Sarah McLachlan among five honoured with Governor General’s arts awards
Vancouver-based chanteuse Sarah McLachlan was immersed in the arts as a child.
She says her school in Halifax had great music and arts programs. And her parents, noticing her creative and artistic abilities at an early age, enrolled her in private lessons.
Music and arts education helps to define a culture, says McLachlan, who hopes to make that point in her acceptance speech for her Governor General’s Performing Arts Award that was announced Thursday.
“(It’s) really important to keep fighting to have it in the schools and as a relevant thing in society,” McLachlan said in a telephone interview, noting she wants to stress “how important it is for kids to be able to learn and think creatively and how that forms the brain.”
“I think music and art are such great avenues for exploration, for discovering our place in the world and our connection with our own emotional centre and with other emotional worlds.”
McLachlan is one of five recipients of this year’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards for lifetime artistic achievement. The others are composer Walter Boudreau, filmmaker Atom Egoyan, actress Diana Leblanc and actor R.H. Thomson.
Filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee is getting the National Arts Centre Award, and philanthropist Michael M. Koerner is the recipient of the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Award for Volunteerism.
McLachlan witnessed the influence of such education through her two daughters (ages 13 and 7) and her 13-year-old Sarah McLachlan School of Music, which offers a free after-school program for hundreds of atrisk and under-served youth in Vancouver.
A gala honouring this year’s recipients will be held at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on May 30.