A string of comebacks and leadership shuffles
This week’s column is all about appearances and disappearances, presences and absences on the GTA theatre and performance scene.
To start, many regular theatregoers have been wondering at the seeming disappearance of Harbourfront’s World Stage. The new year arrived with no announcement about this annual season of international and Canadian contemporary performance.
Iris Nemani, Harbourfront’s chief programming officer, confirms that World Stage will be back this year as an eight-show festival running from April 4 to 22 rather than a multimonth season.
The festival, World Stage Redux, will be made up of productions seen in past seasons. These include Mies Julie, South African playwright Yael Farber’s Strindberg adaptation first seen at World Stage in 2014, and Steer, a solo piece by William Yong’s Zata Omm Dance Projects that premiered last year.
Nemani describes this as “a year of reflection and looking forward,” part of an overall reconsideration of Harbourfront’s identity and vision under new CEO Marah Braye.
While some audiences may find the idea of a “greatest hits” season somewhat deflating, Nemani counters that “you may have seen the piece before, but you are different today. I would be interested to find out how experiences of this programming changes given new contexts and perspectives.”
The 2017 season was curated by artistic director Tina Rasmussen, who is on a personal leave of absence; Nemani and the rest of the producing team at Harbourfront will deliver the programming in April.
A “critical” priority for Harbourfront, Nemani says, is keeping prices low: the top ticket price of $45 for last year’s World Stage is well below that at other major Toronto providers of similar content. Flex passes and special prices for under-29s will be part of the full program announcement on Jan. 31.
Meanwhile, at another theatre gathering with Stage in its title, theatre artists and professionals have been considering the absence of diversity in the highest ranks of Canadian theatre.
On Jan. 15, as part of the Toronto Fringe’s Next Stage Theatre Festival, the Fringe and the theatre incubator Generator organized an event under the provocative title “The White Guy Shuffle.”
The impetus for “The White Guy Shuffle” was the fact that, in 2016, seven vacant artistic director positions at Canadian theatre institutions were filled by white males, most of whom were moving from other senior leadership positions in the field. That three of these jobs — at Vancouver’s Touchstone Theatre, Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa, and London’s Grand Thea- tre — were previously held by women (all of them also white), adds up to a backward step for gender diversity.
“This was one of the prime discussions of the past year,” says Fringe executive director Kelly Straughan, who planned the event with Generator’s outgoing executive director Michael Wheeler. “So many positions became available that don’t come available that often. As soon as the two of us started taking about it we couldn’t stop talking about it.”
The title, says Kristina Lemieux, Wheeler’s successor at Generator, was intended to grab attention. “The point is to provoke. We in the arts, and in society more broadly, tend to want to have nicer, safer conversations, but we need to have the tougher, meatier, more important ones too.”
And turn heads it did: more than 50 people turned up at Theatre Passe Muraille, the majority women and people of colour, including such leading figures as Nina Lee Aquino and Marjorie Chan, artistic directors of Factory Theatre and Cahoots Theatre Company respectively.
Participants brainstormed about what might be getting in the way of theatre leadership becoming more diverse, and about ways to remove or navigate around such barriers. A key focus was boards of directors responsible for hiring arts leaders and how definitions of leadership might be expanded.
While boards and hiring committees often privilege fundraising skills and top-level experience, for example, Lemieux argues the focus should be on identifying “people who make change, galvanize voices and create something that didn’t exist before. We can bring them into leadership and then teach them how to write grants.”
As Chan points out, factors beyond systematic barriers also play a part: “An assumption can’t be made that all types of people have a desire to run all sorts of companies . . . an outdated mandate, which does not inspire a person of colour/a woman/ an artist with a disability, etc., is unlikely to produce a more diverse application pool.”
The lack of attendance by Toronto theatre leaders who fit the white guy descriptor was notable. There’s the sense that, following from controversies such as last January’s kerfuffle around the lack of diversity in the 2016-17 Canadian Stage season, a reticence remains to dive publicly into these concerns.
But doing so, Wheeler says, is crucial.
Just creating a space for such conversations, however, doesn’t eradicate privilege and hierarchies, including at this event itself. “I think it’s great they created a format for a wider discussion,” says Jiv Parasram, Theatre Passe Muraille’s associate artistic producer, “but most of the space held in the discussion was by white women, which is certainly not a bad thing, but that meant less space for women of colour.”
And just because someone’s a white guy doesn’t mean he’s not part of a minority. Brendan Healy, the incoming artistic director of Magnetic North (who was not at the Jan. 15 event), is white, but the fact that he’s gay complicates matters. While he’s committed to promoting marginalized voices throughout his career, “I can’t say my queerness announces itself like different coloured skin announces itself. I’m super aware of that.”
Complicated times ahead, then, but in the view of Wheeler, now artistic director of Spider Web Show, history has its eyes on this discussion: “I actually think that 20 to 25 years from now, when people ask what was going on in the teens of 21st-century Canadian theatre, they’ll say that’s when we stopped being a whites-only club. We are in the middle of a messy process and, as an artistic leader, I want to be part of that process.” Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinee column with Carly Maga.