Ali Momen Performer: Ali, Kevin J. and others
Walking over to the Royal Alex on (March) 13th, I had the feeling that this was it. There’s that Proust quote: if a meteor was coming to destroy the Earth, I would see all the beauty in the world that there is.
That final performance, there was a small house, but there was a lift to it. It was (cast member) Barb Fulton’s birthday. We met after the show in what I call the seniors’ lounge (George Masswohl’s and James Kall’s dressing room). We had drinks and amazing food. We closed the Royal Alex down. We received a text the next morning saying don’t come into work.
It has been a process of, like, grief and growth; that’s the best way to think about it. You thought you’d go back to the way it was, now you realize there is not going to be an event, a light switch that comes back on.
How are we going to do this, what is the world we want to wake up to?
What I miss most isn’t the poetry, it’s the prose: the prose of being an artist. Losing the routine has been difficult, that sense of concrete purpose.
I am working on a project called the Arts New Deal, a relief program in which artistic work is considered like any other work. During the Great Depression in the U.S., (president) FDR viewed a worker as someone not only who picks up a shovel, but picks up a violin.
That’s what I want to do, to build our country culturally. We have thousands of artists who are out of work, thousands of artistic muscles which are in atrophy.
We need a program in which artists are paid to produce all kinds of work … socially distanced theatre productions in care homes, augmented-reality exhibits for the AGO or the Canadian Human Rights Museum or small galleries. We could be painting digital murals; we could be doing arts education around the country. What about when kids go back to school? Artists can provide arts education, digitally or socially distanced.
The arts are three per cent of the Canadian GDP; it’s 650,000 jobs. I didn’t know that before.