featured in CBC, Xtra magazine, BlogTO, and Salty. Instagram @stickymangos

Cara Eastcott is a culture worker based in Toronto, who has been shaping multi-disciplinary arts spaces for the last 15 years. She has done extensive work in creating accessible practices for Deaf and disability arts to thrive. Her work highlights storytellers who help communities gain a deeper understanding of place and is centred in the preservation of public cultural histories through intergenerational exchanges, oral storytelling, and relationship building.

“I'm one of those people who believe deeply in the suburbs as a place of brilliance. It’s a place of complexity, but a place of brilliance too … What do we need for collective work to happen, be supported, and to create the conditions for brilliance to not be an exception, but for brilliance to be the constant.”

Part 1

Throughout its 20-year history, Gendai has led experimental curatorial and organizational practices for East Asian artists and artists of colour. As the new stewards of Gendai, Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng are building upon the organization’s legacy of decentering whiteness by investing in the future of BIPOC arts leadership through collective practice.

In the first part of the episode, Marsya and Petrina take us down memory lane, revisiting specific mall spaces in the suburbs of Toronto that hold intimate meaning to their experience growing up as children of immigrant families. Together, they reflect on malls as sites of cultural tension and othering, but also suburban collectivity. The suburban experience of quietness and loneliness ultimately drove them to leave for the downtown city to forge a practice rooted in imagining collective futures.

Part 2

Marsya and Petrina are then joined by independent curator and community organizer Anu Radha Verma. They unpack their shared personal connection to the suburban immigrant experience (in Scarborough, Mississauga, and North York) as a formative seed that influences their advocacy for collective work today. Together, they daydream about creating new language for diasporic identities, amplifying dialogue around care and decolonization, moving from a scarcity to abundance mentality, and re-imagining suburban malls as community hubs that disrupt the capitalist idea of what space is supposed to be.

Anu Radha Verma is a queer, diasporic sometimes-femme, a cis woman, a survivor and a mad person. She believes strongly in the brilliance that exists in the suburbs of Peel. Anu grew up in Mississauga, and has organized across the region. She likes to be identified primarily as an agitator or shit disturber. Anu Radha (or arv) organizes with QTBIPOC sauga, a grassroots gathering of queer and trans, Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities from across Peel. She hosts a weekly show focused on social justice issues in Peel and beyond on Newstalk Sauga 960 AM. Anu is an independent curator, a community-based consultant, and most recently a research manager. She is still figuring out what it means to have hobbies, and dreams about deep and true rest, for those she loves (and hopefully for herself).