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Seeking Out Conflict

By
(from left) Makambe Simamba and Valerie Planche. Photo by Mike Tan.

Winners and Losers is described as “a conversation between lifelong friends”. It is a Governor General award nominated play written by James Long and Marcus Youssef, who are actual long-time friends.

The two sit at a table and play a game they made up that debates whether people, places or things are winners or losers. The game begins innocently enough, but inevitably creates tension between the two friends, calling into question their closest relationships and most deeply held beliefs about themselves and others.

While the performance of Winners and Losers feels like it might be 50% improvised, it’s probably closer to 90% scripted – though the published script was created almost entirely from transcripts of improvised conversation.

James and Marcus suggest others approaching new productions of the script “use [the] text as a guide in developing a new show that is built on the frame or structure of this one”. This was the challenge I chose to undertake with my company, Chromatic Theatre, in early 2016.

I quickly set about to find two actors who I thought might be a compelling pair for this artistic process. Some careful thought led me to Ellen Close and Makambe K. Simamba, two of my artistic colleagues that I was excited to work with, and who I thought would be great fits for the type of show that asks you to put parts of your real lived experience out into the world for public consumption. They were both keen and interested to be involved with the adaptation, and eager to get to know each other better.

The plan was to create a dramaturgical skeleton for the play. We broke the existing text down into beats based on form and function, rather than beats based on content. What was the purpose of each beat? Where did the plot turns occur? What were the mechanisms leading up to each shift?

Hanging the improvised text on the dramaturgical skeleton. Makambe Simamba and Valerie Planche. Photo by Mike Tan.

We then began to play the game of winners and losers, improvising conversations based on topics we thought might be compelling. At its heart, James’ and Marcus’ play is about social class, and we chose our topics hoping that they would lead to a major ideological difference. The clear starting point was to focus on the differences between these two performers: race and parenthood. One performer is Zambian, the other is Canadian; one performer is a mother, the other is not.

It turns out that Ellen and Makambe have a lot in common beyond these obvious differences. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that finding the heart of our play was much more challenging than I had anticipated. Through our first week of explorations, only one consistent conflict began to emerge: spirituality vs. rationality.

We had planned to rehearse four weeks over four months. Halfway through our second week together, Ellen realized that the conflict we were pursuing was manufactured. She took a very brave step and suggested that there was limited artistic rigour in pursuing a path that encouraged lightly held artistic opinions to be contrived into fundamental beliefs. At the end of the day, and despite all appearances, she and Makambe simply had too much in common to achieve a fulfilling central conflict. To remedy this, she decided she would step away from the project to make space for another voice that would be a more compelling foil for Makambe’s.

This shook me to my artistic core. Ellen is an artist that I very much respect, who has a long history in new work creation and practice at using personal experience to fuel the creative process. If she didn’t want to be in my project, did that mean it was bad? Was I a bad artist? Her decision challenged me into questioning if the artwork I wanted to do had artistic integrity or value.

In the middle of the creation process, this was terrifying, humbling, and challenging. I had never felt so vulnerable… but this wasn’t about me. This was about the pursuit of artistic rigour. It was about making sure we didn’t half-ass the project and put out a product that we weren’t proud of. Ellen and Makambe said they still believed in the project, and Ellen restated her commitment to ensuring the project was completed – just with the right people.

So, with two weeks left in the development schedule, the three of us set out to find a new actor. Again, there was some guesswork involved. Without a life-long friendship to challenge, how would we know that any artist would work in the way we needed with Makambe? The three of us put our heads together and threw ideas around until we came up with a person who excited us: Valerie Planche, an established actor and director in Calgary. Pros: she’s well known, vocal about her opinions, and a mainstay of the Calgary theatre community. Cons: she’s not done much devised work, is of a different generation, none of us knows her very well.

We decided to ask her; what did we have to lose?

Valerie was not only interested in the project, but excited about it! Makambe and I took all that we learned and dove back into the process with Valerie along for the ride. And things started to work.

(from left) Valerie Planche, Jenna Rodgers, and Makambe Simamba. Photo by Mike Tan.

It turned out that her being part of a different generation was a huge positive factor – she was so game to talk about her experiences and fascinated to learn about Makambe’s. It wasn’t easy, but this time we started to get content that felt right. The game started to feel interesting, which helped the process to feel rich, fulfilling, and challenging in a productive way. Makambe and Valerie were responding to each other authentically in ways that were deeply evocative and provocative. We were no longer grasping for content, instead, we were generating hours of conversation.

We sent nearly 10 hours of recorded conversations and improvisations to a transcription service, and received hundreds of pages back. In our final week together, we set to hanging the text on the original dramaturgical skeleton we had created months earlier. We finished the development process with a script and an invited reading.

I don’t think the script is quite complete – we still need to iron out a few transitions, and work on some of the more physical components of the play… but we have a script that we are proud of, and a couple of new friendships.

Maybe even some that will last a lifetime.

Reconciliation, within ourselves

By
A rally for Tina Fontaine. Photo by Nikki Shaffeeullah

My relationship to Canada has moved through three phases in my life so far.

As a Toronto-area kid, I believed the idea I was told: Canada was a haven for diversity, a multicultural mosaic that, above all, was a more just and peaceful place than America. I knew racism existed – I experienced it and felt it and saw it – but I believed it was possible to work against, because this country, Canada, belonged to immigrants and people who look like me as much as it did to white people.

I got older. I found myself in more spaces with Indigenous artists and activists. I was challenged, and I learned things I never knew before. I realized I had rarely before had relationships with Indigenous people because that’s how Canada had been built – through segregation, through apartheid, through genocide. I read essays like “Decolonizing Antiracism”. I realized I had been wrong.

Canada does not “belong” to whoever claims it. Racialized settlers – no matter how marginalized – cannot simply buy into the myth of Canada as the multicultural paradise that it is sold to be. I did not want to be an abettor of white colonial violence. I did not want to enact similar patterns of violence that colonized and displaced my own ancestors. I was ashamed to be Canadian. I rejected the title.

I didn’t want to be Canadian.

But, of course, I am Canadian. I can’t simply reject being Canadian because it is shameful. I am Canadian. I am a citizen of this state, a state that was built to serve settlers – white settlers, and also those who stay complicit in the settler colonial project. Now, like many of us, I am thinking about what it means to both be Canadian and accountable to the ongoing violence this state enacts.

When I first heard the words “truth and reconciliation” applied to Canada, I didn’t think it meant to suggest a reconciliation between two peoples (what a ridiculous suggestion that would be, anyway – you can’t just simply shake hands and be friends after centuries of oppression); rather, I always thought the word “reconciliation” was a call to Canadians like me to reconcile, within ourselves, two starkly different images: the one of Canada as an inclusive society where anything is possible, and the image of Canada as an illegal, violent colonial project that continues to exist and profit off of the displacement, dispossession, and deaths of Indigenous people and communities.

I can’t reconcile these ideas, because they are incompatible. What I can do is acknowledge (and grieve) my complicity in the former, and work for accountability in the latter. This state is a sum of many systems. Every single one of them that theoretically could have helped Tina Fontaine – Child and Family Services, law enforcement, the justice system – failed her. These systems failed Colten Boushie, and are failing his community. These systems fail Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit folks, youth, and communities every day – because that’s how and why they were built. Colonial power is woven through every piece of this Canadian fabric.

I want to ask us all – how are the systems we are a part of reproducing colonial violence? Do you have some bit of voice or power within the justice system, or social work, or education, health care, arts and culture, hospitality, something else? How can you shift something around you or even within yourself to help dismantle these systems? It’s time to tear them down. You are not powerless. We are not powerless. We can’t let ourselves off that easy.

+++

Justice for Colten by Zola_Mtl http://bit.ly/2psP55y

I originally wrote the above as a Facebook post, the morning after Raymond Cormier was found not guilty for the murder of Tina Fontaine, two weeks after Gerald Stanley was acquitted in the shooting death of Colten Boushie. SpiderWebShow invited me to republish it here, and I agreed because I really want to have this conversation with fellow non-Indigenous artists in the Canadian arts community. I am heartened to see us as a community listen and learn about what it means to meaningfully support, witness, engage, produce, and grow from the art and stories of our Indigenous colleagues. We give land acknowledgements before shows; we are sometimes earnest and often clumsy. We know there is more to do.

And I just keep thinking about Tina and Colten. I think about the young and emerging Indigenous artists I know, and the many, many more I do not know. I spend a lot of time doing theatre with young people who face structural barriers to artistic development and arts education – people of colour, LGBTQ2S youth, youth from working class, low-income and poor backgrounds, etc. This work makes me reflect on how equity (in the arts starts, and elsewhere) starts with accessible mentorship and education opportunities for those from equity-seeking communities; it reaffirms to me the importance of people having access to mentors and teachers from their own communities. In this ‘era’ of ‘reconciliation’, how can we, as the individuals who make up the Canadian arts community, invest ourselves in young Indigenous artists?

I know you are with me on this, Canadian arts colleague reading this piece. I also know how much you have to consider your own challenges, especially when times are tough. I know how hard it can be to implicate ourselves in the colonial project. My ancestral history is wholly scarred by British colonization. Most of my ancestors, as far as I knew, came from colonized India. They were brought through the coercive and exploitative system of indentureship to the Caribbean: to Guyana, a country also colonized by the British, the ancestral land of the Carib and the Arawak and many other Indigenous nations. My parents and their families fled a Guyana wracked by the civil turmoil to Tkaronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory, the colonized land where I was born. I do not align myself with colonizers. That would be an insult to my ancestors, and to my lived experiences. But: I do know that I am afforded many of the benefits of settler colonialism here in Turtle Island.

Sometimes, when we have experiences of marginalization, we hold on to them – they are indicators of our resilience, they are legitimization of our ongoing struggles. They give us permission to be angry, to be sad, to be tired. And sometimes, this makes it harder for us to acknowledge the ways in which we benefit from other peoples’ marginalizations. To my Canadian performing arts community – especially those of us who are not rich, who are not men, who are indie, who are young, who are queer, who are people of colour – it is so easy, in our corner of the world, to feel marginalized by our status as artists and arts workers. And, we are: arts under neoliberalism means that every part of what we do is underscored by resource scarcity, work precarity, and uncertainty about the future.

Even knowing all this, how can we, as a community, commit ourselves to the health and vitality of Indigenous youth? How can we, as an arts community, commit ourselves, ongoingly, to the artistic growth of Indigenous youth? How can we, as a national community of artists, meaningfully support our Indigenous colleagues in creating space to teach and make art with their youth? How can we move resources to make this more possible? I say move resources, because I am not talking about charity – voluntary, elective giving – I am talking about reparations.

How do we help repair communities that have been harmed by a colonial project that most of us (however little or unwillingly) benefit from? I say move resources not because I assume you, reader, are resource wealthy, or that you are undeserving of resources – I mean, I am not wealthy, and I believe I am deserving – but I wonder how we each implicate ourselves in reparations, in our corner of the country? What could be transformed if, say, each of us took half a penny from every dollar we made as artists and gave it back to Indigenous artistic communities so they can invest in their artistic health, their youth? What could it look like to make reconciliation a day-to-day practice in our artistic work?

I will end with these questions because I do not have solutions. I have desire for us to keep talking to each other, and to talk to and listen to our Indigenous friends and colleagues. I hope we as an arts community can commit to finding concrete and ongoing ways to protect, lift up and celebrate Indigenous youth.

#JusticeforTinaFontaine
#JusticeforColtenBoushie

Learning To Love Being “In My Head”: Transitioning From Acting to Management

By
Post-It Note Office: photo by Michael Arrighi. CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

“Laura is the most cerebral actor I’ve ever worked with.”

I’m 20, sitting in a term evaluation interview for my third year of theatre school. The comment comes from the director of my first semester show who agonized over the fact that I could not, no, would not get out of my head enough to perform.

I mean, he wasn’t lying. I had slowly dropped my lines in this quasi-collective creation, replacing them with nods, handshakes, giggles, and grins. No one noticed. By the time the show opened I’d reduced my biggest role in the play to a mere seven sentences. And still, no one noticed.

Except the director, who three weeks later acknowledged my efforts by giving me the lowest grade and the burning the word “cerebral” into my memory. I had entered the program eager to learn about performing but this was the nail in the coffin; I declared I was done with acting. So, what was my interest?

When I told instructors that I wasn’t into acting anymore, none of them evaluated my list-making qualities and recommended a career change to arts management; instead they continued to do their job and make me an actor. How could I know management was the right choice if my only stab had been as a department student representative? If I was really cerebral shouldn’t I have chosen an academic program in the first place? Was this “giving up” on my dream too soon?  I was left to Google it on my own.

Me, age 7, on my first day of school. Planner from the start.

Option one was to build a time machine, go back in time, and tell high-school-Laura that acting wouldn’t work out. I jest, but it’s important to note that administrative roles, let alone administrative programs, were never explained or mentioned in any of my high school drama classes. Had I learned at that age about producing, marketing, and programming, I probably would have self-selected into a different undergraduate program from the get-go. Representation and visibility are important: had I seen someone who had my skills and desires in a fulfilling role off-stage I would have felt like I was making the right choice.

Option two (a slightly more realistic one) was to transition to a more academic theatre program, one that would have a course or two in management, or transition to an undergraduate arts management program. A brief survey of arts managers in Toronto shows that many did not graduate from conservatory arts training. Only two theatre students at Humber, where I eventually studied arts administration, came from conservatory programs. Unfortunately transitioning to an academic program was difficult: many universities will not accept college transfer credits so those who discover they’re meant for the books may have to start their undergrad all over again. In the end, I stayed in my program for fear of leaving my friends, though my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

Option three was to study management at the post-post-secondary level. Conservatory or not, undergraduate programs are not sufficient prerequisites anymore. I was lucky enough to have a degree and a diploma (shout out to joint programs!) so I could pursue a graduate program, but the average conservatory student would not be admitted to Humber or any other post-graduate program. Employers want a balance of management and a creative mind, which can only develop in an combo artistic-management setting.

After graduating, I bid goodbye to acting, applied and was accepted to the Arts Administration and Cultural Management program at Humber College. Some prospective managers rely on traditional business programs but the unique demands of artistic leadership, like navigating the charitable sector and interacting with artists, require specialized training.

Me, age 23, on my last ‘first day of school’, heading off to Humber.

Arts management is not a particularly new area of study, but the programs are scattered and inconsistent. Humber defunded their program for over five years (2009 to 2014), Western University ended their long running certificate program this past year and replaced it with a non-profit management diploma, or students who still have a passion for the art itself can apply for the joint MFA/MBA at York University.

Options outside of Ontario, like the Arts and Cultural Management certificate at MacEwan University in Edmonton, are poorly advertised on the national level, and programs in the US are astronomically expensive for international students. One girl in my cohort came from Newfoundland because there was nothing east of Quebec to educate her in what she needed to know. How is that possible?

There’s definitely a demand from the students (my year was a double-cohort of 60) though few schools are rising to the challenge. We continue to produce hundreds of theatre school grads across the country each year with limited ability as an industry to immediately employ them, yet the arts career that could use more people (hint-hint-fundraising!) has the same number of institutions as clown school.

We need a better understanding of and visibility for arts managers in theatre. Maybe if Glee had featured a character who only wanted to schedule rehearsal times and book busses to regionals the average person would understand what exactly I do every day.

Ep13.2 Sectionals: Finn Hits the Fan. But who booked the accessible bus?CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

It’s been less than a year since I graduated from Humber, but already I sense trends in our industry that make me hopeful for the next generation of arts managers. Job postings that encourage specialized programs like mine, increasing attendance at those programs, and anecdotes of high school teachers who let students produce their own work reassure me that fewer young people will feel smushed into acting when perhaps they’re meant for other things.

My biggest dream is that the next time a student is told they’re too cerebral for the stage or won’t “get out of their heads” that the comment is immediately followed with “And that’s ok.” Because it is.

The Long, Loud Resonance of Creeps

By
Brett Harris, Paul Beckett, Adam Grant Warren in Creeps

I first encountered CREEPS in the fall of 2004, during my last year at Memorial University in Newfoundland. One of my fellow theatre nerds (I think it was Clint Butler) flat out told me to read it.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “I think you’ll get a lot.”

He was right.

For the handful of Canadian theatre-makers who may not know the show, CREEPS follows five men “employed” in the sheltered workshops of 1970s Toronto. Men with Cerebral Palsy. Like me. More than that, when it premiered at Tarragon in 1971, CREEPS was held up as groundbreaking theatre that drew its depiction of life with disability from the playwright’s own lived experience.

From CREEPS, I grew my first impressions of the power of bodies like mine on stage. And there was David Freeman, shaking foundations with his first play – an unflinching picture of his desire to do more with his life than the few simple things for which society thought he might be fit. And there was I, an aspiring theatre-maker who also happened to have CP, reading Freeman’s words and nodding my head hard enough to give myself whiplash.

There, in the fall of 2004, CREEPS resonated with me in ways I’d never felt before. That’s the goal, I thought. Resonance. By the time I discovered the play, it was already 33 years old. But, to me, that made sense because the best stories don’t just resonate. They resonate across time. Right?

Cut to 2016. I’d left Newfoundland for Vancouver and been living here for nine years, slowly compiling a body of work in theatre, film, writing, and dance. Then, in the fall of that year, the fine folks at Vancouver’s Realwheels Theatre asked me to audition for their upcoming production of… you guessed it… CREEPS.

“Yes!” I said. “Of course! Absolutely!”

“Fantastic!” they said. “We’ll send you the script.”

I reread it. Where I’d once seen righteous indignation, I now heard whining. Where there had been the rare voices of characters I could’ve sat down to share stories with, there were now gobs of thinly-veiled victim dialogue from Tom, Jim, Sam, and Pete, characters I found almost as interchangeable as their names. What had happened?

The short answer: a lot. In 2004, I’d snap-neck nodded at every other line. So much so that, when I finished reading CREEPS for the umpteenth time, I resolved to look more closely at the ways I felt trapped and hidden, and set about changing things. In 2016, having established myself on the other side of the country and achieved some modest success – most of which had nothing to do with my expression of the capital-D-capital-E Disability Experience – I think part of me was oddly surprised to find Tom and company right where I’d left them. CREEPS, I realized, wasn’t meant to resonate across time. The Realwheels production would be a measurement of how much things had changed since 1971. 

How much was that exactly? In the 45-year history of the play, this production was billed as the first to feature a fully integrated cast of professional actors with and without disabilities. For me, that was equal parts exciting, surprising, and disappointing. Compounded with the fact that neither the show’s director, Brian Cochrane, nor Realwheels’ Managing AD, Rena Cohen identify as having disabilities, the production equation gave me pause.

Adam Grant Warren and Aaron Roderick in Creeps

I wondered who exactly this play was still resonating with: those with lived experience of disability, or those outside that experience, trying to get a look in? And if they got a look in, what would they see in such an old picture? In the end, would the audiences applaud the work as a whole, or the “inspiring” efforts of an integrated cast? And if the latter, wouldn’t that just reflect some of the very same power dynamics that were present in the workshops themselves? Even if the applause came for both the work and the “inspiration”, I wasn’t sure that would be enough for me.

Still, I auditioned. Partly out of respect for what the play had meant to me, and partly because I wanted to believe my misgivings were misplaced. I couldn’t poll the whole of each audience, but to my infinite gratitude, and their infinite credit, I didn’t need to worry about Rena and Brian. They understood their positions in the wider politics of the play. And on the occasions when they were uncertain, they stepped up and approached those with lived experience for the clarification they needed.

Which is more than I can say for myself, at least at the outset of rehearsal. There were three actors with disabilities in the production, but I was the only one with Cerebral Palsy. So, when I was eventually cast as Jim Harris, I figured at least that degree of authentic physicality was good to go.

Then I met Jeanne Morton, A consultant on the show, Jeanne had staffed in the sheltered workshop system. When Jeanne watched me as Jim, she said that maybe I should try increasing my level of spasticity. Maybe I should experiment with what folks with the condition sometimes call the “CP accent”. In essence, Jeanne was suggesting that I appear more disabled than I am.

I resisted at first. Who was this woman to tell me that I was doing Cerebral Palsy wrong? Then she explained that almost all of the people in the workshops had had more severe manifestations than mine. They experienced communication difficulties; their levels of spasticity were much higher. In short, someone like me, as I am, would probably never have been in the workshops in the first place.

As a person with Cerebral Palsy, I felt the resonance again; this time on a different frequency. In 2004, I’d seen CREEPS as a reflection of my own lived reality. In 2016, by the light of the choices I’d made and the opportunities I’d had, Jim Harris – and the play as a whole – had become a reminder of the privilege, ability, and uncommon luck that had kept me blissfully ignorant of what the sheltered workshops had meant to their occupants, and to society, just one short decade before I was born.

As an artist I knew that, for a work explicitly created to reflect the lived experience of a particular population, 45 years is too long to wait for members of that population to appear in the work. That length of time spoke to a much bigger problem of access and opportunity, and helped me understand just how much of an outlier my education, my training, and even my luck had made me. Thanks to CREEPS, I recognized that my opportunities leave me with the means to create opportunities for others. People who want to do the work I do, but haven’t been given the chance.

I need to be clear: performing in CREEPS was an honour, but after it closed I felt the satisfying responsibility to find, represent, and help in the making of newer, better work. Now, I find myself working with an increasingly large national community of artists, including Realwheels Theatre, toward a time when CREEPS might be produced again – with a fully integrated cast of actors with and without disabilities. If and when that happens, I’d like to help make sure we’ve moved on to a place where it’s no big deal. Where, if the work resonates, it will resonate for the right reasons in its own right time.

Front L-R: Paul Beckett, Jayson McLean, Christopher Gauthier, Adam Grant Warren, David Bloom, Brett Harris. Back L-R: Brian Cochrane,
Lauchlin Johnston, Rena Cohen, Ingrid Turk, Aaron Roderick, Genevieve Fleming, David Kaye

Thought Residency: Brendan McMurtry-Howlett

By

Last post here friends. And I’m going to give it up to my gramps, his fourth and final hope for his children.

But before I do, I’ve made a few changes that I’ll explain. My grandfather was a minister in the United Church and so had a specific relationship to the idea of God. That word “God” doesn’t really mean the same thing to me, but I’m still captivated by the notion of Faith, a secular faith that for me underpins my belief in theatre to nourish our hope in humanity and to strive for a better, fairer and just world.

“My fourth hope for my children is the ground for the other three: that they will live by conviction; finding their place in the purpose of creation, and in the community of those who put their trust in creation; carefully cultivating the means by which their faith is nurtured; having the courage to act their faith in spite of apathy and opposition around them; growing in the spirit of love, which is the chief of the fruits of our world.

It is not that I want to lay these as heavy things on my children whether they want them or not. They are the chief things of my heritage, the best gifts I have to pass on. And so I offer them, knowing that they will make their own free response.”

Thanks everyone.

My third hope for my children is that they will feel a sense of responsibility for the world of the present and the future. There is always the temptation to use the gifts of one’s heritage for self-serving purposes. The urgent problems of our global village require the understanding and efforts of all people of goodwill. We are being challenged by the Third World, and by those Canadians who are being marginalized and victimized by the economic and social development policies of our own country. For my children to respond to these challenges means to be prepared to break with many of the prevailing attitudes and life-styles of our time.

 


My second hope is that my children will always be conscious of their place in our family. In the past the extended family provided a means of moral and psychological support for its members, both young and old. In our urban, industrialized society, when families are scattered widely, new ways must be found to keep in touch. If relationships are to continue, they must be nourished. Letters and visits and the rituals of family observance become all the more important.

 

Hi there, Brendan McMurtry-Howlett here. For today’s thought I’m going to have a guest posting from my grandfather (Doug McMurtry). He passed away at 97 about a year and a half ago but he wrote this piece in 1976 called The Hopes For My Children. Here is one section:

My first hope is that they may learn to find their place in the natural order of creation. The Indigenous people have shown us that to be in tune with nature is to find strength, relaxation, and a sense of identity, as well as a means of survival. The mountains and the sky, the prairies and the sea, the northland and the cultivated soil are a gift to be received with gratitude and respect.

 


I’ve been thinking more and more about embracing inefficiency. I have spent so much energy in trying to work more efficiently, build structures that promote efficiency, save time and money. But actually I find so much joy comes from inefficiency, the indirect route from a to b. There is beauty and magic and humanity in the inefficient. It seems to me an important form of resistance to the relentless drive of the world we live in.

 


I keep hoping I’ll one day feel like an expert at making theatre. But is is possible to feel like an expert at something that is supposed to be new and fresh each time you approach it? Every time I go to coach or teach or dramaturge or direct, I keep hoping I’ll one day show up with short cuts and ways of being really efficient, and having all the answers. But maybe that’s just capitalism trying to crush the beautiful inefficiencies of creation. Well, today capitalism lost and my inefficiency won the day.

 

Hi there, Brendan McMurtry-Howlett again.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of transcendence, and more specifically the transcendence of concept. What that means to me is when you hit that point in a project where you move beyond what you originally thought your project was about, to what it REALLY is about. It’s something I’m always striving for in my work, when I let go of whatever clever little ideas I was so proud of at the beginning and find something with some real depth. I’ve been thinking about this as Transcendence of Concept.

 

I’ve been thinking about and learning about the treaties and the nation-to-nation relationships that underpin the social, political, and legal fabric of this country Canada. I’ve started reading up on some of the treaty negotiations and agreements across this country, and it’s been really interesting, perhaps I should say revealing, to read the official Canadian Government accounts of the treaty agreements, and then the accounts of the first nation or nations who were the other side of that exact same treaties. It makes me consider my responsibility to these treaties that were signed by the government that represents me, but also my responsibility to the land on which each of these treaties were signed, and in many cases, which had a long history of treaties predating the processes with Europeans. It makes me think of my responsibility as an artist and storyteller to uphold the treaties that govern this land I’m on. And I guess I’m curious as to how many of you out there have actually read the details of the treaties that govern the land you live on.

PS. Great book to read – Unsettling Canada by Arthur Manuel!!!!!

 

Hi there, this is Brendan McMurtry-Howlett and this is my thought for the day.

I’ve been thinking about how much of the creative process, for me, is just about perseverance. To stick with a project, or idea, or piece of writing long enough that it stops feeling terrible and turns into something concrete that I don’t feel half bad about. I run into this all the time, but I can never say exactly what it is that I do that makes a project turn the corner into something interesting and concrete, other than… I just put in enough time. I find this to be both an exhausting notion, but also an encouraging one at the same time.”

 

When was it that we decided to try to fit theatre into the consumerist model of selling a product to the public? As a “product” Theatre has got to be the worst thing to try to sell –  it costs a lot to create and has an unforgiving expiry date – if a seat in a theatre is not sold one night, you can never try to sell it again. Whereas a can of soup can sit on a shelf for months, even years.

I think theatre’s strength is that it offers an opportunity to be a part of a community and it seems antithetical to try to “sell” that notion in a supply and demand context. I’m hoping we can find alternative economic models that takes the pressure off of trying to sell tickets to meet budget and allows us to focus on making the community experience of theatre truly inclusive and accessible for all.

 

So the thought today comes after a conversation with a friend of mine, a fellow artist who was telling me about working on a show that required him to use a British accent. He was working with the production’s dialect coach and was given a bunch of audio samples of British dialects for him to learn. Now my friend is person of colour, and actually, his family is from England with deep roots in Jamaica. But here he is listening to all of these audio clips that had been brought to him, these sounds and dialects that he was being asked to replicate, and every single person on these audio clips was white. And he said to the dialect coach, well, aren’t there any black British people that I could use as samples? And the dialect coach had never even thought about that possibility.

So this brings me to my thought: does it really count as diverse casting if people of colour are being hired and then are essentially asked to play white people?

P.S. If you haven’t seen The Shipment by Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company you should definitely do so right here: http://youngjeanlee.org/work/the-shipment/

 

So I recently went to see a movie in theatres, and it was the first time in a long time that I’ve seen a popular action film in the theatres. The trailers were playing and I just couldn’t believe it. 9 out of 10 trailers were for remakes from the 90’s, or a prequel/sequel spin off from a 90’s franchise. And I couldn’t help but think as I was sitting there: Humanity is doomed. Our fate is sealed. That’s it. We’re done. Is the future really so bleak and horrible that all we can do is cling to these nostalgic stories from our past? Is the idea of a new story or new narrative so threatening because it forces us to think about the future, which in humanity’s case, is no longer guaranteed on this planet? I don’t know, but I couldn’t help but think, sitting in this packed theatre, this is definitely an End-of-the-Empire moment– sitting here celebrating our past glories while the empire goes up in flames around us.

 

Hi there, this is Brendan McMurtry-Howlett, I’m the Resident Thinker for March, sooooo welcome.

I’m going to be honest with you, I stayed up really late last night trying to finish a grant. And you know what? I kind of enjoyed it. I’ve wrestling a lot recently with trying to adhere to a self-imposed 9 to 5 structure for my independent work, I don’t know I guess to make myself feel like an adult.

I guess it makes me think about the strength that comes from going with the flow and responding to impulses rather than forcing an imposed structure. Yes, I may wish I were a responsible adult who could get things done in a reasonable manner, but the reality is that I’ll waste far less energy and time if I stop fighting my own personal work habits, and just ride the waves when they come. Maybe I should take up surfing…

Training Actors

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Exit the King (2017) at the National Theatre School. Photos by Maxime Côté with Josie Jones, Justin Shaw, Yousef Kadoura, Ellie Ellwand, Bart Demczuk, Gabriella Yeshura, and Roland Piers.

How many directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I don’t know. What do you think?

What I like about this joke is that it lays bare how a director, ostensibly at the top of the pyramid in a production, is in fact completely dependent on her collaborators.

What I don’t like about this joke is that it trades on the idea that there is something wrong with that. I have no formal training as a director. Over my twenty-five year career, my greatest teachers have been the designers, playwrights, stage managers, artistic directors, and producers with whom I have worked. Above all, however, it is the actors who have taught me most about my craft.

I’m in awe of what actors do and am endlessly fascinated by how they do it.  I have spent more waking hours observing, listening to and thinking about actors and acting than I have about anyone or anything else, (excepting perhaps my two children and my wife, who is coincidentally, an actor).

The joke about the director and the light bulb trades on a model of leadership that is, at its core, patriarchal. The person at the “top” is expected to have the most knowledge and that knowledge is delivered top down. Engaging the perspectives and wisdom of others is considered a cop out, a weakness, in fact, a joke. As a feminist director, I propose a model of leadership that is in contrast to this, one that prioritizes collaboration, relies on each individual’s agency, where increased authority is tempered by increased responsibility and accountability.

In the past, in western culture, and perhaps still in some circles, an actor is considered an empty vessel, a delivery method to the audience of someone else’s vision. This too is a patriarchal paradigm, echoing paternalistic attitudes about women, children, non-human animals and Others who are put on this planet to reflect back images of the Father, the Husband, the God, or the Director.

When I took on the role of AD of the English Section of NTS five years ago, I also became the Director of the Acting Program, and was mandated to re-envision the school’s Acting training. During my interview for the position I was asked where I thought the future of theatre lay. My answer, unhesitatingly, was that the future lay with the actor. This lead to a heated discussion, the prevailing wisdom being that the director was the theatre artist equipped to reinvent the form. While it’s true the director may have the structural power and ideally the talent to invent and envision, it is the actor on whom she and the show are dependent. Without the right support for our next generation of actors, no matter how exciting the director’s “vision”, without the excellent actor to embody the work, it will be an empty experience for the spectator.

I am not an acting teacher, and although I trained extensively in performance and creation, I would not flatter myself to call myself an actor. But as a director I have insight into what directors and audiences need and value from an actor. As a feminist, I feel keenly the vulnerability of the actor who, in the theatre world, occupies a role comparable to the role women occupy in a patriarchal society; the actors often form the majority of a show’s population, but based on our traditional understanding of the actors’ role in the theatre hierarchy, despite their numbers, the actor has limited access to structural power.  The actor has another vulnerability that is unique amongst theatre artists; they are their own instrument. The actor’s body, voice, breath, imagination, soul and psyche are the means of their expression. A powerful actor is an empowered actor; self-aware, attuned to their own needs and limitations, empathetic to those of others.  An actor with a strong sense of their own boundaries is the actor who is able to challenge those boundaries.  It is never necessary for a director to “push” such an actor “out of their comfort zone”; this actor does that as a matter of course.

These perceptions were at the heart of the renewal of actor training at NTS.  Artistic excellence is rooted in the actor’s agency. Excellent actors, far from being empty vessels, bring wit and wisdom, insight and instinct, technique and talent to the table; they reveal their whole selves through the work.  This is what makes each Hamlet, each Hedda, each Constance Ledbelly and each Emily Dictionary a distinct creation; while in less narrative forms of theatre, it is this offering of the actor’s full humanity that we identify with and that moves us.

Lear (2017) at the National Theatre School. Photos by Maxime Côté with Athena Kaitlin Trinh, Déjah Dixon-Green, and Rachel Mutombo.

In developing our renewed actor training I worked closely with Head of Voice at that time, Jane Gooderham, and Head of Movement Rebecca Harper whose intimate experience of the actor’s process and whose pedagogical brilliance was pivotal. My experience as a director also informed our choices. When I ran Nightwood Theatre I worked with actors who came to the feminist theatre company with many scars, and who had developed the unfortunate but necessary skill of being “director proof” – this is to say they had figured out how to work so they would not be injured by an abusive director. I pledged to provide actor training that would equip a young artist with the skills to identify and contribute to a safe and healthy environment, where they could have access to tools and techniques both externally and internally, to do their work in safety, and thereby access the generosity which is a trademark of an excellent actor.

Above all, we support the actor’s awareness of their own process. Every morning, voice and movement training takes place in an intimate setting, with high teacher/student ratios allowing the young artist to get to know, strengthen and expand their instrument.  In the afternoon, project work is layered in such a way that the actor feels organically, increasingly challenged. 

Our Theatre History training focuses less on content and more on how to do research, with a view to developing transferable skills that a professional actor needs.  We teach Canadian Theatre by the reading of a diverse and inclusive selection of plays and by discussing why each one emerged at a particular time in Canada’s history.  We foster the actor’s critical skills including their ability to discuss, argue and sustain dissonant opinions, because our role as artists is not to make work that everyone likes – even if that were possible – but to engage with our times. 

We teach the Western canon, but through different lenses. I’m committed to gender parity and a holistic approach to diversity; students need to engage with artists of and works by different genders and generations, cultural backgrounds and theatrical forms

We also include an education in professional responsibilities; central to this is the artists’ responsibility to speak up.  Because our training focuses on supporting actors’ awareness of their own process, each one is asked to become a leader of their own work; to lead others to who they are, rather than being limited to the fruitless and dangerous pursuit of trying to please others.  We ask the students over their three year arc at NTS to practise talking about their process:  What do they need?  What are they going to do next to grow, to own their process and their path?  Training is a platform from which they will continue lifelong learning and growth.

One of the projects for actors at NTS is to create a solo piece. Soon afterwards, they participate in a creation project that spans three years. As part of this process we create a legal document with the actors that defines their ownership of this new play. Based on Playwright’s Guild and CAEA guidelines that students negotiate the ins and outs of ownership; credits, decision-making models for future productions, publications and tours, as well as royalty percentages. This is how the acting students begin their final year, as owners of their work, a challenge to that unfortunate cliché of being “just an actor”.  Acting students graduate with a voice reel, a film reel, an approach to audition process, a sense of their own developing artistic practice as well as being joint owners of an original Canadian play.

Being at NTS is my opportunity to support young artists as they learn how to tackle and transform our cultural institutions.  Our students inspire us to keep moving toward change and transformation. Reviewing and renewing our policies to prevent abuse of power and harassment is an on-going project, as it should be for every institution, and our students are involved. Recently we initiated a new way to launch a rehearsal process. It works like this:  on the first day of rehearsals, I address the company about the challenges ahead.  I acknowledge the land on which we are gathered, as well as our responsibility to the process of truth and reconciliation; if necessary, I recognize the work we are about to engage with involves sensitive material (as it almost always does).  I acknowledge that while I will not, nor could not, force any actor or company member to work on material dangerous to their well being, I am also aware that as students in a school setting they do not have the same choices a professional artist would; I recognize the imbalance of power as well as the students’ agency within it to speak up and lead us to what they need. I address the school’s commitment to providing a healthy environment where we support the company members’ needs.  I remind them that the school provides an arms-length structure for reporting abuse, and provides counselling and other forms of physical and emotional support.  In turn, the student artists create a statement of values, based on and informed by school’s policies, CAEA and Not In Our Space guidelines, and on their own unique priorities for this moment in their lives. This statement of values creates an opportunity for everyone in that particular company, across all programs and disciplines, to join together, to speak up and to be heard.

NTS is strict, rigorous and highly structured, but within this is the space for each actor’s unique process.  Informed by Maria Montessori’s pedagogy, we believe young artists are already deeply creative and talented.  They have the art.  What we provide is the practice: techniques, discipline, skills and an environment where it is safe for them to try, flounder and fly, over and over again. In many ways we are not teaching them how to act – many already know how to do that – rather we teach them how to work, professionally but also philosophically; how to dig deep and aim high to challenge themselves. So that when a director asks, as she should, what do you think, the actor will have plenty to contribute and the confidence to do so.

What’s Fair?

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Cast of Brief Encounters 21, Photo by Kyla Bailey

In the arts, we love fairness.

We talk endlessly about what it is, and are outraged when we feel it isn’t enacted as we believe it should be. We have developed complex systems of committees, juries, and boards to ensure that fairness reigns. We recruit experts (artistic and administrative) to evaluate. We use systems based in math, weighted results, and spreadsheets and we engage impartial facilitators to oversee processes. These systems are designed with the idea that if the gate is unbiased and those who want to get through it work hard enough, our resources will be shared appropriately. These days in the arts, fairness is about what is on paper and due diligence to our systems – it is a performance of fairness.

Ever increasingly I find work in service of the arts in contention with this idea of fairness. I have spent the past handful of years listening to understand the needs of Indigenous, POC, and women-identified artists and arts leaders. I have seen and heard that where the current system fails these artists is in their sense of belonging. If we as a sector are dedicated to fairness, we must stop performing fairness and work in a model where fairness is felt. It is incredibly challenging to belong to a system that you don’t feel is fair, isn’t designed for you, and has inherent contradictions. For fairness to be felt, we need to look at leadership models that create a sense of belonging and humanize each other, creating  reciprocal relationships of accountability.

“True service is not a relationship between an expert and a problem; it is far more genuine than that. It is a relationship between people who bring the full resources of their combined humanity to the table and share them generously. Service goes beyond expertise. Service is another way of life”

– Rachel Naomi Remen, MD.

Capitalism

Capitalism teaches us if we work hard enough, we will succeed. Our successes are the result of this hard work and our success will trickle down for the benefit of others. Capitalism is founded on the belief that it is fair and that everyone has an equal chance at success if they work for it. In capitalism, success looks like growth, an increase in wealth and accolades. Fairness is about how you distribute the products of that success. This focus on growth works against belonging and community accountability as it encourages competition. Capitalism doesn’t want us to be transparent with each other about how we got what we got and what we do with it.

Charity

Organizational charity was designed by capitalists to offset their personal profits and to find ways to incentivizing charitable giving by reducing taxation. They had a philanthropic agenda and altruistic concern for the well-being of society, assuming a role as patrons. A patron is someone who supports with resources, takes one under their favour or protection, and lends their influential support to advance the interests of someone.

In charitable organizations, we largely evaluate based on statistics: number of audience, money spent directly on the art, low administrative expenses, low cost to raise a dollar,  etc. We evaluate leadership based on these numbers and invest in order  to increase these gains. Leadership based on belonging is harder to measure: it takes years to evaluate its effect and is time consuming. We don’t like to take risks with philanthropic dollars.

I am suggesting that change occurs more readily when working the system and subverting it from within. To do that work, arts leaders need more agency in the processes they create a shared sense of belonging within the system. This sense of belonging must be predicated on belonging to each other and not an evaluative patron. Our current requirement to perform paper-based fairness holds this back and sets an expectation that belonging comes from the systems that determine if we get the resources or not.

When I started out as an arts administrator, I was taught that organizations are like boxes and as their staff it was our job to caretake these boxes, under the supervision and guidance of the volunteer board of directors investedin our philanthropic agenda. I treated the many organizations was involved in  in that way – we discussed changing the colour of the boxes or how to repair corners that had been broken and put various policies or procedures into place that ensure that the next caretakers of these boxes would understand how they were built and had been adjusted or cared for over the years.

These days, I prefer to see the organization like a coat. A coat without a body is a pile of fabric on the floor. A coat needs a form to inhabit it and just like in fashion, we do not all wear coats the same way, nor do we care for our coats in the same way. Seeing organizations as coats allows us to celebrate the person in the coat and the finesse with which they wear it. Our systems teach us to not celebrate the individual.  The box metaphor is undermining those who have dedicated their lives to leadership in the arts by externalizing their work.

Seeing organizations as boxes that we care for puts the leadership of that box in the background, as a caretaker. This role of temporary caretaker is detrimental and I see it as a major reason that many of my peers have left the arts or taken positions in larger institutions. Leaders can go for years feeling invisible =in a culture that cares for the organization and not the person(s) behind it. If we instead shifted our cultural focus to the individual leaders who are making change supported by a community, these individuals would be bolstered and their ideas and actions would be reinforced, leading to longer careers with bigger changes in the communities they work within.

I have seen in my own work how powerful it can be to invest in an artist over an extended period of time. My work has focused on individualized, focused career coaching with folks who are tenacious, driven, lost, and often at wits end. My work as a coach with Scaffold in Vancouver is a way to work with artists by providing producing support, networking, information and resource sharing, life coaching, external accountability, creative community and bridging to institutions. At Generator in Toronto, we invest deeply in a few artists and devoting hours of time, training and coaching.

Three cohorts of Artist Producer Training Program gathered on a boat (August 2017)

The cost of this investment is significant, but the benefits are vast. With both programs, the individuals have stronger skills, a clearer sense of what they don’t know, and the confidence to push their careers forward. We are creating communities of competent and confident artists who understand the risks and challenges of a career in the arts and how to offset them.

This kind of work is a shift toward a model that has high expenses and low statistics. It doesn’t perform fairness as it is traditionally measured. This kind of work is about being in service to a community and being held accountable by that community. It serves a few, serves them well, selects them specifically – creating a sense of belonging by investing deeply and opening pathways to systems that have excluded historically. The model serves the individual, not the organization. In ten years, the artists that Scaffold and Generator have invested in will be leaders. They will know the systems, understand how to use them, have communities based in belonging and accountability. They will make changes we can’t imagine.

Change will come with the freedom to support and generate the communities that will alter the sector. These communities will feel like the system is fair and will hold their leaders to account when these investments aren’t working. This work is dismantling the structures we inherited.

The arts game is rigged for the settler. As a settler, I know this game. I’ve played it well. I can take what I know and help guide Indigenous, POC and women-identified artists through the system, point out the small cracks in the walls, act as a guide by translating documents and application forms and identifying beaurcracts sensitve to their cause.  To support independent artists in finding ways to make art outside the currently prescribed modes you have to know the rules to break them and you need to belong to something to have the resilience to survive.

Ideas for this article came from a variety of sources besides my experience, I want to acknowledge some of the individuals who helped me form these ideas: Cole Alvis, Claire Love Wilson, Joel Klein, Rachel Penny, Nikki Shaffeeullah, Ruthie Luff, Chiamaka G. Ugwu, Andrea Scott, Michael Wheeler, and the others whose ideas wove so deeply into mine I have forgotten where they started. Rachel Naomi’s quote is from the essay “Belonging” in the book “My Grandfather’s Blessings” by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD.

The Last Indie Theatre Artist

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Kingston indie co Cellar Door Project rehearsing Tall Ghosts & Bad Weather (2015) in a cemetery. Photo by Angela Maxwell.

This article is written by the only working indie theatre artist in Kingston.

There used to be two of us but he spends most of his time in Toronto these days. We’ve got three professional theatre companies, resources out the wazoo, experienced mentors that are generous with their time, but for the life of me, I can’t find collaborators.

Being an indie artist is different than being a theatre student or an artist with an established career. Most indie artists are recently graduated, employed in joe jobs, and at least in my experience, the work is quick and dirty. It’s mounted wherever there is room and as a result the work is, as Kelli Fox put it in her SpiderWebShow Thought Residency, “risk-perverse”. I’m not worried about losing subscribers or offending an audience because my articulation of my practice is being strung together live as I’m creating. If I’m not working in a bar, coffee shop, or book-store, I’m working contracts in theatre administration to pay the bills.

I’ve spent the better part of my professional life on the VIA corridor. Because Kingston’s major theatre, The Grand, only sees between 3-5 theatre shows in a year, I spend most weekends on a plane, train, or automobile in order to engage with live performance in a bigger city. I’m not always seeking shows in big houses, but I’m seeking things I haven’t seen before. Although there is loads of work being done in Kingston by students and community theatre groups, it’s no surprise that if I’m trying to catch theatre that is new or nationally recognized, I have to drive at least two and a half hours to see it.

Don’t get me wrong, from all accounts Kingston is a great community to settle in as an artist. The downtown is mighty charming, housing is affordable, and audiences are eager to support things that are homegrown. For a small city there are more music and theatre festivals than we know what to do with, and as of recently, we’ve established a stop on the Fringe circuit. It’s clear we’ve got the resources and the rooms, we just need people in town to fill them.

But I think the secret might be getting out. SpiderWebShow Artistic Director and Toronto Dad Michael Wheeler is relocating to Kingston with Zoe Sweet, Fevergraph’s moving-and-shaking Artistic Director. Musical Stage is workshopping a new Fringe musical at the Thousand Island Playhouse and this year, the city will host SpiderWebShow’s festival of live digital Art in a new $72 million dollar performance facility, the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts.         

The Concert Hall at Kingston’s Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Photo from N45 Architecture.

Although these initiatives are real markers of how this community will participate more vibrantly in the #cdncult community moving forward, how are emerging and indie artists invited to engage with them in a city that is taking big steps for big ideas with big money? Arts communities in small city centres are expanding with professional theatre artists leaving Toronto, but it is vital that indie artists from the community get in on the ground. As Kingston arts workers invest in endeavours that attract nationally recognized artists, supporting indie energy will ensure locally produced work is also considered when presenters and programmers are looking to fill a million dollar facility. 

In small cities, this “indie energy” is integral to developing a vibrant arts community that is sustainable, accessible, and diverse in artist, audience, worldview, and form.

As Kingston seems to be starting from scratch in our development of an indie theatre scene, unless we continue to provide opportunities for local artists to make a go at it, our stages will be solely populated by mid-career artists touring in from out of town. In Toronto, indie companies premiere pieces in storefronts to be eventually gobbled up by mid-size professional companies like Factory or Soulpepper. This model could be a useful one to adopt in places like Kingston as well.

Chasse-Galerie, produced by Toronto’s KABIN Theatre/Storefront eventually ended up mainstage at Soulpepper. Photo by John Gundy.

Artists in similar sized cities are hopeful for a local indie arts renaissance. In Michael Kras’ Intermission article “The Rise of Hamilton (the City not the Musical)”, he credits the Hamilton Fringe for igniting an indie movement in the old Steeltown, acknowledging that, like Kingston, as established artists flee the big smoke to smaller cities in the periphery, outreach initiatives elevate local voices. Two years ago, Pam Patel wrote about Kitchener-Waterloo’s experience with redevelopment in the arts community. When she first moved to KW, the indie style of producing meant that there were “fewer restrictions on what could or couldn’t happen in a venue” and as sensibilities redeveloped, Patel worried about the artist’s role in gentrification and the loss of the “cool, hip” feel of an arts community that didn’t have any rules.

Although we are in early days, it’s clear our fledgling indie community is affecting cultural planning. After all, the Kick & Push Festival, our “alternative theatre festival” was founded because Kingston-based indie artists were interested in staging work in non-traditional spaces. However, as the festival continues to grow, there is a lack of local content. Theatre Kingston’s young Storefront Fringe Festival is taking on this challenge, providing a stage for any kind of creator to make a play and keep the box office, resulting in ad-hoc collectives with professional interests starting to pop up in town.

I know I am looking at the beginning of something. As innovators turn to the limestone city to set up shop,  I want to be a part of encouraging a local indie scene that shapes major programming and contributes to Kingston’s cultural identity. As festivals and venues start planning their seasons, I hope we can complement the nationally known with the locally grown.  

Cellar Door Project’s New & Used ft Hannah Komlodi, Audrey Sturino, and I making a play in a record store. Photo by Akhil Dua.

Biting the Hand that Feeds Us

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Government of Canada Public Funding graphic pays it forward

As questions concerning the origin(s) of funding become more and more politicized—i.e. #divest—do we not need to start reflecting deeper on where the money we use to make so much of our theatre and performance in Canada comes from?

I’ve just finished an MFA degree in Vancouver. Now graduated, my peers and I are starting to pursue public funding through municipal, provincial, and federal arts councils to support our work. Like in most MFA programs, we spent a great deal of time discussing the ways we conceptualize the public (as an agent, as a site, as a multiplicity, etc.), but we did not once discuss within the context of our art education the relationship our art could have with the public via the interface of taxation.

So let’s talk about public funding and its relationship to artists.

Public funding in Canada is the funding collected through the taxation of the Canadian people by Canadian governmental bodies. People are taxed for their incomes, their property, and the use of their wealth. Once collected, the funding is redistributed to a variety of services, including arts agencies—municipal, provincial, federal. These agencies then redistribute the funding to artists. Thanks to our government and the public’s taxation, public funding is, and will continue to be, the means of most of our productions.

Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire (1969) caused public outrage when purchased by the National Gallery of Canada for $1.8 million.

Even though our Prime Minister has increased Canadian arts funding (the most recent budgets stating commitments of $1.9 billion in 2016 and $1.8 billion in 2017), the relationship artists have to the public through public funding, remains the same.

Our public funding seems ‘neutral’ in that we do not need to moralize our art practices in relation to the public when we receive it. Our public funding begs no special debts or treatment in the process of our art making. Public funding for artists does not restrict the usage of the funding for a specific public good; rather, public funding for artists assumes the art will, by virtue of strengthening cultural practices, benefit the public. So once a grant has been granted, the funding arrives as a cheque in the mail no different than any other work payment. Art, like much else, can happen without answering to the origins of its capital.

I am not saying this ‘neutrality’ is a bad thing. It helps many of us work and think outside of boxes and expectations. Nobody wants a top-down system in which we’re told to make certain kinds of art by a government (#socialistrealism).

Boris Eremeevich Vladimirski, Roses for Stalin, 1949. Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 141 cm.

But, with respect to the public, the ‘neutral’ mask given to the public through taxation makes the great patron of our country’s artists a highly abstracted body. In the niche of contemporary Canadian art, sometimes it feels like the public is everyone and sometimes it feels like the public is only those who care about the art—only those who buy tickets (on top of their tax deductions).

This is really important. Despite ostensibly coming from the taxes of the public as a whole, our art (like a federal highway in another province or a teacher in another city) is not something every member of the public takes advantage of—nor should be forced to. Inherent to our debts to the public is a certain exclusiveness—by region as much as personal interests. There is no the public.

So given both the ‘neutrality’ of our relationship with the public and the practical restrictions of collapsing Canadians into singular public identities (all Canadians, all Vancouverites, all Nova Scotians), can we really say that receiving public funding equals having public support?

I don’t think so.

I also don’t think an artist’s desire for public funding from government granting agencies is quite so easily reduced to “we want public funding to make our artworks because we believe (some) people will be impacted positively by them” or “we want public funding (with its neutrality) to make our artworks” or “we want public funding (because we don’t want to work joe jobs).”

These desires for public funding likely form a spectrum that we slide along more than fixed positions. Linking these positions is the fact that any desire for public funding collected through taxes is a desire for government patronage as opposed to a public patronage that does not involve the government, such as support directly from fandom, box office, and/or fundraiser-based funds.

Government patronage can, through the concept of democratic representation, still be ultimately attributed to a people who chose someone who chose someone who chose someone to make a decision for them. But as we know, governments are not their people, and so a qualitative difference remains between an artist with government patronage and one with public patronage that does not involve the government. A distinction is especially palpable between both of these categories and an artist with no patronage at all.

So if getting funding from the government doesn’t really give an artist a direct relationship to ‘the public’ who produces that funding, what does the artist get with their public funding?

“Can I Have A Grant” by Mr. Fish. Buy the t-shirt! www.clowncrack.com

One thing they get is status. The patronage of an arts council, their brand and name, forms a significant class status marker within the Canadian artmaking community. That marker means little to people outside of our own art communities and little more to public audiences attending our works. It is also not a marker many artists seem to respect at the level of how it is acquired—we all ‘adjust’ our words and numbers on grants, don’t we?—The status we receive however, along with the funding, is nevertheless something we artists can use, and do use, to construct classes within our community.

Public funding explicitly marks who has government patronage and who does not. It also marks whose patronage and status can beget more patronage and more status in the future.

On the one hand, you could argue that because so many of our experiences in Canada are funded by the public’s taxes, interrogating our relationship with public funding seems a bit disingenuous. And it is. We are very lucky in this country to be able to simply apply for money and make terrible—or great—art if we get it.

At the same time, however, we are artists, and I think that such an identity presumes that we should not do things, such as relate to money, the same way others do. This could be a gross moralizing of the artist, but I have a hunch most of us already do perceive money differently from venture capitalists (who don’t invest in our trade), and most of us tend to carry a certain ‘refuse-to-question-the-value-of-public-funding’ attitude.

There’s just more “value” to public funding than can be measured in CAD.

Thought Residency: Kelli Fox

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Hi. It’s Kelli again, it’s February 28th and this is Thought #12. My final thought for you for February. Thanks, Sarah, for inviting me to do this, it’s been the most extraordinary and eye opening experience to have this responsibility to you all three times a week, to share my thoughts. I’m honoured to have been asked. I began this month talking about the depression I was in the midst of, so I want to end this month talking about the depression that I am now rising out of. This is what they call Season Affective Disorder, and for anybody who’s ever doubted it, that’s a thing. That’s a real thing. I and hundreds of thousands of other people who live in northern climes contend with this every single year. And every single year it takes me by surprise, and every single year I am laid indescribably low by it, and every single year through some mysterious process that I am not really in control of it begins to lift. As the light returns to the sky, and as the warmth returns to the air. And it doesn’t hurt to be busy, and to be engaged, as I am now, in projects that I am passionate about, and it really doesn’t hurt to be … to find myself now, back in Calgary. Which, for my money, as I just finally discovered at this late date last year, is one of the warmest and most beautiful theatre communities in this country, and I’m delighted to be here. And, um …. I think, it’s important that we remember, those of us who contend with this, because when you’re in the midst of it, it’s really hard, but it’s important to remember, that it will pass. The light will return, the spring will come. Hang on. And as a very dear, and very smart friend of mine once said to me …. Fresh air and forward motion, it’ll cure everything. I believe that’s true.

 

Hi there, it’s Kelli, it’s February 27, and it’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’ve just realized that I spent my whole day yesterday so buried in a Hamlet edit that I forgot all about you! The good news is, life is incredibly busy, and there are lots of projects on the go, and uh … I find myself once again apologizing. So I’m sorry, I hope your February has been fantastic, mine certainly has. Heading into my last week on Lonely Diner rehearsal, and loving the company here in Calgary, and enjoying things. Here comes the spring! Yeah! Depression lifts.

 

Hi, it’s Kelli again, it’s February 22, and this is thought # 10. And, ok, this is a little weird, little random, but here goes. I happen to have a somewhat famous sibling. And about 30 years ago there was an event involving myself, and this famous sibling, and the National Enquirer. And weirdly, randomly, the National Enquirer has been in touch with my agent, and let her know that they would like to re-visit that piece, they’d like to follow up on the lies they told 30 years ago, and they’d like to know if I would like to contribute a few thoughts. The short answer to that is no. Thank you. No. But it’s had me thinking all day about the fact that that event was the beginning for me, that planted a seed of my deep, deep distrust of celebrity culture. It’s a large part of the reason that I chose to remain in Canada, on stage, where I could just do my work and not have any of those weird distractions. But more importantly than that, there’s a thing about celebrity culture that really makes me kind of puke. I can’t stand the fact that people can’t seem to be in a room with someone who was on television, and be themselves. I can’t stand the fact that a little bit of celebrity profile seems to add extra weight, and probity, and value to every word that drops out of a persons mouth. That culture put Donald Trump in office in the United States. And I would hazard a guess that that culture played a large part in putting Justin Trudeau in office in Canada. Celebrity culture is not our friend, and we have to get over it. That’s what I ‘m thinking about today.

 

Hi, it’s Kelli Fox again, it’s February 21st, and this is thought # 9.

And today, I really can’t stop thinking about those kids in Florida. I  can’t stop thinking about their bravery, and their unbelievable strength, in the face of political apathy, and obstruction, and obstinacy from the adults around them. I’m so, so impressed with them. And today I learned something about them that I didn’t know before which is that they mostly know each other through the theatre group at their school. Those kids are artists. And it kind of kills me …. but it affirms something that, of course, we all know. The theatre, the arts, teach empathy. They’re vital in our schools. That’s what I’m thinking about today.

 

Hi, it’s Kelli again, it’s February 18th and this is thought #8.

And thought # 8 is about this amazing little thing I got to witness this afternoon. I’ve always heard about Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary, but I’ve never been able to see anything there, and I saw a play this afternoon … at Noon … an hour long. It was a play, really at bottom it was a play about coming out, it was also a little bit a play about culture clash, very much a play about family, full of heart, full of love, and depth, and hilarious. and about an hour long …. and, I swear to god, people leave their office buildings, all these towers in downtown Calgary, and they come down there, and they look for a different kind of nutrition on their lunch break. And I think that’s amazing! And I congratulate Calgary for making that happen, and I congratulate Calgarians for keeping it alive.

Hi. It’s Kelli again, it’s February 15th and this is thought #7, and what I am thinking about today, what I’m wondering about today, is whether or not there is any such thing as social progress. I found myself in rehearsal today, listening to the words coming out of Al Capone’s mouth in the play, and for all the world, all I could hear was Donald Trump. It was extraordinary. I was a teenager, and a young woman, in the late 70’s, early 80’s, and I knew for certain that I lived in a different world than my mother had. I grew up in a different world, even than my older sisters. And what all of us knew for sure was that we were never going back to that old world. The forward march of social progress was irreversible, and irresistible, and we were embracing it. And sometime around the late 90’s, turn of the century you just started to feel this pull, this drag on that forward progress, and then that drag began to feel like an actual reversal. And now we live in a world where Donald Trump is President of the United States, and it just makes me think, what have we been doing for the last hundred years? We’ve circled right back around. Is there any such thing as social progress?

 

Hi. It’s Kelli Fox, again. February 14th.

Valentines Day. I’m not going to talk about that. That’s not going to be thought # 6. Thought # 6 is about beginnings. We started rehearsal yesterday for my next project which is Lonely Diner at Vertigo Theatre in Calgary. And, oh there is something about beginnings, man. There is something about a blank slate, a clean fresh white sheet of paper, an empty room with a bunch of people, some words on a page, some tape on the floor, a few scattered props and bits of furniture around the room, and out of that we are going to begin to build a story. And that is exciting. That’s a great day. I always love this day. So that’s what I’m thinking about.

 

It’s early in the morning on February 13th, it’s Kelli Fox, and this is Thought Residency #5.  And I guess this morning it’s all about focus. I flew to Calgary on the weekend, I’m about to start rehearsal today, it’s my sister’s birthday today, and it’s all been a bit um … distracting and overwhelming, and I forgot to put this together for you. Um, because my focus is a bit chaotic and askew. I guess that’s what I’m thinking about this morning. Pulling it together.

 

Hi, it’s Kelli again, it’s February 8th today, and this is Thought #4.

Which today is all about light. The light, the light, that creeps just earlier, and just a little earlier, and just a little earlier every morning into my room, and it let’s me know that spring is just around the corner, and even though I’m on the prairie and everything is still frozen solid here, and it will be for  …  …..  weeks, it’s gonna be ok, because the light is coming. The light is coming. And it just has a way of turning everything. Praise to the Light. That’s what I’m thinking about today.

 

Hi, it’s February 7, it’s Kelli Fox again, and this is thought #3.

So, I was at the theatre yesterday morning for the first day of rehearsal for the company of US. New Canadian musical, everybody’s pumped, tons of excitement in the room. And Wes Pearce, the designer, was giving his presentation, he’s talking about how they got where they got with it, and he just happened to mention, in passing, that this project might push some boundaries for some people here. He didn’t make a big statement, but he reminded everyone that what they were about to embark on was risky, and it was like everyone’s nerve endings came alive. There was this kind of collective inhalation of kind of giddy, terrified anticipation, because, of course, it’s what we all live for. Our work might matter enough to cause a bit of a stir in town, get people talking, get them angry, or get them animated. Alternatively,  we could bore them. But we don’t know until we take the risk, and for some reason, for a lot of us, the scarier the proposition, the bigger the risk, the more irresistible the challenge. I’ve heard so many of my friends say, “I had to say yes, it scared the crap out of me.” It’s like the opposite of risk aversion. Risk perversion. That’s what I’m thinking about today.

 

It’s February 6th. It’s Kelli Fox, and this is thought #2 for my February Thought Residency. And today I’m thinking about time.

I’m thinking about time as a commodity, as the most valuable commodity we have, each of us, in life, but also, … we, as artists.

Once we’ve begged, borrowed, or stolen whatever it takes to make our art, that will speak our truth (and let’s not forget that is what it is that matters), once we’ve bought that time, we have a responsibility about how we use that time. That’s what I’m thinking about today.

 

Hi. This is Kelli Fox.

It’s February 1st and this is the beginning of my Thought Residency and here’s my first thought. Um … I’ve been thinking a lot this past couple of weeks about the healing power of our work. As I make my way through another dark Canadian winter and battle the depression that hits me every year at this time, I am grateful for the studio that I go into every night right now, and the guys that I’m working with on this project that’s teaching me things, and stretching my own practice, and healing me, inside, every time I go into the studio. And I’m grateful for that. That’s my thought today.

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