Condo Towers and Buried Streams: Stories from The Housing Show

Created by director Gabriel Levine and Drama students of Glendon Campus at York University, the resulting performance in March 2020 had three sections: The Consultation (a mock public forum on affordable housing staged in the university cafeteria using verbatim text from interviews), four Table Shows (tabletop object-theatre performances featuring stories from the housing crisis), and Land and Water (a movement and video piece that questions what it means to make a home on Indigenous land).1 The performance sought to stage pressing questions of precarity and inequality, and to foster more truthful conversations about privilege, class, race, and belonging in our community. 1. The harsh reality that comes from living an underhoused life leaves long-lasting effects on one's mental and physical health. Across the world, municipal, provincial and federal governments have been captured by real estate capital. [...]here I am, a settler writing in a basement sunk into land owned by an absentee slumlord, while the buried Garrison Creek rushes somewhere in the depths below me, occasionally seeping up through cracks in the foundation as a stormwater surge.