Artists and Communities

by Julie Salverson

In Sorouja Moll's essay on the Unilever Canada/Dove-sponsored production Body and Soul, she quotes the playwright and director Judith Thompson as saying, "It felt like a revolution." I think Thompson has nailed it. At the heart of every conversation I've had with artists who work on community arts projects and central to every play of this nature I've been involved with is this visceral, explosive sense that something radically new is in the room. There is a freshness and honesty that emerges in the liminal space of a workshop or rehearsal through people who've never done this before. One of the greatest challenges of this art form is how to take participants unfamiliar with the craft, process, and business of theatre from those generative moments of discovery to a powerful theatre experience that recreates that sense of revolution for an audience.

Ruth Howard and I stood at the back of the Baillie Theatre in Toronto listening to the talkback after a performance of Body and Soul. The women speaking from the audience to the women on stage were excited and effusive in their praise. Somebody suggested that copies of the script might be made available at libraries across Canada so that other "ordinary people" could get help telling their stories. Ruth and I looked at each other in surprise. Later, over a drink, we wondered why nobody in the theatre that day seemed to know about Canada's long, rich history of artists working in communities of all kinds: telling stories 'from the ground up,' grappling on and off the page with questions of aesthetics, politics, and 'authentic voice,' negotiating the role of the artist and the participant. Clearly more work was needed to get the word out!

CTR has been terrific at documenting and supporting the community arts movement in Canada. The choice to focus this issue on artists reflects a shift in how this work is placed within the arts and culture funding bodies, the neighbourhoods and organizations, and among artists ourselves. In 1981 when I received my first Toronto Arts Council grant to run the program that helped start Second Look Community Arts, money for community projects had to be explained and argued for over and over again. Now this rich and fertile field has attracted the ardour of the mainstream: artists, producers, and funders from many creative worlds are engaging with all kinds of communities. These developments are accompanied by the delights and dangers that all love affairs entail.

When Jenn Stephenson invited me to be a co-editor on this issue, I was excited about the opportunity to find out who some of the new artists doing community-engaged theatre were; artists such as Caleb Johnston who writes here about dreaming a poetics of Vancouver. What were they working on? How did they define, explore, and push edges? Why do they do it? What do they get out of it? What kind of aesthetics and forms and images and puzzles does this kind of work provoke? This collection offers a mix that reflects some answers to those questions: the integration of theory and practice; the virtual and the embodied; celebration and mourning; rage and reflection.

by Kim Renders

I left Toronto in 1992 after having lived and worked there as a theatre artist for more than a decade. I had come of age in Toronto and had thrived on the grit of the inner-city neighbourhoods as well as on the vitality of the arts community that I had been a part of. But it was time for me to leave.

Moving my family to a small-town community was much easier than moving my career. After several years of enduring endless hours of highway commuting, I realized that I had to find a new way of being a theatre artist. I had the talent, I had the energy, and I had a small project grant from the Ontario Arts Council. My partner Robert and I came up with a name and created Theatre Out & About. Our first project was Lighten Up! A Celebration of the Winter Solstice...