NAC creates Department of Indigenous Theatre
As its 50th anniversary looms in 2019, the National Arts Centre is taking a bold step with the creation of a new Department of Indigenous Theatre, a move that dovetails with the Liberal government’s stated goal of building a new relationship with Canada’s First Nations.
It’s the first new artistic department the centre has created since it opened in 1969 and was announced as part of its latest strategic plan, which is to be unveiled Thursday morning.
Other key points of the NAC’s new plan:
A more intensive effort will be made to reach out to French Canada, a relationship that has atrophied in recent years, the centre admits. This will include key appointments to important positions in the centre, sending a signal that the next chief executive could be a francophone. Peter Herrndorf, 75, has held the position since 1999.
The NAC will continue to emphasize the creation of new work, underpinned by an enhanced and focused effort by the NAC Foundation;
The centre will extend its Music Alive education program to Atlantic Canada;
Its ArtsAlive website will be restored. The site is a teaching tool for music programs;
Patrons will witness a $110-million facelift and renovation that is expected to be done in time for July 1, 2017. Along with the glass facade, the NAC will get an additional $114.9 million from the Liberal government to renovate performance spaces and production areas, especially Southam Hall.
The first artistic director of indigenous theatre will be in place in 2017, and by the fall of 2019 the Indigenous Theatre Department will open its first full season. Don’t let the title fool you. The department will likely bring in other performing arts, including music and dance.
“Everything is possible,” in the first season in 2019, says NAC director of communications Rosemary Thompson. “It will be up to the new artistic director to determine what it will be.” It is on the same level as the other theatre departments and will be funded appropriately, she said.
The new department is the most important development in the growth of the NAC since its opening, Thompson said. The centre has also added other important programming such as the annual NAC Presents concert series and the biannual Scene festivals.
The new department grew out of meetings that culminated in February, when, with leaders in the indigenous arts community, planning started in earnest.
Success will be measured as it unfolds.
“I think getting it open is a success,” Thompson says. “Having it here is a success. To have that story shown on our stage all the time is a success. To have a home for indigenous artists in a national institution is important.”
The NAC has staged indigenous works regularly over the past decade. Former English-theatre artistic director Peter Hinton brought forward works such as Copper Thunderbird by Marie Clements, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga, Where the Blood Mixes by former NAC playwright-in-residence Kevin Loring (2010), Night by Human Cargo (2010), and the all-indigenous production of King Lear (2012).
The indigenous department has been an evolving story, says Sarah Garton Stanley, associate artistic director of English theatre, and the NAC’s point person on the file.
Along with English-theatre artistic director Jillian Keiley, Stanley has conducted a series of meetings with indigenous artists over the past few years. Dubbed The Summit, The Study and The Repast, these meetings laid the groundwork for the new department.
The NAC officials also started to understand how big a body of work has been created by indigenous artists. And how many of them there are.
“I came to realize that these are my stories,” Stanley says. “I may be, as a settler, the problem of many of these stories. But they are my stories, too.”
She says she started calling herself a settler at the first meeting in 2014 as she gained an understanding of the indigenous story in Canada and her place in that tale.
“As a national arts centre, if we are reflecting the breadth of this country, the indigenous stories are smack dab at the centre of all of our stories.”
For Michael Greyeyes, a former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, the artistic director of Signal Theatre and an associate professor at York University, the new department is “terribly exciting.”
It expands the emerging conversation between First Nations and the rest of the country, he says.
“This is a much-needed step in the right direction,” Greyeyes says. “For many reasons, as theatre artists, our experience is very different from English- and Frenchspeaking artists.
“We are invisible in many, many ways. This is a way to give power to indigenous artists to create the kind of space and place for our theatre and our artists to flourish. This gives us a seat at the table as opposed to being in the line of people that come to a table controlled by others.”
Creation has come to the fore at the NAC, especially in recent years, as exemplified by Life Reflected, a quartet of new music pieces based on the lives of four Canadian women and a string of new ballets coming in 2016-17 that have been commissioned jointly by the music and dance departments.
Life Reflected is the biggest investment the company has made in any new project. The centre is also seeding new works through arts groups across the country in music, theatre and dance.
Budgets are not growing rapidly, so the centre is depending on the NAC Foundation to raise the funds needed to fuel the ambitious vision. “This will be a very important focus for the foundation going forward. This is about telling contemporary Canadian stories,” Thompson said. The foundation has raised more than $100 million over 16 years.
The return to French Canada is an admission of failure on the part of the NAC. After the Quebec Scene of 2007, the centre says in its plan, the goodwill and the contacts built up with French Canada were “allowed to wither.”
This pivot to French Canada comes with a new government led by a Quebecer and featuring a Quebecer, Mélanie Joly, in the key heritage department.
“The NAC needs to become just as national in French as we are in English,” the centre’s plan says.
The NAC says that, in Quebec, it intends to commission, co-produce and partner with artists, arts organizations and major Quebec festivals on new work, and cultivate philanthropic support in the province for major artistic projects.
It also says it wants to make the French-speaking community in the National Capital Region feel more welcome at events and performances.
The same sort of partnerships will be extended to francophone artists across Canada.