Rice is nice
Of All The People In All The World (Americas) - Toronto4
Originally uploaded by Grae-ZI spent the past couple of weeks surrounded by quite a lot of rice.
The delightful British theatre company Stan's Cafe came to Toronto for the Harbourfront World Stage Festival with their awesome, rice-heavy show Of All the People in All the World, and they hired several local performers to help them put the show together and wander around wearing labcoats. I was lucky enough to be one of those performers.
In The Rice Show (check out more pictures of rice piles here), each grain of rice represents one person. Piles of rice are used to demonstrate various statistics, from the massive (the population of the U.S. - 303,000,000) to the bitty (number of people who have gone over Niagara Falls and survived - 10). The show packs a visual punch, and offers a different way to envision, for example, the number of people in North and South America who live on less than $2 a day. It's not all depressing stats - there are also silly things like the population of Pie Town, New Mexico (2,900), and the number of people fed by the world's largest pumpkin pie.
Over the course of two weeks, I touched more rice than I ever thought possible. I carried and scooped and swept and weighed and measured and counted. I explained to several children that not all kids in the world have the access to health care that they do and therefore go unvaccinated and die from diseases like polio. I erased footprints.
I met some truly lovely folks and got a brief glimpse of Canada through the eyes of a visitor. How often do you get to hear a trip to Niagara Falls recounted with childlike wonder by two grown men?
I'll miss you, Stan's Cafe. Please come again soon.