BURLINGTON POST: Making our dreamworld a reality
By Trevor Copp, Guest Contributor
"As a bedroom community, we live in a dreamworld.
By that I mean Burlington doesn’t exist on its own terms; it exists because Toronto and Hamilton exist, they fill in our blanks. Many of us sleep here to actually work, play and participate in the culture of the ‘real’ world over there. That’s why the upcoming Cultural Action Plan presents us with a crisis of meaning: do we want to become a real place, with our own cultural richness? Or is the MoneySense No. 1 rating all the richness we want?
I operate a professional theatre company, Tottering Biped Theatre. Since we heard about a June 19 vote being deferred, we started to organize a rally for that date. We’ve been drawing attention to arts issues here for years, and not simply for our benefit. It’s because sometimes I drive past our strip malls and housing subdivisions and wonder — if I woke up in another GTA suburb an hour away, how long would it take me to notice? It’s the kind of bad dream only culture and art cure."
