♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Kristine Maitland, who is
a storyteller, a singer, a dancer, a photographer, and a public speaker.
You can find the resources mentioned by Kristine Maitland during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
♪ Kristine sings ♪
Your tongue was kissed by sea and mist tenderly.
I can't forget how two hearts met breathlessly.
Your arms opened wide and closed me inside.
You took my lips, you took my love so tenderly.
You took my lips,
you took my love so tenderly.
♪ Audience claps. ♪
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in conversation.
Today I am with Kristine Maitland, who is a storyteller, a singer, a dancer,
a photographer, and also a public speaker.
Welcome Kristine.
Thank you. I do appreciate that.
So you have a rich artistic life, but
I think it started with the storytelling.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Okay. So, my name is Kristine Maitland.
My pronouns are she her.
In terms of a little bit more about me I was originally diagnosed as a child
as autistic and then diagnosed in my twenties as having ADHD
before receiving my most recent diagnosis as being bipolar.
Personally, I view myself as being on the spectrum of the first two.
A little bit about my sort of artistic practice.
I am a singer performer of jazz, soul, R&B, as well as folk, Americana,
medieval, and Renaissance music.
I am also a dancer with a background in ballroom, Latin, and swing,
with training in ballet as a child and some knowledge of
belly dance and renaissance dance.
I teach rhythm and motion and movement.
I am also - I've been a writer since the nineties
and a researcher mainly of black history.
I am known for making TV and radio appearances, mainly because
I'm a media ho and I'm a photographer.
Lastly, I live in Tkaronto in the traditional territory of the many nations,
including Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe,
the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and Wendat peoples
and live in a city that's now
home to diverse nations, including the First Nations, Inuit and Metis people.
But while I am a Canadian, I recognize my heritage as being Guyanese and honor
my mother and my female ancestors, including my grandmother Carmen,
my aunt Margaret and my great great aunts.
How did it start, all this attraction to the arts in your family?
My mother, definitely my mother.
She was the one who took advantage of being in Toronto.
My parents separated when I was three and my mother made the decision
to stay in this country.
She had come with my father from the West Indies and then that didn't work out.
And instead of going to the United States to live with my grandmother, my mother
decided to stay here because she knew there were more options and
opportunities, especially in the arts.
So I went to the library regularly.
I went to events at the U of T.
My first introduction to Poculi Ludique Societas, which is a medieval theater
company, was when I was five.
I took ballet starting at the age of four.
Did that till I was twelve with a ballet instructor
who was trained at the Bolshoi.
So. And I did storytelling.
My mother did storytelling with me when I was very little.
So, like, I know my own family history, like, to the nth degree.
And she also collected children's books, so she would read to me.
I mean, my mother is 50 now, not 50.
I'm 50 plus.
My mother is 80 and still reads children's books to me.
So it's very much part of the culture.
And even, like, when you look at my teens
and in my twenties, my mother
would take storytelling classes with me.
I wasn't the type of kid who was like, oh, mom, why are you with me, Ma?
That wasn't my, my style.
I, you know, I did things with my mother all the time and still do.
And so from storytelling because her storytelling was for children.
But if I understand correctly, you were more attracted in storytelling
about lived experience or adulthood or things like that.
Well, actually, that's not totally accurate.
My mother told the stories of our family
and then as I got older, I would find out
more personal stories about the family.
And you know how my, I found out about
my grandmother's participation
in the war, World War Two, I mean.
You know. Then stories would be,
for example, I lost my great aunt to 9/11
because she was a nurse and she died from the toxic dust,
from the, from the two towers.
So, like, these are all stories that play a part in our lives.
And.
And then.
So when it comes to my own storytelling, it depends on the venue.
So I'm very active in the LGBTQ2S community.
So those stories tend to be a little more -
They can be a bit more erotic, they can be a little more explicit.
Whereas if I'm telling stories of history, especially the black history
I do, then it will be.
It won't be as much so, you know, so that.
So it gages.
What I don't do is storytelling for children.
I'm trained to do it.
I worked for Toronto Public Libraries from 1988 to 1999.
I even.
I built two puppet shows for Toronto Public Library.
But.
So I'm trained to do it, but it's not a favorite thing for me to do.
And this must have evolved into your black history research.
Black history has always played a part in my life because my mother
would tell me stories of black history, but particularly black history
in the Caribbean, mainly because people don't talk about it much.
So this is something I retain.
But when I started university,
I got involved with
the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is
a medieval / renaissance reenactment group
that started in the sixties.
My easy explanation of the SCA is it's a bunch of white guys who put on armor and
bash each other's brain in with stick.
(Laughs)
That's simplistic.
And I think I defend my friends in the SCA, but basically that's what it is.
But when I joined the SCA, the Ontario chapter
had one black, two black people in it,
and I was one of them.
And I had a friend, a musician,
who was doing collecting black history
research, but he's a musician
and tends to be a bit flighty.
So I took the project away from him and I started collecting the data.
And I still do, mainly, but I specifically
about medieval and renaissance history.
That's my field, because in the nineties,
it was hard to find.
You know, it's gotten easier now because, like, in the nineties,
we didn't have Google.
And even in the early aughts, with Google,
doing research still wasn't easy because
we didn't have the keyword searches to be able to do that kind of work
that has since changed.
But in those days, literally, I was doing the work by hand.
In terms of history, you spend your whole life in Toronto, so you
must have seen periods of evolution, of
how your research was perceived and how
black history evolved in the city.
It's still. I'll be honest, it's still problematic because, like, in the nineties,
I tried to sort of communicate with school boards and so on.
I was ignored because I'm dealing with basically white academics.
And then even in the SCA, it was a bit tenuous.
People would question why I felt the need to do it.
So that that was an issue
and, you know, so it was a battle.
These days, my issue is
when dealing with academia,
I have people who basically will lie to me
and tell me that they're not doing the research that they're actually doing.
I've had that happen a couple of times because everybody's, like,
holding on to their research.
Like, you know, you've dealt with academics. You know what it's like.
Yep.
You know, and when they're not.
And especially when you're speaking to somebody who doesn't have three letters
behind their name, you know, I have a BA, you know,
you know, I don't have a PhD, and therefore I don't have the credential,
the street cred when dealing with these people, even though
three quarters of the time I know more than they do.
Yeah, but we have.
We have this discussion about, okay, it's great to have a PhD.
It shows that you did a lot of studies and spent a lot of time with academics.
But okay, it's fine to have none, and it's fine to have a Master.
It's fine.
It's all about what your motivation in life is and what.
What you like to do.
It's not about.
It's important to have three letters.
And I think it's funny because I also feel
because the research is so accessible.
The days of being able to keep things locked away in a library,
like an academic library.
Forget public.
An academic library who, unless you happen
to have the library card, you know,
because you're a PhD and you can get in,
you know, in the nineties, because I was
a U of T grad and an alumna, I was able to get a library card.
And then after a certain point, I had to pay for that privilege.
Yeah. These days, Toronto Public Library
has access to JSTOR.
It has access to, like, the major academic journals online.
So I don't, you know, I can just go online and look this stuff up,
you know, I mean, here's classic.
When Toronto Public Library got hacked
and the system went down, I happened to
be speaking to a journalist from CTV and told them that I was flipping out
because I couldn't access the JSTOR.
JSTOR got a touch with me and gave me access directly,
you know, so it's just like they recognize the importance of this stuff.
Speaking of that, speaking of journalists, you're also a writer, right?
You're writing these.
So what do you write?
Okay. So I started writing in my - well, actually
first started writing in high school.
I would do exposes, you know, and then when I was in, when I was in university
and more to the point, when I was just finishing it, I started writing
for the varsity, which is the school
paper, the main paper for U of T.
You may know the name Naomi Klein.
Naomi Klein was the editor at the time.
And so I would write, you know, opinion pieces and so on.
I also, that was the point where I started doing interviews.
So I would interview over, I interviewed like a whole bunch
of Canadian writers who were just starting their careers.
Like people like Guy Gavriel Kay, for example.
And, you know, and now, like, they're like Governor, you know,
Governor General Awards winners, you know, but I knew them at the beginning,
so I, but my first, like, paid piece was thanks
to Michele Landsberg, who I met through my mother,
through storytelling.
That's how I got the gig.
And she was the one who got me an in with the Toronto Star.
So my first piece was published there.
Then I wrote for the Toronto Star.
Toronto Star had a Afro canadian magazine
that it had for a couple of years.
And I wrote for them.
And essentially my relationship with them was they would call me up and say,
can you write an article on x?
And I would meet the individual, interview them, write the piece, get paid.
I mean, that was pretty much it.
So that was the sort of stuff I was doing as a writer.
The last, I must admit, because of COVID and everything else,
I haven't really been writing much.
I'm hoping to get back into the scene.
Last piece I did was for Huffington Post,
and it was an article on the first cousin
of Queen Elizabeth II, who used to live next door to me.
So I, you know, and so it was sort of a conversation about the royal family
and of the time versus Meghan Markle,
who my mother met by the way! You know,
my family, you know, these people come into our lives and in, in very weird ways.
I want to go back to singing.
I know you're a jazz singer.
You have a beautiful voice.
Yeah, among other things.
But I heard some excerpt of jazz, so I was very, very happy.
When did it start?
When did you start singing?
Well, I sang in church because I was raised as a Roman Catholic.
More specifically, I was raised as an Irish Roman Catholic.
The church was mainly Irish, go figure.
But so I sang in church, but when I was my.
The church was actually St. Cecilia's,
which is the patron saint of music.
And singing was very much
a part of my early education,
elementary school education.
But one of the standouts during that time was there was
a Canadian singer named Bobby Gimby.
He sang part of Expo in Montreal in,
what was it, 67.
And there's a song called Canada.
You know, "Canada, notre pays."
So on, so forth.
So we.
My school did a gig with him at Ontario Place,
when Ontario Place was Ontario place, in 1976.
So, like, that was my first, like,
big show thing, because it was like,
I don't know, 200 kids singing with him, you know?
And we also appeared on television a couple of times and sang with him then.
I didn't sing again actively
until high school because
I went to Humberside Collegiate, which is also a very music oriented school.
And so I sang in girls choir.
And then after that.
After that, I was doing the Medieval Renaissance stuff.
I also did.
I sang Sephardic music because it was easier than singing
in Portuguese, as I discovered.
And so I did a lot of that. I did a lot of.
So we're talking 14th, 15th, 16th century material.
I have a knack for learning
to sing phonetically, so I sing in
about eight different languages.
There's only. There's certain languages I won't touch.
Polish is one, Turkish is the other.
Phonetically, it's just like.
It's easier to sing in Mandarin.
So, you know, so I did that, and then I started doing gigs
where I'd be singing and doing jazz.
So a lot of times it would be for
festivals, concerts, that sort of thing.
Particularly in the LGBTQ community.
That's where I would sort of appear, sing, leave.
You sing with someone, right?
You sing with a double bassist.
I.
Funny story with that.
I have. I talk to people.
I have no problem.
People say the Torontonians are sort of closed.
Not true.
They're just afraid of either.
If they don't want to deal with you, they're gonna
have their headset on anyway.
So I talk to people all the time, and I saw him with his double bass going
up the stairs, and I raced up after him, and I asked him, do you play Jazz?
Because some of them do classical, right?
And he says, no, I do jazz.
I said, would you be willing to partner with me?
He said, sure.
Man did not know me from Adam.
Did not know if I could sing new squad.
Turns out he was my next door neighbor.
He literally lived around me.
He doesn't anymore, but at the time he was literally living around
the corner from my house.
So we started doing stuff.
Well, we started doing stuff together and then Covid hit.
We literally had done our first bookings
and then that was the end of that.
So I've only performed with him once since, and that was last year.
What's his name?
Oh, Steven Falk.
F-A-L-K.
What are your performing spaces in Toronto?
I just recently, literally, like a week ago, did a gig
at The Painted Lady, which is sort of
a club mainly for burlesque performers.
So I joined up with them.
I think it was "Good Morning, Goodbye," something like that.
It was - it's specifically for performers who identify as bisexual
or within that spectrum.
So we did that show and that went really well.
Like, the performers were, ah, amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
So it was fun doing that and I think it was fun having me there
because a lot of time with those, with burlesque shows, it's.
It's a lot of strip, strip, strip, strip, strip.
With luck, you might get a drag king, which we did, actually.
He was amazing. But.
But with me as a singer, it sort of broke things up.
And in fact, that was the cool thing about the show, is that they had,
we had somebody who was a gymnast,
we had strippers, we had, like,
we had everything and we had me, so.
Which broke it up quite nicely.
I like variety shows.
If you're going to be spending that kind of money to come to a show, good to get,
you know, your bang for your buck.
You also added an extra artistic practice, which is photography.
Yes. That started with the cell phone.
I actually had enough.
I have another camera, but, you know, but the cell phone's great
because I can just take pictures.
And I, I like, like, I take a lot of flora
and fauna, but I also like to take,
I don't take pictures of people because that's personal space.
And, you know, then there's the legalities of, you know, getting permission
to take the picture of them and I don't want to be bothered by that.
So. And I have friends who are photographers.
I'll let them do that, but I'll take
sort of more whimsical photographs.
Like, there was a picture I took in
when I was in London of -
they were doing this weird project and
they were making a paper chain across a bridge
and there was a sign, you know,
saying, you know, please donate Stapler.
I mean, it was so ridiculous, you know, because their stapler had died, you know?
You know, so it's those sort of pictures I like to take, you know, sometimes
you know, graffiti, stuff that people
have taped on walls, that sort of thing.
sort of whimsy, those are the sort of photos I like to take.
And it goes back to your storytelling, right?
It always tells a story in that.
It's a photo story, basically.
The other thing I like to take are pictures of architecture.
I like the forms of things.
And Toronto has some great features
that people don't really look at,
mainly because they're either very high or.
I think we take them for granted.
We've got stuff we tend to have.
A lot of our architecture tends to be a bit brutalist,
but at the same time, we've got sort of, you know, if you look at some of the old
banks and so on, some of the, you know, the carvings and so on are amazing,
but we take them for granted.
It's interesting how they, in Toronto, particularly how they mix architecture.
So they would have this old building in the middle of gigantic towers.
Do not get me started on that.
It's the.
The whole glass building thing is boring.
Yeah. You know, it's not creative at all.
And. And I.
And I think, and especially, one of the things that I keep on poking my
politicians about is housing in the city.
When I was about six or seven, they built.
They were going to build an Ontario housing complex
apartment in my neighborhood.
I live in High Park.
And everybody was freaking out because it was just like,
you know, it was a lot of NIMBY.
They didn't want any of these poor people here and so on.
And my mother, on the other hand, was like, look, you can build it.
Just make sure it looks like all the other buildings in the neighborhood.
The point being is that you are where you live.
And if you build a house or apartment
or whatever that is not to standard,
then the people who live there will feel like they're not to standard.
You know.
So it's these things, you know, I take into account and I.
If I was going to get into yet
another thing, architecture's of interest
to me, you know, I'll hook up with Brad Pitt and we'll talk shop.
Oh, he's a big architecture junkie.
Who'da knew?
So what's the next step for you? What do you have?
Do you have some projects in mind that you want to accomplish?
Actually doing choreography would be cool.
And the reason why I say that is because I've been watching a lot of dance
on YouTube and Instagram and so on.
Variety of styles, whether we're talking, you know, that sort of hip hop freestyle
that they seem to be doing now.
West coast swing, tango, ballroom, like, variety.
And what really drives me nuts is this feeling of necessity
to do tricks instead of just dancing.
The only person who seems to not be doing
this whole tricks thing is Debbie Allen.
Debbie Allen opened up a dance academy in California.
I think it's California.
And I've been watching her kids, and it's none of that stupid trick thing.
And also her kids aren't, you know, these skinny minis.
The variety in terms of size of the children who are dancing.
Race is not a factor.
Is mainly black kids, but not necessarily, you know, I'd like to see, you know,
in terms of the dance world, a wider scope.
And, you know, so I'm sort of been thinking about how, you know,
what I would put together, how I would,
you know, attract people to do the
dancing with me or do it individually.
I'm still sort of up near.
I see.
That's a lot of things. Yeah.
That's a lot.
I have a question about working in environments where we
promote accessibility in the arts.
Do you think about that a lot?
How is your process about that?
I'll tell you, I.
And I've been doing this, actually, since I started working,
doing stuff in the SCA because I used to run events in the SCA, and that is,
is that I scope venues,
and it's amazing how many of them suck
in terms of - especially you don't want to deal with the churches
because you can't get in them.
You know, they're not accessible.
And also, I have to sort of.
I think there are other things we have to take into account,
like noise level, lighting,
you know. I've gotten older and I've
met people who have issues, especially
my friends with children who are autistic,
I've been sort of noting that there are
all these sort of issues with sensory.
And, you know, and it's a question of how do we work with that.
You know, these are all the things, you know, how do we.
I've seen, you know, efforts with doing, say, visual art with the blind
and how do we, like, how do we
be on the ball with dealing with disabilities
when you come across them?
But people aren't educated in this stuff.
You know, they have a vague notion, like they might know things
like sign language here. Sign language.
I had a - I was at a Mayworks event this year,
and they had
sign language interpretation available, except they had two interpreters.
No, no, they didn't have two interpreters.
They had three.
And this confused everybody.
They couldn't understand why the deaf person needed three interpreters.
Two is normal because you, you know, the interpreters need to have a break.
But having three, why?
It's because in sign language, or
when you have interpreters,
a lot of the time the interpreters are hearing,
so they can't sign in dialect.
That's how come they have the other interpreter who happens to be deaf.
I happen to learn this watching a TV show.
But, you know, this is shit that most people don't know.
And more the point, they don't understand.
They don't understand that sign language is done in different languages.
Sign language in America and Canada is different from
sign language in Australia or in UK.
You know, so it's like most people are totally unaware, and then
you have African Americans, they do their
sign language differently, you know,
but most people don't know that.
I never met.
I never met an ASL african american interpreter.
So how different is it from ASL?
They.
It's a dialect.
It's an american dialect.
I can't speak for black ASL interpreters here,
but from what I understand, in the United States, especially with the southerners,
they have their own sign dialect.
Because I've seen this with comedians
in Australia and in the UK,
there's a chick named Catherine who does signing for Adam Hills. Brilliant!
In fact, she's more fun to watch than the comedian.
But I gather with.
With the African American sign they have,
it has its own -
It's not ASL, I forgot.
I think it's called BSL.
BSL is British sign language.
Right. But BASL.
I see, huh, interesting.
Well, I learned something. I didn't know that.
so I came across it watching a Rap concert.
But again, how it works in performance
versus how it works in general speech
could be two different things.
Not totally up with that, but I did come across it, and it was just like,
as I say, there's so many variants.
Accessibility in the arts.
It's really something that fascinates me because there are so many aspects of it.
And when you start really paying attention of the details of the ASL or the sign
language interpreters, and then the ramps for wheelchair users to access
stages, because most of the accessibility, when we talk accessibility with a theater,
for example, they say, oh, yeah, no problem, we're accessible.
We can host wheelchairs in the audience.
Yeah, that's not what I meant.
Are you accessible to the performers?
Yeah, this sort of not thinking
with theaters
and so on just drives me up the wall.
Or simple things like,
there's a new
Nia, which is an arts venue for -
geared towards the black community.
It's lovely.
It even has an elevator.
It's too small.
Like, I'm conscious of the fact that
if you have a person in one of those bigger
driving wheelchairs,
there is no way in hell it's gonna get in here.
I am not a small person.
I can barely fit in this space, you know? So it's.
It's a. Like, I find myself, you know, this sort of haphazard.
Let's put in an elevator, but they don't think about the type of elevator, and, you know,
or they don't, you know - thought isn't put into
washrooms.
Because the thing I've noticed is that, okay, now we have the call to have
gender accessible washrooms, you know,
so we have parity, but then they don't
put in the wheelchair access.
It's like I.
You know, because I I've been using, you know, non gendered washrooms
because I go to gay bars.
You know, I remember one gay bar.
They used to write Us and Them, you know, but
in terms of the accessibility, there isn't thought with that.
Well, thank you for that.
Well, I have a last question for you, and it's about people who might have
inspired you or motivated you in your career, in your life as a performer.
If you had to think of one or two people who really
counted in your career, who would it be and why?
Two.
One, Nina Simone.
Because, a, she was a genius
and totally mad!
As a representative of somebody who had mental health issues,
it was patently obvious.
But at the same time, it wasn't like she was wrong.
Like, I mean, she just didn't have the patience to put up nonsense,
so she had her moments when she would be a bit glitchy.
But, you know, for me, she.
She is tantamount to, like.
I mean, she was also living in a,
living in a time of political strife,
and, you know, chose to speak up.
So definitely Nina Simone.
The other one is a little more personal, and that would be Odetta, because
I met Odetta a year before she died.
She did a concert at Hugh's Room, and I just happened to snag a dick at.
And I went to Hugh's Room, and she did her performance,
and she was ace, her last song.
I don't remember what it was.
She had the entire audience singing along with her.
And, of course, me being me, I had to sing with gusto.
And then we all applauded. Yay.
You know, and so on, and then everybody went on their way, and me being a bit
ballsy, I went up to her and I said, thank you very much for the performance.
And she looked at me and she said, are you a professional?
And I said, no.
She looked at me dead in the eye and said, why?
You know, and it was just like.
And that, that was like, that was the point where, like, I mean,
I had always seen myself as an amateur singer, but, I mean, we had,
this is a woman who performed with all the greats, you know, this is a woman
who was on a show with Johnny Cash.
I mean, she, she worked with all the big ones, and she took the time
to sort of point to me and say, you should be singing professionally.
Who am I to argue?
She detected you in the audience, right?
Yeah.
So, yeah, those are the two.
Well, thank you again for this conversation.
Thank you.
Yeah, I wish you all the best for all your projects, and, yeah,
see you around in the artistic scene. Okay.
Thank you. Thank you.
Bye.
♪ Closing theme music ♪