Feed the Soul
About the Series
Date(s): Wednesdays, April 29, May 6, May 13, May 27, June 3 (*NOTE: no lecture on May 20th)
Time: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Place: In-person or Live-streamed at St. Paul's Centre in Orillia
Price: $80 +HST for the whole 5 lecture series; $20 +HST for a single talk.
Discover the joy of lifelong creativity in this inspiring Spring 2026 lecture series with Third Age Learning Lakehead (TALL).
Why do we engage with the arts? Simply put: because it makes us happy. This series explores how connecting with music, visual art, theatre, literature, and creative expression can deepen life satisfaction at every stage of life. Drawing on research, personal reflection, and real-world examples, we’ll look at how the arts enrich our emotional well-being, strengthen community, and bring meaning to our everyday experiences.
Whether you’re a lifelong arts enthusiast or someone curious about where to begin, these sessions will offer practical, welcoming ways to get involved—no experience required. Learn how to rekindle old passions, discover new creative outlets, and integrate the arts into your life in ways that are accessible, fulfilling, and fun.
Come as you are, and leave inspired to create, connect, and thrive.
Please bring your own mug to enjoy a hot beverage during the intermission. Alternatively, TALL branded travel mugs will be available for purchase for $5 (cash only).
If you are unable to attend the lectures in person, a link will be sent to all registered participants for viewing from the comfort of your own places and spaces! Be sure to invite folks in your network, near and far!
Plus: Enjoy a FREE Lecture on April 27th, celebrating the President’s 60th Anniversary Public Lecture Series from 5:30-7:30pm on the Thunder Bay Campus or via livestream. Register for this lecture here.
Health Start - Daily Art
Kate Hilliard
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Are the arts an important part of your life? How so? Are you a creative observer or a creative participant? Any practice can be artful, and by extension - more meaningful! From cooking, to gardening, journaling to storytelling - you are creating an expression for yourself and the world around you! Join Kate Hilliard as she shares her ideas about creative practice as a philosophy and how to walk through life with a maker's mindset.
Kate Hilliard is the Artistic Director of Arts Orillia where she programs residencies and festivals to invite learning and community gatherings. She has been a faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University in the Dance and Acting departments since 2015. Kate studied Art History at the University of Toronto and holds an MFA through the Transart Institute and Plymouth University in the UK. Her own creative practice combines movement, digital media, writing, and collaborative conversation. Her most recent performance installation exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2026 and at the Venice International Art Fair in 2023. Kate is the co-author of Nature It Is, a reflection on creative practice with Canadian dance icon, Margie Gillis. She lives with her family on the Black River in Washago.
Learning to see again - Art and truth
Tony Bianco
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
This lecture encourages us to explore how we see, why we understand art (or don't), and what it does to our quality of life. We will take a brief journey through different cultures and their art, and end up igniting our own creative potential, artist or not. Whether or not we identify as artists, we all have the capacity to think and see creatively. The goal is to leave with a renewed curiosity about the visual world and a spark of confidence to explore our own creative potential.
Tony Bianco has been painting professionally for 40 years. His work has been featured on over 120 coins produced by the Royal Canadian Mint. He has created a series of over 150 paintings of our national parks, entitled “a Portrait of Canada” which has been shown in numerous museums and galleries across Canada.
His work has been described as optimistic, which he takes as the greatest compliment.
“When I was a young boy, I would stop by a forest on the way home from school and settle at the base of a tree, waiting. Presently, I would begin to see a beauty in the light. Birds and animals would appear and there would be a great sense of the sacred animation of all things around me. I’ve been trying to capture that beauty and spirit in my work ever since.”
THEATRE: Not for Nothing or Nobody
Chancellor Rita Deverell & Rex Deverell
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
For 65-ish years, since high school in Orillia, Rex Deverell has been engaged in his arts (award winning playwright, librettist, theolog,). Rita Shelton Deverell, since high school in Houston, Texas has been engaged in hers (theatre, media, academe, Governor General’s Performing Arts Lifetime Achievement 2022). Together, for this edition of TALL, with excerpts from their work and the work of others, in conversation with you, they explore “Theatre about Something for Somebody.”* Warning: videotape and snippets of each Deverell’s newest, never-presented work are included!
*quote from Florence Bean James, theatre director, 1892-1988.
Rex Deverell is an award-winning playwright and lyricist. (Canadian Authors Association Medal, Chalmers Award) Work for the forum theatre group Mixed Company, includes Life Gets in the Way, Project Act, and Diss. He has been resident playwright at Regina’s Globe Theatre, University of Windsor, and The Blyth Festival. His plays have been translated into French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Japanese. His most produced play, Boiler Room Suite, has been performed from coast to coast and internationally. His opera libretti include composer Elizabeth Raum’s Time of Trouble, produced by Opera Nova Scotia, and Leviathan Hook by Qenten Doolittle. He is proud to have been raised in Orillia, to have hung out at the Opera House, to have gone to movies there (in the days when it showed movies) to have learned his craft after school at the old library, and to call this town, his home. He is currently at work on a new play about a famous disappeared monument once in Couchiching Beach Park.
Throughout her career in broadcasting, journalism and theatre, Rita Shelton Deverell has stood out for her innovation, creativity and inclusion. Driven by her commitment to social justice, she has focused on telling the stories of those whose voices are often unheard. She co-founded VisionTV, and is one of the first Black women in Canada to be a television host and network executive. Born in Houston, Texas, Dr. Deverell joined CBC TV in 1973. At Vision TV she produced and appeared on several shows, including Arts Express, which explored the intersection between spirituality and the arts. From 2002 to 2005 she was news director of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, and mentored her Indigenous successor. Her play Who You Callin Black Eh? won the Teen Jury prize at the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival. Of her multifaceted career, Dr. Deverell notes, “One of the reasons I have worked at so many things is that when a door or a wall or a glass ceiling is put up around me, rather than beating my head against it, I change direction.”
~Taken from the Governor General’s Performing Arts website - 2022 Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award -Television broadcaster, theatre artist, scholar and activist
Personal Empowerment: Writing Our Lives
Isabel Huggan
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Isabel Huggan, prize-winning author and creative writing teacher, will speak about the
various pleasures to be had -- at any age -- in writing and rewriting our own stories. Getting to
know ourselves through our own words is a gift we can enjoy and share.
Recently retired in Orillia, Isabel Huggan was an instructor in the Humber College Writing Program until 2020. Over the past 40 years, she has given writing workshops in Canada, Kenya, Australia, Switzerland, France and the Philippines. Her published work includes the prize-winning memoir (Belonging) and two collections of stories (The Elizabeth Stories and You Never Know), along with book reviews, essays and poems in literary magazines. With a career that included both university and high school teaching and newspaper reporting, she remains enthusiastic about the benefits to be achieved by writing – pen on paper or fingers on keys, diary entries, letters, fictional stories or truthful accounts -- believing that the written word empowers both writer and reader.
The Music of Talk
Tom Allen
Wednesday, June 3, 2026
This closing lecture in the Feed the Soul series explores the profound ways music connects us to ourselves and to one another. Through rhythm, melody, and shared emotional experience, music reaches beneath words to express what we often cannot say, reminding us that our feelings are universal. As the series concludes, this talk reflects on music’s power to comfort, unite, and affirm that, no matter where we are in life, we are never truly alone.
Tom Allen was born in Montreal. He worked as a bass trombonist in New York City when there were still places you just didn’t go, toured with the Great Lakes Brass and began working for the CBC on his 30th birthday, a very long time ago. He has written books, created and hosted countless shows for theatre companies and orchestras, as well as touring a series of chamber musicals with his beloved, the harpist Lori Gemmell. Those include The Missing Pages, Being Lost and JS Bach’s Long Walk in the Snow, plus a forthcoming exploration of the music of deep geological time with the poet Don McKay. Tom was recently granted an honorary Doctoral degree from Brandon University. His latest project is an 18th century-style Classical Musick Almanack, being created with illustrator Ian Bell, built on gossip, smut, steampunk technology and, within certain limitations, history. He can’t imagine there’s anything else you’d like to know, but if there is visit his website, www.tomtomallen.com .
How to Buy Tickets
The Spring 2026 session of Third Age Learning Lakehead will be delivered in person at the St. Paul's Centre in Orillia and virtually. Light refreshments (coffee and cookies) will be served if attending in-person. Please bring a reusable mug.
Tickets for the full series are $80 plus HST. Single lecture tickets are $20 + HST.