Give yourself a treat, check out the Cultural Centre

November 27, 2013 · 0 Comments

The Cultural Centre has been an enormous cultural addition to Aurora. It has provided our Town with a wide range of concerts from folk to classical throughout each year, performed by accomplished artists.
To see them in Toronto, ticket prices would be much higher, plus gas and parking charges.
Other opportunities it provides are theatre performances, ballet, historical displays like the use of the Town’s historic artefacts to create a memorial for the Town for Remembrance Day and play readings in which actors read out new plays, making audiences able to feed their reactions to the writer.
There have been exhibitions of varied paintings, metalwork, pottery, from modern to more traditional, that are open to everyone – and free. This is a great opportunity to introduce children to these subjects that may give them a lasting interest in this creativity or promote a wish in them to create themselves.
When we took our grandson to galleries, I’d ask him to look through a room and then name his five favourites each time. It made him study them more deeply. I remember a show that was powerful about how the Japanese in Canada were treated during the war, with many letters from them or their children. There are also art classes for children or adults and writing courses.
Last year, I asked the Centre if they were interested in staging a small exhibition of our daughter, Melinda’s art work and letters between us but also from the slant she had extreme bi-polar disorder.
The staff welcomed the opportunity, but staged it in the Aurora Room, renamed “Melinda’s Room” for the six weeks it ran. They displayed her work skillfully and were sensitive to our request. When the exhibition closed, we were given the guestbook in which the majority of visitors had written a paragraph of how it had moved them or brought forward their own struggles with mental illness.
For those of you who have never visited the Cultural Centre, go soon and give yourself a treat.

Dierdre Tomlinson
Aurora