Reflections on A year in the arts (part 1)

The hurricane of time and circumstance has brought me to a quiet street just off Sherbrooke in Montreal. There is a light rain, a release, the air has been thick with moisture since I arrived here not very long ago at all. What you are reading is the first part of a series of essays that I will be publishing to my blog over the coming weeks. 

These essays collect my experience in the world of the arts in Canada and are intended for artists seeking to make a professional career for themselves, for my colleagues in this country who are interested in talking shop, and to whomever it may be of interest to. I endeavor to speak candidly and with as little jargon as possible. In discussing the work of other artists, I will link to where certain exhibitions took place and describe the works for lack of photos I have permission to use.

Let’s begin at the end:

I’ve reached the end of another adventure, over the previous 15 months I had the great pleasure of being the Theatre Outreach Coordinator at Contemporary Calgary. And what an amazing 15 months those were.

Here are the raw numbers: 9,250 visitors across 70 partnership events and 30 partners, 15 of which Contemporary Calgary did not previously have a relationship with. The role I played in Calgary’s arts ecosystem was to be a vocal advocate for the place of Canada’s artistic landscape in Calgary, to encourage artists to consider themselves and to consider their practices in the context of a larger national conversation. 

Most importantly, I successfully bridged the performing arts and the world of contemporary visual art in such a way as to encourage further collaboration between artists across these disciplines and mediums. Conversations which may have been far from one another, are now happening in the same rooms, together, and many of these conversations took place in the Heather Edwards Theatre. The impact is visible in the work being programmed around the city and its scale. I am proud to say that I leave Calgary better than when I found it at the beginning of my career

Now, let's travel back in time to the beginning of 2025. I had decided that I wanted to be the kind of artist that exhibits internationally, whose work is collected by major institutions, and to contribute to Canada’s cultural output. I began by making work inspired by what I had seen in museums elsewhere in the world, which culminated in participating in a group show at a studio gallery called, “The Art House.” My education, however, had been in theatre, not in fine art and there was a wall of knowledge and a considerable distance between myself and a career as a professional artist. 

So when someone sent me the job description for a position running a theatre inside of a major art gallery I thought it was an opportunity impossible to pass up. I applied for the job and got it.  

The task at the outset was deceptively simple: Program a 193-seat theatre and build and develop relationships between Contemporary Calgary and other cultural organizations. In practice, the task was neither modest in scope, nor simple in character. 

The question is, what to do with that responsibility? What do you want to see on the stage? What does programming a theatre in an art gallery look like? It essentially took me the entire duration of my time at Contemporary Calgary to learn and appreciate what it is exactly a curator does and how some Art Galleries work. 

I had the experience in event management and production needed, I had a strength in building connections and I had a network behind me. At the beginning of my time, I had a chip on my shoulder about what was currently going on in the world of performance.  If theatre in English Canada could be considered to be about 5 years behind the times in terms of theatre, Calgary was about 15 years behind the times.  

Calgary is a city in the middle of nowhere. Travel to and from is expensive despite it having a large population and being rather affluent. The city is laid out around a geographically small downtown core surrounded by suburban sprawl. Because of this, not many artists have a reason to come this way. For a long time, the arts took a backseat to the Calgary Flames and to the stampede. There was a resentment within the arts community towards the part of society expressed by the stampede and therefore a resentment towards the large portion of its society who actually go out.

However, a spirited cocktail of individuals exist in Calgary, those who believe in the possibility of the arts to improve the lives of individuals and communities. I found proof of this during the pandemic when there was little to do in terms of entertainment. Outdoor art events animated the city, in what little quantity they existed. These came in tow with a proliferation of outdoor summer markets such as the inglewood night market and the lilac festival. Patios expanded on 17th avenue, and the summertime economic activity sparked by The Calgary Stampede kept chugging along. All these stimulated an increasingly participatory economy.

Connected as I was to older generations of artists, and having taken a keen interest in the history of the arts in Alberta, I learned that once upon a time there was a large amount of overlap between disparate artistic practices. Furthermore, one can often read about how painters used to commune and gather with writers and actors and directors in crowded cafes. This image, of the bohemian cafe taken over by rowdy poets, is a romantic one but not an entirely impossible one. It was one that was continuing to take shape in organized gatherings and a rising creative class. 

But for all the development that had been going on in the arts, when I began my career some 6 years ago, theatres were attended by old white people, the plays were aggressively safe, and the different performing arts disciplines were siloed. There was an air of pessimism, a brutal air of pessimism. Many of my respected colleagues would tell me that theatre is in crisis, or that theatre is dying. Well, in 2020 it did die. The thing was rendered illegal and there was nothing to be done. 

Fine art on the other hand is cool. People frequent art museums, people hang art on their walls and Canadian art has changed dramatically over the course of the past 100 years. Without always knowing why, we do recognize its value in making us think, in delighting us, in scaring us, in exposing us to physical experiences in space that a visitor has command of. And for the artist there is value in being near these things when performing.

I believe the value is that being constantly exposed to the avant garde approaches in other media may have the cumulative effect of elevating both the quality of work and the sophistication of both ideas and audiences. Furthermore, it is more likely to be greeted with curiosity if contemporary performance is presented side by side with contemporary art. The visitor already has to accept that they will see something new. The artist therefore has to demonstrate that their work is up to the level of the rest of the work in the building. If we could really do better, then it would be best to show better, as many times as possible. I wanted to call our bluff. 

So it was that I came to be employed as the Theatre Outreach Coordinator at Contemporary Calgary. A terrible day for the opps. I expressed the aforementioned vision to the gallery and they decided to call my bluff. When I arrived at my first team meeting it was apparent that this wasn’t time for fucking around. I had a job to do. First I had to learn how to do it.