On March 13, 2020, Lunchbox Theatre artistic director Shari Wattling walked into the tech rehearsal for the upcoming production of A Tender Thing. She bore bad news. “I’ve got to stop you guys,” she said to the cast and crew. “I’ve got to send you home.” Thus the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly upended Calgary’s arts scene.
Denise Clarke, long-time ensemble member of One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, was directing A Tender Thing. She’d been working with Lunchbox since the beginning of February, just after OYR’s annual High Performance Rodeo festival had wrapped. A Tender Thing was set to open in a few days. Clarke asked Wattling if she and the crew would be coming back to stage the play eventually. Would they be able to launch in a couple of weeks? Would they have to wait until the new season started in December? “Maybe,” Wattling said. “I don’t know.”
As she walked home from the theatre, Clarke worried about what the pandemic would bring. “I was walking along, horrified,” she said. Then something unexpected happened. “I felt this wild exhilaration come over me.” For the first time in years, Clarke said, she was free of responsibility. “I had been working really, really hard for a long time.” Now, all of a sudden, she didn’t have to.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, OYR co-founder Blake Brooker was on holiday. He’d first arrived in Puerto Vallarta, but found resort tourism wasn’t to his taste. “Walking around sunburned with a Corona is not my idea of a vacation,” he said. So Brooker took a bus into the interior and ended up in the mountain town of Mascota. Sometime in mid-March, around the same time Clarke was being chased out of her tech rehearsal, Brooker received a text from a friend in Calgary: “Blake, do you know what’s happening?”
Brooker had heard about the spreading pandemic from an Italian he’d met whose parents’ hotel in Sardinia closed in the wake of an outbreak there, but Brooker didn’t know the situation in Calgary. He decided to come home a week earlier than scheduled. His airline, however, wasn’t answering their phones. Brooker spent his last three Mexican days before his departure sitting in Puerto Vallarta reading alarming emails from his friends, each differing in levels of panic and fear.
The first thing Brooker did when he returned was watch a movie. A bad one. “I remembered from my canon of memory a pandemic artifact that affected me greatly as a teenager,” Brooker said. “And that was The Omega Man.” The 1971 film features Charlton Heston as the only survivor of a deadly worldwide plague. Brooker returned to the film because it was the first objet d’art he could remember related to a pandemic. “Human beings are meaning-making machines,” he explained. “The first thing you want to do when something scary and unknown has come to you is to unpack the unknown. We want to make meaning out of the unknown.”
Brooker also returned to some of his favourite books—this time revisiting them in audio form. Among the ones he listened to multiple times was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a novella set amidst a cholera epidemic, “about a human being who is obsessed with small and worldly details and then gets overcome by events.” Brooker saw meaning there too. He didn’t watch the 2011 film Contagion, though. “It seemed a little bit too close,” he said.
John Dunn, OYR’s managing director, had other things on his mind than Charlton Heston and Thomas Mann. Nor did he share Clarke’s exhilaration. He worried for the Rabbits.
OYR had weathered trouble before. When oil prices collapsed in 2014, for example, so did corporate sponsorship dollars and audience numbers. All Calgary arts organizations that endure recognize the vagaries of our booms and busts. But OYR had never faced a complete shutdown. The company had been looking forward to developing a new play and launching a mentorship program, led by Clarke, called beautifulyoungartists. COVID cancelled everything. OYR’s six full-time staff feared for their jobs and Dunn arranged for daily Zoom meetings. “It was sort of a health and welfare check,” he said. They needed to figure out what to do next.
CERB gave artists an income. Government arts funding agencies offered support. Rent subsidies were implemented. Donors continued funding.
Fortunately, government arts funding agencies offered support. “All of them wanted to keep as much intact as possible,” Dunn said. “We benefited from that.” The federal CERB program allowed artists to continue drawing an income. Wage and rent subsidies were implemented, and OYR’s landlord at Arts Commons stopped collecting rent. “Right away there were encouraging words and encouraging plans that allowed us all to calm down a little bit and take a breath.” OYR called up all their donors, and each assured them the funding would remain intact. No one at OYR would lose their job.
Without on-stage performances to produce, Dunn used the pandemic intermission to deal with mundane office work the company had long neglected. They rejigged their fundraising strategies and sent out newly crafted letters of appeal that resulted in hundreds of new donors. They managed their dataset, cleaned out the storage rooms and put together a new handbook for the box office. This busywork was less sexy than staging avant garde theatre productions but foundational to the running of the company. Those first fretful months of the pandemic proved unexpectedly fruitful.
Andy Curtis, Christopher Hunt and Denise Clarke perform Gilgamesh Lazyboy in a friend’s backyard, spring 2021. Photo by Joe Kelly.
The incongruous happiness Clarke felt during those first pandemic days never abated. “I have a long-held conviction about radical joy,” Clarke said. “I consider it a political act to try to just live in joy. Because otherwise, I would just join the masses of everybody going ‘Oh, it’s so horrible.’” In spite of all the pandemic-borne anxiety swirling around her, Clarke never stopped feeling grateful for all that she had.
And now she had something else to be thankful for: time away from the stage. Instead of performing, Clarke went on long walks, sometimes for hours at a time. She memorized T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Taking advantage of the empty Arts Commons, Clarke designed a dance and movement piece around Beethoven’s late string quartets, alone in the Big Secret Theatre. Clarke also started a written work she calls her “memory project.” “I started to think about how fantastic my memories are,” Clarke said. She spent much of her pandemic intermission writing those memories down. “It just is such an exhilarating process. Taking experiences that mean so much to me and trying to find the words to frame what the time was like.”
Clarke didn’t miss performing, and this surprised her. She so delighted in her pandemic-enforced sabbatical that a friend warned her to tone down her visible bliss. “She reminded me that there are a lot of people who were really sad,” Clarke said. Her joy became her dirty little secret.
Brooker too found creative stimulation in the pandemic—though not at first. “For a few months there, I wasn’t interested in doing anything other than finding out what this was and how to live with it,” Brooker said. He found creating art amidst the pandemic anxiety a challenge. “I understand the torpor and the pressure. It doesn’t lead to a whimsical spirit.” Brooker’s torpor proved brief, though. Once he’d decided his life and livelihood were not under imminent threat, he began to see the pandemic differently.
“The pandemic both oppressed and thrilled me,” Brooker said. “I was oppressed by it like everyone else. Your quotidian habits change—not by your choice—and there are all these things you’re forced to do.” Still, bearing witness to a worldwide happening excited Brooker, both as an artist and as a human being. Arguably the COVID-19 pandemic is the first tumultuous global event since the Second World War that everyone participated in. “We were conscripted. And I felt oppressed by that,” Brooker said. “And I also felt tremendous, because I was living through a thing.”
OYR had hoped to host the High Performance Rodeo in January 2021. The Rabbits intended to restage Gilgamesh Lazyboy, a play that originally starred OYR co-founder Michael Green in the title role. This would have been the first time the Rabbits had performed Gilgamesh since Green’s sudden death in a highway accident in 2015. But by September 2020, with infections spiking again, OYR knew they’d have to cancel the festival.
Much of the funding for the Rodeo comes from Canadian Heritage in the form of arts presentation grants. Even though arts organizations across the country were unable to host festivals like the Rodeo, the ministry didn’t withhold funding. “Canadian Heritage just says you’ve got to spend your money,” Dunn said. “We want you to seed that money out to as many artists and technicians and gig workers in the arts and culture festival scene as you can.”
In lieu of hosting what would have been OYR’s 35th High Performance Rodeo, the company used their Heritage Canada funding to present what they called “35 for 35: Who Are You Now?” OYR commissioned 35 local and international artists to create 45- to 60-second videos that were then posted, one per day, on Instagram. Artists included France’s Société protectrice de petites idées, Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson from The Kids in the Hall, and Austin, Texas-based musician Alejandro Escovedo—along with local artists such as Karen Hines, Michelle Thrush and the Rabbits themselves.
The Rabbits remained committed to Gilgamesh, though. So, in spring 2021, with theatres still closed and indoor events impossible, OYR decided to stage the play outdoors. Clarke, Andy Curtis and Chris Hunt rehearsed under the trees in Confederation Park before performing the play four times in their friends’ backyards. “We just wanted to give it a try,” Clarke said.
Jamie Dunsdon in bliss (the birthday party play), OYR’s first in-person performance since the pandemic started, fall 2021. The one-woman show—”part theatre, part investigation of all the things we wish we could un-know”—was a slam for a bleak year. Photo by Mike Tan.
That fall, during the brief optimistic time before Alberta’s “Best Summer Ever” disintegrated into disaster, OYR decided to stage their first in-person performance since the pandemic started. They chose a playful one-woman show called bliss (the birthday party play), first staged at the 2020 Rodeo and starring Jamie Dunsdon. bliss, billed as “part theatre, part investigation of all the things we wish we could un-know, and all parts birthday party,” seemed the perfect balm for the bleak pandemic months that preceded it.
Audience members had to be vaccinated and masked, but the restrictions barely tempered anyone’s delight at being at the theatre again.
Audiences were thrilled. The provincial Restrictions Exemption Program had just been imposed, requiring audience members to be vaccinated and masked. The restrictions barely tempered anyone’s delight at finally being at the theatre again, Dunn said. He remembers a mother and daughter in the audience one night who were “dressed to the nines.” Dunn complimented them on their outfits. “They said ‘God, we’ve been waiting to wear these for two years. We are so happy to be out.’”
But the bliss ended soon after bliss ended. The Omicron wave scuttled hopes for a proper on-stage Rodeo in January 2022. At first OYR thought they could go forward with the festival as long as they planned for every possible pandemic-related contingency—an exercise Dunn likens to playing whack-a-mole. Finally, after 10 days of Zoom meetings, Dunn asked the question nobody wanted to hear: whether or not to have a Rodeo at all. “Everybody on the call just stopped breathing,” Dunn said. They couldn’t imagine cancelling the Rodeo. Again.
In the end, everyone agreed that launching a festival during Omicron would endanger the audience and performers alike—even with restrictions in place. So, 17 days before the festival was scheduled to begin, the Rabbits pulled the plug. Thanks again to funding from Canadian Heritage, OYR fulfilled the contracts of all the artists who’d been booked. “We paid them out,” Dunn said. “They were blown away.”
The provincial government lifted their “vaccine passport” program in February 2022, allowing unvaccinated people to enter businesses or attend indoor events for the first time since the previous September. Still, Arts Commons decided to keep the restrictions in effect in all their theatres. Audiences had bought tickets under the assumption that these measures would be in place, after all, and visiting artists expected restrictions, given their shows had been booked months earlier.
The Rabbits didn’t stage any shows during this time, but some of their fellow Arts Commons tenants did. Most ticketholders appreciated the extended COVID measures. Others recoiled at being asked to prove their vaccination status or wear masks, and harassed theatre ushers and volunteers. On April 4 an unhinged pizza salesman posted a rambling anti-mandate video on social media calling the Arts Commons restrictions “despicable.” (Apparently nobody told him that Arts Commons had just announced they were lifting the restrictions that same week.)
Even though several comments on Pizza Man’s post called for a boycott of Arts Commons, the complex never had to endure an organized protest campaign by what Dunn calls “the freedumb people.” Dunn wonders, though, if the troublemakers prompted Arts Commons to ease restrictions earlier than they would’ve otherwise.
One Yellow Rabbit staged Gilgamesh Lazyboy in spring 2022, properly this time, indoors at Big Secret Theatre. Clarke found, however, that her professional habits were out of practice. Like most actors, Clarke would normally spend the whole day preparing for an evening show. She would wake at a prescribed hour and eat precise meals at precise times. And if she had a performance the next night, she kept her after-party revelry in check. “You don’t do stupid shit,” Clarke said. “You eat properly and you don’t get hammered.” Clarke’s long sabbatical had dulled her routines. During the Gilgamesh run, Clarke didn’t eat enough, or she ate too early, and she went to bed too late. “I also did a really bonehead thing on preview night,” Clarke admitted. “I had three glasses of sparkly. And I felt that the next day. I got a little drunk by mistake.”
Despite Clarke’s rusty rituals, nothing had changed for her on stage, even after two years away. Clarke thrilled at being under the lights again. “As soon as I hit the boards, it was heaven,” she said. “It didn’t feel different. It felt just the way it was supposed to.”
Audiences, though, were smaller than Clarke and Dunn had hoped. And OYR wasn’t the only arts organization facing empty seats. This doesn’t surprise Dunn. Theatregoers and other arts audiences are among the most cautious demographics when it comes to the pandemic. Dunn wonders too if people have grown so accustomed to entertaining themselves at home that they don’t feel the need to attend live performances. “We don’t know this,” he said. “It’s anecdotal. But it’s easy to understand.”
The Rabbits discussed streaming more performances online as they’d done with the “35 for 35” project. But these conversations never lasted long. Neither Dunn, Clarke nor Brooker wanted to bring the Rabbits into a virtual hutch. “A large part of the experience of what we do is gathering in real life,” Dunn said. “It’s being in the same room together. Meeting beforehand. Talking about things after the show. We’re not interested in streaming.”
OYR, like all arts organizations, will face numerous challenges in the months and years ahead. Spikes in the cost of living will cause donations to drop and ticket sales to shrink. Further, the pandemic undermined the gig economy, which included freelance theatre technicians. These workers have moved on to more lucrative work in the booming film and television streaming services. “They realized they’re worth more than they were getting,” Dunn said. Many have left the business altogether. Theatre companies will have a hard time replacing these skilled workers. The effect of federal CERB payments made a strong argument for a guaranteed basic income, Dunn said. “If we had that [now], we’d have more artists. We’d have more technicians. We’d have healthier arts and culture.”
Still, Dunn remains optimistic about the future of OYR. “We’ve developed a real survival muscle,” he said. “People have died. Economies have collapsed. We’ve gone through busts and booms over and over and over again. Now we’re living a pandemic. And you know what, we’re resilient as hell.”
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books, including, most recently, Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers (Biblioasis).
