Fortunately, on the phone from Calgary, Sharon was anything but “prickly.” She was warm and friendly and full of laughter. And her guidance to me was solid. She said aspiring playwrights should try to get as much life experience in and out of theatre as they could, in part because that would inform their writing, but also because that’s simply a recipe for living an interesting life. As for playwriting, she was blunt: the profession is frequently challenging and enormously frustrating, even for her. “I don’t mean to be discouraging, but I really don’t have a lot of positive things to say,” she said. And then she laughed.

We spoke for close to an hour, much longer than I had intended. This from one of Canada’s most widely produced playwrights, a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and a three-time winner of the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Drama Award. Back then I didn’t think someone of her stature would have much time for a young, inexperienced person like me. But as I learned later, when it came to young writers and artists, Sharon could be generous with her time, mentoring and supporting them however she could. That mentorship was a part of her devotion to theatre as a whole. In a comprehensive biography, Sherrill Grace writes that Sharon had experience doing just about any job you could think of in a theatre, from acting to being the artistic director to running the box office. When I asked Sharon why she was a playwright, she said it’s because theatre lives and breathes in the same space as the audience.

Her road to a life in theatre was a rocky one. Mary Sharon Chalmers was born in 1936 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her father was a hard-working and respected physician, while her mother was a former nurse who left the profession to raise a family. Life at home was far from idyllic. Her father’s absence and persistent infidelity caused deep marital strain, and her mother’s unhappiness as a housewife led her to alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour, and she ultimately died by suicide. It all left Sharon with profound emotional scars.

While attending the University of New Brunswick, Sharon met Ross Pollock. The two married quickly and moved to Toronto, where she became a housewife and mother. But Ross was physically and emotionally abusive, to the point that Sharon’s misery led to a moment of desperation when she unsuccessfully tried to poison him.

Amid her demanding life as a mother, Sharon began attending plays and eventually joined an amateur theatre group. Ross disapproved. After a particularly violent incident, she fled back to Fredericton with their five children. She got involved with another theatre group and soon began a relationship with a fellow actor, Michael Ball. When he was offered a position in the drama department at the University of Calgary, Sharon moved west with him. In Calgary she toured with the Prairie Players through small-town British Columbia and Alberta, earning accolades including best actress at the Dominion Drama Festival.

Her road to theatre was rocky…. She tried to poison her disapproving husband.

While pregnant with her sixth child, Sharon wrote her first play for the stage. A Compulsory Option won the 1971 Alberta Playwriting Competition and was produced the following year. Her next work, Walsh, about the relationship between a North-West Mounted Police officer and the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973 and was subsequently produced at the Stratford Festival. Walsh brought Sharon wide public attention and more productions, and by the time she was 38, she had begun a promising career as a playwright. She started to write plays in part out of frustration with not seeing Canadian stories on the stage. “I wanted other actors to stand up and say my words,” she said, “to speak directly through an experience I shared with those other Albertans and Canadians.”

Walsh was an important development in Sharon’s career. It demonstrates her storytelling gifts—a reviewer in the Ottawa Citizen said Walsh had “that indefinable magic that is the essence of the art” of theatre—and reveals her strong inclination to write about historical injustices.

But I didn’t read Walsh until just after I had finished my degree, and by then it would only affirm my deep admiration for her as a playwright. It was Blood Relations that first exposed me to Sharon’s work, when the University of Lethbridge drama department produced the play for its mainstage season in 2003. The two plays had different impacts on me in my early twenties, but when I reread the two scripts at 41, I noticed both are about individuals caught in oppressive social and political systems. In the case of Walsh, we get a glimpse into the Canadian bureaucracy that was seemingly designed to inflict hardship on Indigenous people, with NWMP colonel James Walsh being a captive and reluctant agent of this bureaucracy, and into the Sioux people, led by Sitting Bull, being forced to return to the United States from which they had fled. “Honour, truth… the lot… they’re just words,” says Walsh in the play. “I gave my life to them, and they don’t exist.”

On the other hand, Blood Relations examines how the repressive roles imposed on women cause the protagonist to lash out in a horrifying way. The play is about Lizzie Borden and the circumstances leading up to the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother, of which she was accused and acquitted. Though the story may seem far removed from Sharon’s experience, she felt a personal connection to Lizzie’s case. “Prior to working in the theatre,” she wrote, in the afterword to the Methuen edition of the play, “I was married for some years to a violent man. I spent a great deal of time devising, quite literally, murderous schemes to rid me of him…. I would have killed to maintain my sense of self…. And so it is with Lizzie.” In Blood Relations, Sharon was less concerned about whether Borden committed the murders and more interested in why she might have done it.

I saw the play well over a decade before the #MeToo movement and, at 20, my comprehension of feminist issues was juvenile. Yet even someone as oblivious as I was could see that Blood Relations was about how accepted social conventions restrain women. Lizzie is trapped in a strict Victorian family that suppresses her personal ambitions and independence. She’s pressured to spend time with a suitor she despises. She watches helplessly as her father signs title to the family farm she loves over to the stepmother she hates. She’s refused the opportunity to get a job to attain her own independence, and her father refuses her the money to live on her own. Her stepmother tells her she has no rights. Later, when Lizzie protests too much, her father butchers her beloved pet birds.

But the play doesn’t just catalogue the ways women have historically faced limited prospects for freedom and were punished for seeking autonomy. When I saw the play, what stood out to me was its moral ambiguity. Lizzie’s violence can be seen as an act of defiance against subjugation, making her character and her actions morally complex. The crime was heinous, no question. But at the same time, it was clear to me that Lizzie’s legal options were limited, that she had been backed into a corner, and under that extreme duress she became desperate and reckless, lashing out at the people who had pushed her too far. Sharon didn’t offer a safe separation between guilt or innocence, instead confronting her audience with serious ethical questions about violence as a reaction against oppression.

I had never seen a play like Blood Relations. At that time in my life, I was only studying drama in university as a stopgap toward going to film school, with no plans to finish my degree or take up theatre as an artistic practice. The production of Blood Relations didn’t single-handedly change that, but it did open my eyes to how the stage could tell a deeply layered story as rich as anything I’d seen on film.

In Blood Relations Sharon was more interested in why Lizzie might have done it.

It wasn’t just the thematic elements of the play that struck me, but also the way in which Sharon told the story. The action that unfolded before me wasn’t a linear, by-the-facts murder mystery, but a twisting and turning play-within-a-play that introduced me to a new level of theatricality. In the play, as the stage lights come up in the theatre, an Actress character is standing centre stage in an upper class Victorian room, reciting Hermione’s lines from Act 3, Scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say “Not Guilty.”…

Lizzie Borden then enters and, after a brief exchange with the Actress, the two of them decide to have some fun by acting out the events leading up to the infamous crime. I watched the Actress don Lizzie’s costume to play Lizzie Borden, while Lizzie herself put on a costume fit for an observer servant. From there, the action seemed to go back in time as characters from the past entered the stage to re-enact what happened.

Pollock performing in Blood Relations at Theatre Calgary in 1981. Her play is based on the true story of an unsolved double-murder in 1892

This play-within-a-play device jolted me out of my passive observance. What was this extra layer of psychological and temporal complexity being thrown at me Of these two women, who was the real Lizzie Borden Why include this role-playing at all Why not simply tell the story in a simple, straightforward fashion But of course, I embodied the answer to this latter question: I leaned forward in my seat and paid close attention, piecing the action together in my own way, while the audience around me was likely doing the same. What might have been a chronological, facts-of-the-crime murder mystery became something more engaging and thought-provoking, pulling the audience into more-active scrutiny of the unfolding drama. The play-within-a-play device pushes Blood Relations deeper into the realm of theatricality and imagination, lending itself well to different readings and varying interpretations, raising questions about identity, memory and truth, and ultimately making the whole experience more subtle and artful.

Two moments from the play remain as vivid to me now as they did then. The first occurs late in the play, when Andrew Borden lies napping on the couch, and the Actress, playing Lizzie, hums a soothing tune as she approaches him, carrying a hatchet. Standing over him, she raises the axe, and just before she swings it down, the lights in the theatre go out. In the darkness the voices of monstrous children sing the now infamous skipping rope rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one

The second memorable moment happens at the play’s end. After a confrontation with her sister, Emma, during which Lizzie grips the hatchet, the question of whether Lizzie committed the crime comes up.

Emma: You didn’t… did you?
Miss Lizzie: Poor Emma.
The Actress: Lizzie. [She takes the hatchet from Miss Lizzie.]Lizzie, you did.
Miss Lizzie: I didn’t. [She smiles.] You did. [The Actress looks to the hatchet, then to the audience.] [Blackout.]

From left to right: Sharon Pollock’s play Walsh, about Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the massacre at Little Bighorn, Talonbooks, 1973; Blood Relations, NeWest Press, 1981; Doc, Broadview, 1985; Saucy Jack, about Jack the Ripper, published in 1994 by Blizzard.

Sharon revealed a different kind of theatricality with her 1984 play Doc. This was one of the few plays I read as an undergraduate that really lit a fire under me to write for the stage. Ironically, when I first read it, I was oblivious to how autobiographical the play is to Sharon. Doc draws heavily on her family history growing up in Fredericton, with characters who are extensions of her overworked physician father, her despairing and alcoholic mother and the playwright herself.

In an interview with Canadian Journalist, Sharon said every play she writes “begins as an attempt to understand the world around me. I make up a story in which I can control the elements and the motivation of the characters. I create a little world which I know has meaning and makes sense. When I’m finished doing that, I’m better able to cope with what began as something incomprehensible to me.” So it seems she wrote Doc to clarify her thoughts and feelings surrounding her family’s troubled history, believing theatre can process, explore and make sense of complex personal relationships.

When I first read the script, it showed me that an intense family conflict can also be highly theatrical. Rather than presenting a linear, kitchen-sink drama, Doc is a memory play where the action shifts across time, with characters living and dead occupying the same space. The aged doctor and his estranged daughter Catherine reunite and try to make sense of their dark past, their conflicting memories playing out against one another. Temporal barriers are broken down, with characters from different time periods addressing one another, creating an elaborate and fluid interrogation of the past. In Doc, Catherine and Katie are the same person played by different actors at different stages of life, yet they speak to each other, each trying to come to grips with events in their own way. And all of it written with dialogue that avoids tedious melodrama and instead presents five humans with their own psychologically complex voices.

She wrote Doc to clarify her thoughts and feelings about her family’s troubled history.

In one scene, Ev, a worn-out doctor, stands isolated onstage while his wife, Bob, watches from the shadows.

Ev: We had the worst goddamn polio epidemic this province has seen, 11 years ago. We had an outbreak this year. You are lookin’ at the attending physician at the present Polio Clinic—it is a building that has been condemned by the Provincial Fire Marshal, it has been condemned by the Provincial Health Officer, it has been condemned by the Victoria Public Hospital, it’s infested with cockroaches, it’s overrun by rats, it’s the worst goddamn public building in this province! When is the government gonna stop building liquor stores and give the doctors of this province a chance to save a few fuckin’ lives!
Bob: Haven’t you got enough?
Ev: Enough what?
Bob: Enough! Enough everything!
Ev: You’re drunk.

As personal as Doc is to Sharon, this passage reflects how relevant it is to the rest of us. We are living in a time in Alberta when doctors and nurses are similarly burning out from overwork and the healthcare system is in crisis. Such is the power of Sharon’s craft, transforming the deeply personal into the universal, the private into the public.

Nicole Garies as Lizzy Borden in the University of Regina theatre department’s production of Blood Relations, November 2018. U of R Photography

Sharon continued working as a performer off and on throughout her career. In 2011 she was in rehearsals for Verb Theatre’s production of Marg Szkaluba (Pissy’s Wife), a one-woman show about a survivor of domestic violence. One day, the show’s director, my friend Jamie Dunsdon, emailed me to ask if I would come to the last week of rehearsals and be on book for Sharon, following along in the script and providing her with her line if she forgot.

I attended the rehearsals, watched Sharon work like a pro, and only had to cue her lines a few times. On opening night, I watched her onstage at the Ironwood in Inglewood, where she embodied blue-collar Marg Szkaluba’s fiery wit and defiance with passion and humour. After the show I was invited to join the creative team for drinks. There we were, a handful of eager artists in our mid-twenties having a beer with a 75-year-old woman who happened to be one of Canada’s most accomplished playwrights—youthful ambition and seasoned mastery converging over a shared passion for theatre.

That was Sharon for you. Despite her stature and achievements, she remained grounded and approachable, and shared her knowledge and experience in a way that nurtured the next generation of artists. Theatre was much more to her than a mere job or a pleasant pastime. It was central to her identity and sense of purpose. She devoted her life to it as a performer and as an administrator and, most importantly, as a playwright who gave voice to Canadian stories and sensibilities at a time when such things were almost entirely absent from our stages. Yes, she could be blunt, perhaps by some estimations even prickly, but she was always striving for excellence in craftsmanship, and she did so with great respect and generosity.

Since 2021 Sharon Pollock is no longer with us. For people who didn’t know her as a close friend or as family, all we have left are her plays and our memories of having seen them. For me, Sharon will always be the one who transformed how I conceive of theatre—this art form that lives and breathes with its audience. Every time I go to a play, I hope to be captivated the way Sharon’s plays captivated me, that there may be moments as brilliant as the ones I witnessed in Blood Relations, that the experience might light a fire under me the way Doc did. When the show is about to start, my anticipation goes up as the lights in the theatre go down.

Andrew Torry is a playwright in Calgary. His work has been shortlisted for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama.

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Masked characters handed out chocolate almonds. A Gorilla curated a banana-peeling contest. The silent antics of Chaplin and Buster Keaton danced on the wall. This was not a “wake” in the original meaning of the term. There was no chance the body could reawaken (though Keith would have approved of such a prank): the patron saint of impro had donated his body to science. Even after death, his lifelong desire for others to learn through exploration prevailed.

Months earlier, on March 11, 2023, the English-turned-Albertan mentor to comedians, actors, screenwriters, playwrights and directors around the world had died at Rockyview Hospital. The official cause was complications related to diabetic sepsis, though few would argue he had not lived a long enough life, least of all himself.

“Who wants to be 90?” he liked to joke. “Anyone who’s 89!”

Tributes flooded the internet, obits ran in The New York Times, the Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. Keith’s former students, self-proclaimed “enfants terribles” of the Loose Moose,

Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall, joked about playing the hat game (a collaborative challenge Keith invented) on his grave.

Johnstone is the author of the seminal text on improvisation, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). He expanded on his formats, games and techniques in Impro for Storytellers (1999). He is the creator of popular competitive formats of improvisation including Theatresports, Micetro Impro, The Life Game and Gorilla Theatre. Today Theatresports is arguably the most popular invention out of Alberta after ginger beef. This team-on-team format is played on every continent except Antarctica.

Impro—or improv—is widely considered to have two traditions. Viola Spolin developed a series of exercises and games to train actors in the mid-1950s and taught these alongside her son Paul Sills at the University of Chicago. Sills founded the Compass Players in St. Louis and co-founded The Second City. Spolin and Sills trained Del Close, who went on to be the “Chicago style’s” most influential improvisation instructor and mentor to the likes of Tina Fey and Bob Odenkirk.

With some notable exceptions, fewer improvisers south of the border are indebted to the Johnstone style. According to Jeremy Lamb, an Austin-based performer, “Chicago-style improv is US football, while Johnstone is soccer: predominant in the rest of the world.”

When Better Call Saul actor Odenkirk visited Calgary in the winter of 2014, he dropped in on a show at the Loose Moose on a day off from shooting Fargo, only to learn that this was in fact Keith’s theatre. Not only that, Keith lived in town and had lived and taught here since 1971, for more than half his life. Would Odenkirk like to meet him A May 19, 2014, caption of a selfie with Bob and Keith on Bob’s official social media reads:

“My fucking mind blew a gasket. Guys, I bought this book [Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre] the day I met Del (Close)… and I made notes in it, and did the exercises in it with my dumb friends at college (Tim Thomas—a teacher in Rockford, Illinois) and it set me off on my life path.”

Mark Ravenhill, a British playwright, connected deeply with the techniques and theories in Impro, as Odenkirk had, and partook in a workshop with the man himself in London in 2017. He shared his first impression of Keith in an editorial for The Guardian:

“He arrives, a natural clown. His teeth sit widely and uncomfortably in his mouth, his trousers are high on a generous belly, his trainers are unfeasibly large. He’s carrying a plastic bag full of balloons, hats and cards containing lines of dialogue in gobbledegook. He grins, sighs and blinks at us through thick glasses.”

Today Theatresports is arguably the most popular invention out of Alberta after ginger beef.

Keith was born on February 21, 1933, in Brixham, England, a poor fishing town in the southwest county of Devon. His father was a pharmacist. The family of four lived above his shop. His mother, much younger and larger than his father, was prone to terrorizing her young children by chasing Keith and his sister around the kitchen table with a fire poker as a “game” while Keith’s father turned a blind eye. The first chapter of Impro begins, “As I grew up, everything started to grow grey and dull.”

Their home in Brixham was on the harbour, and, with the onset of the Second World War, became a target of German bombing. In 1940, at age seven, Keith was sent off to Glastonbury to a preparatory school, where he astounded his teacher with his ability to read at an adult level. There was no “Cat Sat on the Mat” for young Keith; he could read the newspaper aloud, having taught himself by memorizing comics. Keith thrived, was spared the cane and was deemed clever. He was recommended to attend the prestigious Totnes Grammar School. Here, though, things quickly went downhill. “I decided right before my ninth birthday not to believe a word the grownups said,” writes Keith. “And the next day I decided to see if the opposite could be true. I think it changed my life. I’ve been doing it ever since. It taught me to be looking for the obvious and not the clever.”

At age 10, while playing, Keith fell off a cliff. Suddenly he felt a different version of “self” take over as he grabbed onto branches and scrambled to safety. He realised he had developed a social self to please grownups that was not his authentic self. Verbal thinking and intellect interfered with being in the moment.

“Much of my work has involved ways of interfering with speech so that ‘something else’ can operate,” he has written. By recognizing a performer’s ability to bypass fear and be in a state of non-verbal thinking, magical things could be unleashed.

In his later work with Trance masks, Keith draws on this idea of human beings having many social selves. By creating large or expressive faces, performers stare into a mirror in trance and discover a mask character who frees them of their set idea of self.

Perhaps the worst stab at Keith’s childhood gusto was not inflicted by sharp branches as he scrambled to hang on to that cliff, nor by the bully whose pencil took out Keith’s eyesight in his left eye, but rather by his educators. In his blog he writes: “It’s difficult to destroy the curiosity of an ape, but Totnes Grammar School regularly achieved it.”

Keith went from being the top of his class to being at the bottom, and he wanted to understand why. “Students who are not eager to learn have been damaged. Instead of assuming that they were born that way, conscientious teachers should see it as a chance to heal the school-inflicted wounds.”

He eventually attended St. Luke’s teacher’s training college in Exeter and began teaching children in the government housing area of Battersea, experimenting with more playful and explorative forms of learning.

Keith writes in a chapter titled “Notes on Myself” in Impro: “I began to think of children not as immature adults but of adults as atrophied children.” Education left people atrophied, and with the wrong attitude to failure. Embracing failure was necessary to learn, according to Keith. He discovered techniques and ways to remove fear of failure, whether it was stage fright or writer’s block. Beginners of improvisation are taught to say “yes” to offers. In a TED talk, Keith’s iconic words appear on a title card: “There are people who prefer to say ‘yes’ and there are people who prefer to say ‘no.’ Those who say ‘yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say ‘no’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”

Battersea and life in London was when the colour returned to Keith’s life as he met and exchanged ideas with kindred spirits: artists, filmmakers, actors taking in plays and films and live music together. After seeing Peter Hall’s production of Waiting for Godot, a life-altering experience that spawned a friendship and mentorship from Samuel Beckett himself, Keith was inspired to move from teaching into theatre.

Keith Johnstone influenced many star performers

Johnstone began as a play reader, and then taught acting and playwriting. He wrote and directed several plays himself at the Royal Court and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London for most of the 1960s. Here, Keith evolved into the impro pioneer who could teach the unteachable: the misfits and the outliers, the drama school stragglers.” One such straggler was Jonathan Pryce, who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Pope Francis in the film Two Popes. In an interview for the docuseries On Keith: Artists Speak on Johnstone and Impro, Pryce recalled Johnstone’s influence: “To me, Keith is the man who released any inhibitions I may have had when I went to RADA in the late 1960s.”

At that time in Britain, the Lord Chamberlain had to approve plays and scripts before they could be performed in front of an audience. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. Keith found a way around that by hosting open workshops, marking the beginning of his trademark side-coaching, or directed improvisation, another major departure from the Spolin tradition. Keith continued to work on the games, techniques and theory he developed at the Royal Court and through his work with Britain’s first travelling improv troupe: the Theatre Machine.

While teaching at the Royal Court Studio in the early 1960s, Keith became inspired by British professional wrestling, where the competition is fake, yet elicits a sports-like passion from an audience. As he says in Improvisation: The Origins of Theatresports: “The exaltation among the spectators was something I longed for, but didn’t get, from ‘straight’ theatre. Sometimes the performers would lie on the canvas and hug each other for minute after minute while the crowd yelled insults and witticisms. Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison—probably because once an event is categorised as ‘cultural’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”

Education left people with the wrong attitude to failure. Keith discovered techniques and ways to remove fear of failure.

Keith was a healthy young man of 40 who didn’t smoke—a real feat for any person in the 1970s. Yet in London he often felt ill or as if he couldn’t breathe. There was no room for Keith to continue experimenting. Keith accepted a visiting lectureship at the University of Calgary in 1972 and was offered a full-time tenure position in 1975. It was not until he emigrated to Alberta and arrived in the can-do, yeehaw, “git yer stompin’ boots on” Stampede culture of Calgary in the early 1970s that he blossomed into the world-renowned leader in the field of improvisation. “Calgary was a place where literally, physically and intellectually there was space,” said the late Kathleen Foreman, original Loose Moose member and former U of C Drama faculty member, in an interview for Theresa Robbins Dudeck’s Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography.

Keith was consistently finding better ways of teaching and continued to work on his discoveries in improvisation. He hand-picked his U of C students for further experimentation outside of the university. Early drama students included Foreman, Dennis Cahill, Frank and Tony Totino, Veena Sood, Jim Curry, Dave Duncan and Betty Poulson. Keith preferred to keep the peace at the first sign of dissension from certain faculty members who did not feel his unconventional drama experiments were welcome on campus. He searched for an off-campus home for his growing gang of improvisers. They found one at the Pumphouse. There Johnstone and veterinarian Mel Tonken co-founded Loose Moose Theatre in 1977.

Cahill, current artistic director and an original member of Loose Moose, recalls, “We started doing weekly performances at the Pumphouse on Sunday nights. I think the improvisation is what really got people’s attention, just because there was nothing quite like it, not in Calgary, not really anywhere.”

In Calgary Keith found the freedom to create new techniques and create performance formats, beginning with Theatresports, which quickly exploded. In Impro Keith writes, “Now that I’m teaching ‘playwriting’ in a Canadian university, I’ve adapted from this early game into a way of teaching narrative skills. Two students obey a third, who tells them what to say and do.” This is the source of the “Typewriter Game,” a narrative exercise played in impro theatres everywhere, where a player mime-types a story for others to fill in. Big discoveries happened with the early students at Loose Moose and the company grew. Early houses frequently sold out.

Keith travelled in the summers while he was at U of C, and then further developed techniques he began abroad in his classes in Calgary and at the Moose. He developed The Danish Game, a component of Theatresports, while teaching in Denmark. Maestro Impro was originally created in the Netherlands, but Keith developed the format further at Loose Moose. Cahill says, “At some point, Keith started to introduce the theory behind the games, which, if you were going to teach or invent your own games, was invaluable.”

Keith retired from U of C in 1995, and, instead of a gold watch, was given a balloon ride. He handed over the artistic reins to Cahill in 1998, but often returned to teach or co-direct. Generations of Loose Moosers have made waves in the entertainment industry since, such as Pat Kelly of CBC’s satirical news radio program This is That.

“Probably the greatest influence Keith had on me was teaching me that a performer ‘should not try to be interesting’—being average was more compelling,” Kelly said. “It unlocked everything for me when I understood that being subtle worked. It has informed everything I’ve done in comedy.”

Dave Lawrence, creator of the cult hit FUBAR, says, “Studying with Keith from such a young age helped me with FUBAR [for] the simple fact that characters need to be altered. I don’t think I would have known that if it weren’t for Keith.”

Keith pioneered huge parts of this now ubiquitous art form right here in Cowtown, beside his beloved Rockies. Yet he got no rewards or prizes; he was never white-hatted. There’s no mention of this legend’s name on the webpage of the University of Calgary’s drama department, where he taught for nearly 25 years, no plaque or scholarship or rehearsal space named after him on campus. Improvisation at the Loose Moose Theatre—having miraculously survived the pandemic—receives minimal provincial funding compared to other more “respected” art forms such as ballet and scripted theatre. To this day, Keith and his work have received no formal recognition from the local community or the provincial government.

As Mark Ravenhill wrote in his editorial for The Guardian about his workshop with Keith:

“After one class, I try to tell Johnstone what an inspiration he has been to me. He’s evasive, ducking my attempts to praise him. He is wary of the guru status that many in improvisation have given him. ‘It stops them inventing for themselves,’ he says. What’s the thing he is proudest of in his life He stares into the distance for a long time, then says: ‘I did once invent a totally new way of peeling a banana. I’m very proud of that.’ ”

Back at the Pumphouse last June, Dennis is wrongfully declared the winner of the banana-peeling contest, Mark McKinney leaps to his feet in mock protest, telling Tony Totino he was robbed, “and this shit has been going on for years!” Dave Lawrence, dressed as his FUBAR character Terry, attempts to patch in a group in Brazil, sending screeching feedback through the string quartet’s performance of Beethoven. Terry yells down at the crowd from the booth: “Sorry. I boned it right up!” They roar with laughter and heckle him, the perfect summation of Keith’s teachings: embrace failure, be obvious, misbehave, relax, the competition isn’t real.

Immanuela Lawrence is a comedy writer, improv performer and co-creator of FUBAR: Age of Computer. She lives in Calgary.

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Over at the Winspear Centre, construction of a $65.6-million expansion—planned prior to the pandemic—is taking shape in a former parking lot. The original concert hall, opened in 1997, is home to the 70-year-old Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. A smaller venue, the Music Box, and a series of rehearsal and teaching studios will be part of the 41,000-ft² addition.

Inside the Winspear, hundreds of people mill about in the main lobby, waiting for one of Alexander Prior’s last few performances as chief conductor of the ESO. Seating in the hall itself is staggered to maintain physical distancing, so there are more empty spaces than bodies in the room. (The Winspear can fit 1,932 people if it opens the choir lofts.) Almost everyone is masked as they take their seats for the evening’s program, which includes pieces by two Edmonton-born composers, Vivian Fung and Alissa Cheung, and excerpts from Philip Glass’s minimalist opera Akhnaten.

“Tonight is a little exploration in relentlessness,” Prior announces from the stage. “It often takes the form of minimalism. Minimalists tend to stretch time. It feels like both an eternity and one second.” In other words, tonight’s music will comprise the ideal soundtrack for a pandemic.

Akhnaten, which sounds like the theme to a Game of Thrones prequel, hovers from dour and cinematic to lilting and pastoral. Fung’s A Child Dreams of Toys captures the joy of total abandon—or the anticipation of it—while Cheung’s Impressions, with its scratchy violins, signals (perhaps) another round of impending doom.

Prior and the ESO also throw in an unscheduled performance of Carl Nielsen’s Canto Serioso, originally written for French horn and piano. Before launching into their interpretation of the piece—complete with gongs—Prior reminisces about life before COVID-19. As it turns out, he conducted one of Nielsen’s symphonies during his last pre-pandemic concert with the ESO. The title of the work The Inextinguishable.

“Ironic?” Prior impishly asks the crowd.

From May to September 2020, musicians performed more than 180 outdoor concerts, raising more than $160,000 for the ESO.

The day the world shut down, Prior was in Montreal, getting ready to fly to Germany for a tour with one of its orchestras as a guest conductor. He ended up renting a car and driving the 3,600 km back to Edmonton. Prior wanted to be with his ESO family and help in whatever way he could, whether lobbying the government for emergency financial support or organizing a public fundraiser.

“My first thought was ‘I really have to be here,’” he says. “But because the [restrictions] of the pandemic were so strong, there wasn’t much I could do. It was rough. It was survival mode for us and the whole classical music industry. How can we pivot?”

Like so many others, the ESO pivoted to digital. While in-person concerts were cancelled, classes for its youth orchestra, YONA-Sistema, went online immediately. By the end of April 2020, the ESO had officially called off the 25th edition of its late-summer festival, Symphony Under the Sky. But the orchestra had by then started producing a series of YouTube videos, “From Stage to Screen,” featuring musicians alone or in small groups performing in the Winspear’s empty and resonant concert hall—including concertmaster Robert Uchida playing several of J.S. Bach’s sonatas for solo violin.

“Thank you for this!” one viewer, Wendy Miller, commented on YouTube. “Everyone could use a bit of beautiful music right now. We miss the Winspear and ESO so much.”

Prior himself, on piano, accompanied principal cellist Rafael Hoekman performing Sibelius’s Two Pieces, opus 77. “The videos told our patrons ‘We’re still performing for you, we care about you, and we want to keep you connected with our players and our community,’” says Prior.

ESO tuba player Scott Whetham and trombonist Kathryn Macintosh outdoors in 2021. Photo by Colin Waugh.

While the videos increased the ESO’s YouTube subscribers by more than 65 per cent during the first three months of the pandemic, musicians and fans alike were craving live performances. Indoor concerts weren’t allowed, but outdoor shows were—with masks, distancing, fewer performers and smaller audiences. So the ESO took to the streets and parks and backyards of Edmonton, playing a series of community concerts organized by assistant principal horn Megan Evans.

From May 2020 to September 2020, musicians performed more than 180 outdoor concerts, raising more than $160,000 for the ESO. “We played for a 95th birthday,” Evans writes in the ESO and Winspear Centre’s 2020-2021 annual report. “Cellist Rafael Hoekman performed a solo show for a music teacher diagnosed with stage four cancer. We also played a concert to celebrate a 30th and a 60th wedding anniversary.” At one show, strong winds ended up blowing a violist’s sheet music into her colleague’s face.

For cellist Julie Hereish and violist Keith Hamm, these outdoor shows were a great way to meet music fans and explore Edmonton. The couple had only moved to the city seven months prior to the pandemic. “People were excited to talk to us [after a performance],” says Hereish. “That doesn’t happen in a concert hall. There’s less of a barrier when musicians are playing on a street corner—audiences feel very comfortable coming to chat and introduce themselves.”

“[People] would bring lawn chairs onto their streets and take in the music,” adds Hamm. “We started feeling really close to the city and to the individual neighbourhoods that came out and showed support.”

By October 2020 the ESO was back in the Winspear—still in smaller and distanced configurations but with better acoustics (and less wind). Within six weeks, and 22 concerts by the orchestra, however, and with COVID infections surging across Alberta, the provincial government ordered another ban on indoor gatherings.

The orchestra wouldn’t perform again for eight months—its longest absence from the stage during the pandemic. (Some members continued to record and release YouTube videos; others started a podcast.)

In August 2021 the ESO played a series of small outdoor concerts in and around Edmonton, and relaunched its annual outdoor festival, Symphony Under the Sky, at reduced capacity, in Hawrelak Park. Here, all 56 members performed in concert together for the first time in 16 months.

Autumn saw shows at the Winspear once again, with the ESO offering monthly memberships instead of season subscriptions. After another brief shutdown in January 2022, the ESO resumed a regular slate of performances that March—some with restricted capacity, some full—and announced its 2022–23 season (including Symphony Under the Sky) and the appointment of an artistic adviser, Michael Stern, in early June.

People would bring lawn chairs onto their streets and take in the music. We started feeling really close to the city and the neighbourhoods.

Still, with so few concerts and such small attendance, COVID could’ve been disastrous for the ESO. The company made only $73,127 in ticket sales for the year ending June 30, 2021, compared to $4.6-million for 2019 and $3-million for 2020.

But the ESO and Winspear Centre weathered the pandemic relatively well. They received some $2.9-million from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy program to help pay administrative staff and musicians’ salaries in 2020 and 2021, as well as grants from six organizations, including the Edmonton Arts Council, EPCOR’s Heart + Soul Fund, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Canadian Heritage. The orchestra and the Winspear did have to let go some administrative staff, but the ESO didn’t lay off any musicians.

Prior thinks the ESO’s administration and Winspear’s board of directors did an admirable job of keeping the 70-year-old orchestra and its 25-year-old venue alive. Together, the two institutions posted an operating deficit of $2.7-million for the year ended June 30, 2020, and a surplus of $1,387,032 for the following year. (ESO CEO Annamarie Petrov wasn’t available for comment, despite repeated requests.)

“We were very fortunate to have really thoughtful leadership in the board and the administration,” says Prior. “You can’t magic money, you can’t work miracles, but they definitely tried. The task was to keep the little pilot flame burning, because the ESO is such a treasure. Thousands of musicians have put so much into this orchestra, and so many audience members have supported it regularly and selflessly over the years.”

Members of the ESO perform a community concert on Saskatchewan Drive in summer of 2020. Photo by Konstantine Kurelias.

As COVID wreaked havoc on the ESO’s schedule and ability to perform, some of the orchestra’s musicians poured their energies into other projects.

Cellist Victor Pipkin focused on his family farm about 80 km northwest of Edmonton—raising goats, cows, ducks and rabbits. He spent time climbing in the Rockies, teaching music lessons outdoors, learning to play piano, writing several études and at times catching up on sleep. “I love performing, I love our audiences. Music is meant to bring community together,” says the 32-year ESO veteran. “Did I miss performing Probably the answer is no, because I’m so busy with other aspects of life outside the symphonic circle.”

Cellist Hereish and violist Hamm welcomed two daughters—Charlotte in May 2020, then Claire 20 months later. “Having kids was kind of the perfect project for that time,” says Hereish, as she cradles and breastfeeds her youngest during a video call. “I mean, I was pregnant before the pandemic started, but it ended up being the perfect timing. We both had so much time at home.”

Their experience wasn’t always seamless. Due to COVID precautions, Hamm was only allowed to join his wife in the hospital for the last two hours of Charlotte’s delivery. “It wasn’t fun,” Hereish remembers. “I was alone in labour for hours, and then Keith was able to join only at the very end. It wasn’t the experience you’re supposed to have.”

The couple also pursued their own musical side projects—starting a duo, The New Cohort, and performing livestreams. Hamm even recorded an album and toured Ontario with his ensemble, the Rosebud String Quartet. (He hails from the southern Alberta town of Rosebud and is the artistic director of its chamber music festival.)

Hamm says he’ll always think of the COVID years whenever he plays Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The ESO performed the classic with conductor Mario Venzago at the start of 2022, back in the Winspear but in front of a more intimate audience. “As we were playing it, I remember thinking there was some part of the pandemic I could associate with each of the passing movements,” says Hamm. “Then of course, there’s the huge, victorious finale that we all wish and hope for as far as being on the other side of it all. I found a lot of parallels there.”

ESO concertmaster Robert Uchida, left, and former chief conductor Alex Prior at the Winspear Centre, March 2022. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

For the ESO’s chief conductor, however, much of the COVID period has been a challenge. A young (he turned 30 only last month!) and naturally gregarious man who’s been writing orchestral music since childhood, Alexander Prior missed performing regularly and felt incredibly lonely. He worried about the future of the arts and his future in the arts. For a brief time, he flirted with the idea of learning to code.

“[The pandemic] was awful,” he says. “Thankfully, a few close friends really rallied to my aid and kept me going. I found it incredibly challenging for my mental health. It was also really stressful to see what was happening to the industry and to music. People need music, right Music is one of the oldest things humanity has.”

For some relief, Prior listened to music. Perhaps more surprising, however, was his chosen prescription—country music and road trips. The UK-born and Russian-trained composer spent days driving through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, even (once the border reopened) Wyoming and Montana. His favourite drive Highway 40, which runs through Kananaskis and is only accessible in summer. “It’s just fantastic,” he says. “Open the windows all the way and blast country radio.” (Alberta cowboy Corb Lund is one of his favourite artists.)

In addition to the pressures of the pandemic, there was the question of Prior’s future with the ESO. He wanted to stay, but his five-year contract was expiring in June 2022. “I didn’t decide to leave,” he says. “That was a bigger-picture thing. So my job was to get another job.

“But I’m full of gratitude. I’ve had quite a long run here, and we really love each other. It’s really good to leave on good terms. Many conductors don’t.”

Prior is now the music director of Erfurt Theatre and the Erfurt Philharmonic Orchestra in Germany. (Flying to and from Europe for auditions was “rough and full of bureaucracy.”) He says Alberta and its capital city will always be close to his heart. He began his tenure with the ESO when he was only 24, so he feels like he matured as an adult in Edmonton. “It’s hard to say goodbye,” says Prior. “But it’s hard because it was beautiful.”

The ESO is now looking for his replacement. New artistic adviser Michael Stern is helping with the search. He’s also scheduled to conduct 11 concerts himself, including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The ESO’s 2022/2023 season also features repertoire by titans such as Bach, Mozart and the Beatles. As for the Winspear Centre’s expansion, the goal is to open next spring.

“The ESO is a real treasure and it has an awesome future ahead of it,” says Prior, who promises to return to guest conduct at some point. “I’m proud to have been part of the history. I’ll be part of the future, too, in a different way, and I’m very grateful for that.”

Sandra Sperounes is a music journalist based in Edmonton who was formerly on staff at the Edmonton Journal.

The post People Need Music, Right? appeared first on Alberta Views.

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).

The post Extended Intermission appeared first on Alberta Views.

This is one of Cheryl Foggo’s favourite stories about the man she has been researching and writing about for years. “I believe the magnitude of that event was the beginning of the legend,” she says. Foggo is currently working on the second instalment of a trio of works based on Ware’s life. As a tall Black man he stood out from other cowboys, but Ware earned his reputation from his strength, courage, kindness and skill with livestock. He eventually started his own small ranch, married former slave Mildred Lewis and had a family.

But Foggo’s interest in Ware was sparked long before she heard the blizzard story. As children growing up in Calgary, Foggo and her brother were fascinated by “the Western mystique.” They read dime-store cowboy novels and watched cowboy movies every Saturday afternoon. “As we got older we began to notice there were never any Black people in the stories,” she says. The siblings felt their love of Western culture wasn’t compatible with their African heritage.

Everything changed when her brother went to the Glenbow Museum on a school trip and saw an exhibit about Ware. He came home excited to tell his sister the cowboy they had vaguely heard of was Black. “That was the beginning of a very long and gradual discovery of who he was and the legacy he left,” she says.

Foggo also started digging into her own family and community history, learning about the pioneers who came up to Alberta in the early 1900s and formed the most northerly Black communities that likely ever existed. “That just wasn’t a part of what we learned about in school or in library books,” she says.

Foggo’s career has been dedicated to telling those stories through articles, novels and plays. She also directed the 2002 National Film Board documentary The Journey of Lesra Martin.

In 2011 Foggo bumped into Tunde Dawodu of Calgary’s Afrikadey! festival, who shared her interest in Ware and asked if Foggo was planning to do anything about him for the Stampede’s centennial in 2012. Foggo says she realized it was the perfect opportunity to draw attention to Ware’s significance in Alberta’s ranching history. “I wanted his legacy and his contributions to the values and the events that led to the creation of the Stampede remembered.”

At the time, she was preparing a multimedia presentation for the University of Calgary’s Black History Month celebrations and asked her daughter, Miranda Martini, to write a song for John and Mildred. That eventually led to the first work in her trilogy, the play John Ware Reimagined, which mirrors Foggo’s childhood discovery of a Black cowboy. The play debuted with Calgary’s Ellipsis Tree Collective in 2014 and won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama. It recently ran in Edmonton at Workshop West (Nov 8–19).

Foggo is now in the midst of the second work, a documentary for the National Film Board titled John Ware Reclaimed. The film is about her efforts to not only investigate where the man came from, but also to “illuminate the disconnect” between Canadian and Black history. “Why is John Ware not well known outside of southern Alberta?” Foggo asks. “Why is he not a figure of national significance?”

Filming took place in the foothills last summer with eight-time world champion rodeo star Fred Whitfield as Ware. Foggo hopes the film will be finished by summer and will launch at Canadian film festivals next fall. The final project in the trilogy will be a book—perhaps, she suggests, John Ware Retold.

—Maureen McNamee

The post Cheryl Foggo’s John Ware appeared first on Alberta Views.

“We started talking about it three years ago at the front end of the crisis,” says Michael Zaugg, artistic director and conductor of Pro Coro Canada, a professional choir in Edmonton. “Of course we couldn’t foresee that crisis—maybe some economists could, but we couldn’t.”

Audience support, however, was steady and Pro Coro was able to get grants for the new festival, so they forged ahead with a slightly scaled-back plan and a healthy dose of optimism. “We hope this translates into ticket sales for this festival and general enthusiasm for the next one,” Zaugg says.

“Being part of these big choirs at the end, singing beside others, to have that experience—I felt very strongly that Edmonton and Pro Coro would be a great catalyst to provide that,” he says.

The first-ever Edmonton International Choral Festival will be held June 1–4 and will include workshops, lectures and performances by three professional choirs: Pro Coro Canada, Halifax Camerata Singers and, from Sweden, Voces Nordicae. On the final day, all three will be joined by 120 amateur singers from across Alberta for a special gala choir performance.

Audiences will hear a range of voices and styles—from jazz to pop to classical—presented visually with actors, musicians and screen projections.

The inspiration for the festival came from Zaugg’s experiences growing up in Europe, where he spent summers travelling from one choral event to another. “Being part of these big choirs at the end, singing beside others, to have that experience—I felt very strongly that Edmonton and Pro Coro would be a great catalyst to provide that,” he says.

Zaugg was born in Switzerland and started his career as a tenor before becoming a conductor and educator. He was the first Swiss conductor accepted to the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, and has since conducted choirs from around the world. In Canada he was previously artistic director of the St. Lawrence Choir in Montreal and the Cantata Singers of Ottawa. In 2012 he joined Pro Coro Canada, which was founded in 1981 and remains one of the few professional choirs in Canada.

Zaugg’s pitch for the festival gained support from Pro Coro’s board of directors and other choral groups in the province, and the plan took shape. He says it’s the only choral festival in Canada produced by a professional organization that invites other professional organizations to participate. He adds that the performances will showcase the high calibre of singing in Alberta.

The gala choir on the final night is the highlight of that effort. Amateur singers from Alberta applied to sing with the professional choirs, and Pro Coro chose 120 applicants as well as some youth singers and emerging artists. The choir will be conducted by Robert Sund, a well-known Swedish composer, teacher and conductor. Sund also chose the repertoire, which will include some Swedish, French and North American songs—“a broad variety of styles and languages,” says Zaugg.

Pulling off a new international festival in the midst of a downturn was a big first step, but success ultimately depends on how many people attend. If all goes well, the plan is to host another festival in 2019.

Maureen McNamee is an associate editor at Alberta Views.

The post Edmonton Int. Choral Festival appeared first on Alberta Views.

The much-needed space was one of five new facilities to open in Calgary in the last 18 months as the result of an initiative called the Cultural Space Investment Process (CSIP). A 2007 inventory had found that Calgary’s major arts facilities were at capacity, with the city having fewer purpose-built visual and performing arts spaces overall (and fewer seats per capita) than Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Austin or Seattle. The number of performance-space seats per capita had fallen 25 per cent in the previous two decades. Calgary Arts Development (CADA) and the City of Calgary created CSIP to evaluate projects and make funding recommendations. In 2008 the City designated 5 per cent, or $165-million, of Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) funding it would receive from the province over 10 years to culture-related infrastructure.

Dance space was one of the priorities. Calgary is home to two major dance companies, Alberta Ballet and DJD, a degree program in dance at the University of Calgary and the international Fluid Fest presented by Springboard Dance. The number of dance organizations and attendance at performances has been rising, but growth has been hampered by the shortage of affordable and appropriate space—dance is a physical art form that requires sprung floors, good ventilation and open areas without pillars.

A professional dance company founded in 1984, DJD has 60 original productions under its belt as well as thousands of students of all ages, including some with Parkinson’s disease. But its old space on 4th Street SW was accessed by a narrow stairway. It had chips in the walls, desks so old they weren’t designed for computers, a costume room that looked like an overstuffed closet, and a dim and dingy changing room with repurposed lockers. The only bright spot was a hallway lined with framed DJD show posters illustrating the company’s long history. Executive director Kathi Sundstrom says the company was saving every spare dollar for what became a 10-year effort to build the new $26-million centre.

As of 2005 DJD’s rent was doubling every five years, she recalls, but the company couldn’t boost its revenue because the studios were heavily booked. Sundstrom says DJD supported artists—whether from the company or the community—by allowing them to use the studios for creative and rehearsal space whenever they were empty. “They often had to come after hours and late at night because that was the only time we had available,” she says.

The company decided it needed a philanthropic partner for a landlord. The Kahanoff Foundation, which provided affordable office space for non-profit organizations, became that partner. When the economy faltered in 2008, so did the plan. In 2012 the Kahanoff turned its assets over to the Calgary Foundation, and a new plan was hatched to create space for DJD on the first five floors of a new 12-storey build-ing next door to the Kahanoff Centre on 12th Avenue SE, with additional office space for non-profit organizations above.

DJD studios were heavily booked. Dancers “often had to come late at night because that was the only time we had available.”

The DJD Dance Centre received $5.5-million in cultural MSI funding through the city, with the rest coming from the Calgary Foundation, provincial and federal governments and private donors. The project broke ground in April 2014. When DJD moved in two years later, the company went from having 10,000 ft2 with three studios to just under 40,000 ft2 and seven studios—including one that converts into a 230-seat theatre. “We’ve never before been able to create a show in the same space it’s going to be performed in,” Sundstrom says.

New Universe, the title of the first show at the new DJD Dance Centre, was fitting—the space is nothing like the company’s former cramped quarters. Bright and spacious, it’s filled with natural light from the wall of windows on the north side of each floor that offer views of downtown from the inside and a glimpse of the action in the studios from the outside. The cityscape will provide a backdrop for some performances, but the theatre also converts into a black box. Behind the scenes is a large costume room and locker rooms with plenty of lights and mirrors. Participants in the Dancing Parkinson’s YYC classes can now access studios from an elevator on the main floor.

The new centre allows DJD to create more shows per season, each with a longer run. They can also double the number of classes to 80 and rent out studio and performance space to other organizations. “Dance has been one of those disciplines in the city that just didn’t have the appropriate space,” says CADA president and CEO Patti Pon. “The new DJD space gives recognition to their legitimacy as a dance company.”

In the last year and a half, four other high-profile facilities recommended for cultural MSI funding opened in Calgary: MRU’s Taylor Centre for the Performing Arts, including the 787-seat Bella Concert Hall; the National Music Centre in the East Village; the 85,000 ft2 Calgary Film Centre in the southeast; and the first phase of cSPACE King Edward arts incubator, a work in progress. “All of the spaces are stunning,” says Pon. “It feels like a culmination because now you’re starting to see a critical mass of these openings. We’re seeing the benefit of almost 10 years into a strategy.”

The Centennial Planetarium, recognized for its brutalist architecture, was built in 1967. (photo: Richard White)

Unlike the new facilities, cSPACE King Edward is a century-old sandstone school in South Calgary that is being transformed into an “arts incubator,” with offices, studios and exhibition space for artists, arts organizations and non-profits. cSPACE is part of an initiative started in 2011 by CADA in partnership with the Calgary Foundation to make room outside the city centre for emerging and established artists alike in a multitude of genres. The plan is to retrofit existing buildings in inner-city neighbourhoods to develop a network of affordable, sustainable, multi-tenant workspaces across Calgary.

Pon says the program will encourage graduates coming out of arts programs at the Alberta College of Art + Design, the
U of C and Mount Royal University to stay in the city. “What are we doing to keep them?” she asks. “Creating space literally and figuratively for emerging artists is really important.”

Reid Henry, president and chief executive of cSPACE, describes the project as a “social enterprise” and strategic response to the need for arts and cultural space. cSPACE King Edward—the first project to launch under that larger program—is a 47,000-ft2 facility complete with an outdoor sculpture garden. The building has rental units as small as 250 ft2 and as big as 830 ft2 that can be used for offices, studios, exhibitions and rehearsal space. Reid says King Edward will not only provide space for artists to work and interact but for the community to gather. The project received approval for $5-million in cultural MSI funding through the city in 2011 and another $1.5-million in 2015.

The first phase of the project was completed in December 2016 and the first tenants arrived in January. The second phase, slated for completion by fall 2017, is the addition of a modern west wing with space that can be rented for revenue to help cover King Edward’s operating costs—meeting rooms, co-working space for freelancers or tenants who need occasional extra space, event space and a 125-seat theatre. The old three-storey building’s character has remained intact. The wide corridors are flanked by classrooms that feature the original blackboards and mouldings. In several areas, sections of original brick are left exposed. Large windows on the north side provide natural light as well as views of downtown. Beneath the surface are many changes. The building now meets LEED Gold standards for energy efficiency, walls have been reinforced for hanging artwork, the wiring and heating have been updated and hallway lighting can be adapted for different uses, including highlighting or projecting artwork.

The smallest spaces are found in the “hive” on the top floor, where the attic has been turned into studios for working artists. One of those artists, Arkatyiis Miller, was giddy when she first saw hers. A graduate of ACAD, she needed an affordable space to create her large, abstract conceptual drawings, and the idea of interacting with other artists in the same building appealed. “I want to do something really, really grand and there just isn’t space to do it anywhere else,” she says. “It’s perfect for me in every way.”

Nikki Loach of Quest Theatre, another tenant, says she was drawn to King Edward not only because the space is subsidized and affordable but because it offers a sense of community. Quest Theatre, Loach says, looks forward to working with its new neighbour, the Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society, which has an office in the building and will share rehearsal space.

The project has not been without hurdles. To help offset the cost of the land purchase and renovation, a portion of the school site was to be sold to a developer for affordable live–work artists housing. The $33.5-million budget was higher than expected and funding came in slower than anticipated. Construction was delayed and the original plan had to be revised. Instead of artist housing, the residential portion of the site will now include seniors housing on the east side and luxury condos on the west. Meanwhile, some of the arts organizations that initially wanted to become tenants made other arrangements.

Quickdraw Animation Society was interested in cSPACE King Edward at the outset, but executive director Peter Hemminger says they weren’t sure the building could meet their space or budget requirements. When the project was delayed, they couldn’t wait any longer. Quickdraw was on a month-to-month lease because their landlord planned to tear down the building and redevelop the site. Like DJD, Quickdraw didn’t want to invest money in a temporary space. In the meantime the 32-year-old organization was running classes in rooms with no flooring.

Public art museums are some of the most exciting and dynamic spaces being built these days.

The same economic downturn that delayed King Edward also delayed plans to tear down Quickdraw’s building. That bought some extra time, during which vacancy rates and affordability improved. The society recently moved to a space in Sunalta that has offices at the front and a warehouse at the back with the 12-foot clearance required for animation equipment. Quickdraw is now neighbours with other organizations that found affordable space: Truck Gallery, Beakerhead, Emmedia and three theatre companies—Ghost River, Green Fools and Calgary’s Young People’s Theatre—that came together to share a space they’ve named West Village Theatre.

As for cSPACE King Edward, the final list of 29 tenants includes a mix of emerging and established visual artists and designers, non-profit organizations and a preschool. The Maria Montessori Educational Centre for children age 19 months to 6 years will occupy the largest space in the building. The Alberta Craft Council, which operates a large public gallery in Edmonton, will open a long-awaited exhibition space in Calgary. Quest Theatre and Making Treaty 7 will be joined by the Forte Musical Theatre Guild and Theatre Encounter. Alliance Française, the Alexandra Writers’ Centre, the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association and the Calgary Association of Lifelong Learners will all rent office space.

Under CADA’s strategy, 450,000 ft2 of arts and cultural space has been added to the city centre and seating capacity has increased by more than 1,800. Joni Carroll, CADA’s arts spaces consultant, describes CSIP as a “small but mighty” tool that has helped projects attract further investment from provincial, federal and private sources. Combined, the projects have leveraged six times the MSI funding designated for cultural spaces, she says.

Nonetheless, gaps remain. Calgary’s 2007 inventory found that attendance at visual arts exhibitions was increasing exponentially, while at the same time Calgary still lacks a contemporary art museum. But progress is being made. In 2014 three visual arts organizations merged to form the new Contemporary Calgary in an effort to gain support for a bid to turn the Centennial Planetarium at the west end of downtown into a public gallery for contemporary and modern art. The building, recognized for its brutalist architecture, had been vacant since 2011 when the science centre moved.

Contemporary Calgary plans to turn the iconic building into a public gallery for modern and contemporary art. (photo: Grant Hutchinson)

In April 2016, two years after Contemporary Calgary won the bid for the planetarium, the city approved $24.5-million in cultural MSI funding for the organization. The money will help cover the cost of renovating a wing added to the original structure, previously the Creative Kids Museum, to operate as a “Temporary Contemporary” gallery. Director and CEO Pierre Arpin says the funding is a milestone that will enable Contemporary Calgary to move forward with its vision as soon as it has provincial approval and a lease from the city. “It’s such an iconic building and it’s great that we’re able to do something with it,” says Arpin. He adds that the building’s unique spaces will lend themselves to different contemporary art practices—from hanging artwork on the walls of the rotunda to projecting artwork onto the dome. “We don’t always have to work in boxes.”

The organization expects to move on site and open Temporary Contemporary in 2017—50 years after the Centennial Planetarium itself opened in 1967 for Canada’s 100th anniversary. Contemporary Calgary will run exhibitions at Temporary Contemporary while raising money for phase 2, which will bring the rest of the building up to code. The final phase involves installing specialized systems to control temperature and humidity in specific areas of the building—including the addition and the rotunda—so they meet the class A standards required to host international exhibitions. Arpin estimates renovations will be completed sometime in 2020 at a total cost of about $82.5-million—provided there are no surprises. “One of the challenges is we’re dealing with a historic structure,” he says. “We have to be very careful.”

Arpin says public cultural spaces like Contemporary Calgary have the potential to impact the way people interact with art and each other—from their first impression when they walk in the door to their viewing of the art itself. As a child growing up near Ottawa, he recalls his visits to the National Gallery and what are now the Museum of Nature and the Museum of History as “transformational.”

“Public art museums are some of the most exciting and dynamic spaces being built around the world these days. These spaces become magnets for people,” he says. “If we’re working well as civic leaders, if we’re able to provide our citizens with these great spaces… then we’re doing our jobs well.”

Maureen McNamee is an associate editor at Alberta Views.

The post Room to Create appeared first on Alberta Views.

The scene was a typical recess—except that it played out on a small stage in a crowded gymnasium at Hillhurst School in the spring of 2016. This was the “world premiere” of the school’s opera, Doppel, an original production developed through Calgary Opera’s Let’s Create an Opera program. Students learned how to develop a story idea and write music to go with it. They learned how to sing and act onstage. They learned how to design costumes and sets. They learned how to deliver a message through performance.

But the experience taught them much more than that. From the very beginning, the opera provided a lesson about the meaning of inclusion.

Inclusion is essential to public education at an individual, school and system level, but it doesn’t come easily. Classrooms have students with different needs, abilities and personalities who come from different cultures and backgrounds. In newer neighbourhoods, schools have more would-be students than space, so district boundaries determine who can attend and who will be bussed elsewhere. Some alternative programs, such as science, have more applicants than spaces, meaning some students will be excluded. Or, in my family’s experience, efforts to keep an inner-city school open results in two separate programs sharing one building.

We sent our sons to Stanley Jones, a public elementary school just a few blocks from our home. The school had faced declining enrolment, but attracted new students by adding an all-girls school for Grades 4 to 9. Alice Jamieson Girls Academy occupies classrooms on the upper level of the historic sandstone building. Students wear uniforms and have different recess and lunch times.

The girls academy helped keep the school open, but not without consequences. Most girls leave Stanley Jones after Grade 3 and head upstairs to attend Alice Jamieson, which offers extra opportunities. Left behind are classrooms of boys with only a few girls. Our oldest, Dexter, is a sensitive child with his own way of looking at the world—we were wary of having him in a de facto boys school. Following the advice of school staff, he left Stanley Jones at the end of Grade 3 after being accepted into the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program for Grades 4 to 6 at Hillhurst School, which we hoped would be a better fit. Now we were in a separate program housed in a community school. Hillhurst, another historic sandstone school, had boosted its enrolment by providing a home for GATE. Much like at Stanley Jones, the GATE classrooms were located on the top floors while most of the others were found below.

During Dex’s first year, conflicts arose between kids from the different programs. One day Dex told me he and some classmates had a playground skirmish with some community students. He referred to them as “normals.” I asked, “If you call them normals, what do they call you?” He didn’t know.

This divide didn’t go unnoticed by the principal, David Ball, who had also started that fall. When Dex returned for his second year, the classrooms had been rearranged so there was less of a barrier between GATE and community students. The next fall, when Jared arrived for Grade 4 and Dex entered Grade 6, the school year started with students from both programs going on team-building field trips. At parent council meetings, the principal talked about Hillhurst being one united school community and said teachers would continue to bring students together to focus on inclusion rather than differences. Teachers had already reported improved communication and interaction across the GATE and regular classrooms—and reduced conflicts at recess.

The idea of creating an opera took that effort one step further. Students from different grades and both programs would join work committees responsible for different tasks. Monthly messages from the principal in school newsletters chronicled the opera’s progress, beginning with the announcement in September:

The seeds of our opera are being planted this week with classroom discussions with our librettist (a person who writes opera plots). Kids have been excitedly sharing ideas about story ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it will be Aaron Coates’s job to sort through them all for a storyline. He will then revisit classes to develop the basic structure with their input. He reports our students are very creative and energetic—no surprises there. He will prepare the libretto and present it to the school in November.

The next stage will involve a similar process, with our composer joining classes and having students co-create our music and lyrics. Then our director joins us in the new year to make it all start to come to life. Students will have opportunities to sing, act, design costumes and sets, and participate in the technical aspects.

Our house was filled with stories surrounding the opera. We heard how Jared’s class had provided ideas for the storyline and suggested names for characters, and that he’d be on the props committee. We heard how Dex helped compose a section of the music and would be painting backdrops on a committee including his Grade 2 buddy. A highlight came near the end of November, when students were offered tickets to a dress rehearsal of Calgary Opera’s production of Lakmé. One adult from each family was also invited and my husband got the honour. I was confident the novelty would wear off by intermission and they would be home by bedtime. Instead, my husband texted to say the boys wanted to see the ending—they loved it.

Of course, the opera wasn’t the only thing happening at school. The October newsletter provided a glimpse of what schools deal with regularly, when the principal wrote about a shoving match at the end of recess:

One of the participants was a “good kid” with many friends who sometimes made poor choices. The other has a growing reputation among some students and adults of being “that kid” who is always in trouble or looking for a fight. After collecting the facts, yes, “that kid” took their 4-square ball and threw it over the fence. The “good kid” took exception and gave him a shove. “That kid” responded with greater anger until an adult quickly intervened. Apologies were offered and accepted. Natural consequences were mutually decided. That could have been the end of the story.

I kept “that kid” back to try to understand why. I learned a little more. He hadn’t had breakfast. He didn’t have lunch. He’s never played 4-square. He doesn’t feel anybody likes him. He doesn’t know how to become involved in a game when he thinks he’s unwelcome. He was mad. Then… he cried. This is now a different story. The new factors do not excuse actions, but they help understand their source.

Our job is to help “that kid” learn a better way…. As adults, ultimately, we are outsiders to their world, but we have influence on them. And they will become adults whose social skills were partially defined on playgrounds at recess.

A  few weeks later, at a school assembly, students learned the opera would be called Doppel. “Its theme is inclusivity based on a plot in which some kids prone to excluding others find themselves in an alternative world where everyone has a twin (doppelganger) and they are the ones excluded,” wrote Ball in the November newsletter. “It will be fun.”

At one point, staff briefly considered limiting individual roles to students in Grades 4 to 6, but decided against it. As Ball pointed out, you can’t have an opera about inclusion that excludes half the school. There would also be a Thursday cast and a Friday cast, which would not only allow more students to take on main roles, but also give more people a chance to attend performances in the small gym.

After the winter break the next big event was auditions for the main roles. Drama classes had shown us that Dex thrives in the spotlight. He decided to audition for Quelly, leader of the rebel solos who don’t have doppelgangers. Jared prefers to blend in—he joined the chorus of trees. The day the posters went up announcing the results, we were anxious. We knew it would be a big confidence boost for Dex to be chosen, and we knew he would be heartbroken if he wasn’t. Jared proudly blurted out the good news as he stepped off the bus ahead of his big brother. Landing the part of Quelly was the highlight of Dex’s three years at Hillhurst—he enjoyed rehearsals and was soon calling his Thursday castmates “my opera peeps.” Of course, not every kid who auditioned got a part—inclusion for Dex meant exclusion for others.

Meanwhile, the Calgary Board of Education was also focused on inclusion as Syrian refugees arrived and the province implemented new guidelines for transgender students, which was the topic of the principal’s message in the February newsletter:

Welcoming new Canadians is a process public schools excel at. They are Syrian now, but we have had waves of immigrants become part of our social fabric since people inhabited our land. Many groups have come to Canada over generations with the hope of leaving their troubles behind, but we know they often bring issues and challenges of their own, from language acquisition to wondering if they will have friends. Canada is a very different place than most immigrants’ home countries, and it is often a difficult transition…

On a very different issue, our provincial government recently released guidelines for schools to follow regarding LGBTQ and gender diversity issues. Sexual orientation and gender identity are intensely personal topics that educators need to be prepared to discuss, if and when particular students need our support…. We did not need guidelines to tell us that every child needs an adult in our school with whom they have confidence to share their personal troubles and tribulations. We did not need guidelines to tell us that homophobic language or bullying based on gender identity or sexual orientation will not be tolerated. But the guidelines will definitely support educators if we face external pressure to do otherwise than support a child facing adversity.

That winter saw a lot of humming and singing at our house. All students were busy practising songs and working on tasks. Jared’s committee was making a kickball and other props out of papier-mâché, much to his disappointment—he would have preferred a real ball and real torches with real fire. Dex’s committee was painting backdrops, and we were entertained by stories about the antics of his Grade 2 buddy, who painted his mushrooms upside down.

When the students returned from spring break, work on the opera ramped up. Dexter was spending more and more time in rehearsals, and loving it. For Jared the experience was starting to wear thin—he complained that the opera had taken over the gym and he wanted it back. Fortunately, good weather allowed students to spend more time outdoors. The performances were scheduled for April 28 and 29, with afternoon and evening shows. As the days counted down, the principal’s message reflected on the process leading up to the opera:

Very early in the brainstorming process, a theme of inclusion was suggested as representative of the work of our school and community. We tried to continue brainstorming, but like a lightning rod, all the ideas kept coming back to how inclusiveness is so relevant to our work at Hillhurst in particular and in public education generally. Indeed, it is the continuing work of our province and country.

…The story of a world in which some leader students were excluding peers, as part of a kickball routine for picking teams, quickly connected with students. The alternative world of Doppel was created where everyone was expected to be exactly like someone else, and conversely, individuals were not only outcasts but criminals. The protagonists not only had to fight to be allowed to be individuals, but through the opera they also came to understand that everyone else also has greatness in their differences and that similarities can sometimes be limiting for us. It is a great message for young people as they learn to navigate the tensions between socially fitting in while trying to be themselves.

The big day arrived. Backstage, students were excited and nervous but also focused. Those with main roles went through costume and makeup. Dex and most of the residents of Doppel were covered in a mixture of cocoa powder and charcoal to make them look dirty, although they smelled delicious. In comparison the queens were squeaky clean, with matching Cinderella-style white dresses, and the cops wore crisp black jackets, sunglasses and moustaches. The other performers waited in the classrooms until it was time to appear onstage. As part of the tree chorus, Jared wore a green and brown tie-dyed shirt, tree-trunk brown pants and a head wreath of branches with leaves. Just before the show started, the student musicians took their places at xylophones and boomwhackers, or tuned their ukuleles. All the students were well rehearsed and knew their cues—even the two kindergartners who decided en route to the gym that they did have to go to the bathroom after all didn’t hold things up.

I found my chair in the gym, which was packed with rows of parents and grandparents. Principal Ball took the stage for a brief introduction before the debut of Doppel began. And it was impressive.

As Oscar kicks the ball out of bounds, a chorus of voices sings “Oscar, nooooooo!” The ball disappears down a well and Nick and Laura fall after it. The painted backdrop of green grass and sunny skies is replaced with one of dirt and mushrooms for the underground world of Doppel. Four identical queens rule the land here—doppels are citizens and solos are outcasts. Laura is taken prisoner, while Nick escapes and ends up with the solos. Quelly, leader of the solos, leads a rebellion to the queens’ castle. Laura, who has broken out of prison, suddenly shows up. Reunited, Nick and Laura sing a duet to convince the doppels and the solos that there is no need to fight: “When you push each other apart, you close off a piece of your heart. When you pull a person to you, you open the way to let love through.” The doppels and solos realize the error of their ways and decide to live in harmony. Nick and Laura have also learned a lesson—when they emerge from the well, everybody is invited to play kickball.

Like all operas, all of the lines were sung, but the singing was more like a musical—no tenors here. Some wide-eyed students were obviously nervous, but the singing was strong and confident. The story itself was sometimes strange and often funny—in one scene, Nick and Laura communicate in their own secret language, which to the rest was just the word “pineapple” sung over and over again. The numerous backdrops for the different scenes would have been at home in Alice in Wonderland, featuring trees, mushrooms and other objects varying in size, shape and detail, as you would expect from paintings by artists aged 5–12. The resulting impression was of authenticity—it was clear that students had been allowed to express their own ideas and creativity without too much adult interference.

After the second Thursday performance, the boy who played Nick gave a speech: “The opera has brought all of the students together, where we can discover each other’s strengths, appreciate each individual’s differences and learn to respect one another. We learned inclusion is not simply a word from the dictionary or a story to hand in for marking…. Our opera journey of inclusion is far from over, but what we have accomplished together in this short period has made a difference in our lives. Let’s roll up our sleeves and continue this journey with more dedication than ever.”

Hillhurst is fortunate to be able to raise funds for special arts programming such as Let’s Create an Opera, which costs schools between $5,000 and $10,000 (a major sponsor covers the rest), and to have staff willing to support such a massive undertaking. Participation in the arts helps children learn to express themselves, co-operate with others and feel empathy—every student should have such valuable opportunities regardless of their school’s ability to raise money. Ideally, this lesson about the meaning of inclusion should extend beyond the students and the school and the school system to the broader community.

I leave the final word on that to the principal, who reflected on that topic in the newsletter following the opera:

It is easy to discuss positive virtues like citizenship and inclusion, but it is far more difficult to behave in ways that are always inclusive of everyone’s needs. One recess period provides countless opportunities to be inclusive or not. Every piece of school equipment, material and resource is a tool to be used or abused. We are guided by values of respect for each other, our place and ourselves.

The nature of being social animals involves constantly working towards creating community and coaching inclusion and citizenship. We go from one metaphorical game of kickball to the next. The process is imperfect and ongoing. Social learning is often confusing and messy. It is also very rewarding. It is just like creating an opera. When it works, it is beautiful.

Maureen McNamee is an associate editor at Alberta Views.

The post 300 Kids Create an Opera appeared first on Alberta Views.

“2016,” Mayor Nenshi told me, “will be the year of music in Calgary. Canada and the whole world will be casting a glance at the fantastic scene here, and the National Music Centre is here to nurture that.”

I met with Mosker late last year just outside the new building and found him in a hardhat, his suit pants tucked into work boots, ready to show me the place before it opens. He handed me a hardhat and we clumped up a set of temporary wooden steps into the building.

Inside, construction workers were still scouring the place, many of them calling out a good morning to us. A “soft opening” will take place during the Juno Awards in Calgary from March 28 to April 3, but the full opening has been pushed back to the summer.

The first place Mosker led me to was the performance space. It’s stunning—a small concert hall that made me feel like I was sitting inside the sound box of a violin. “This,” Mosker said, “is the heart and soul of Studio Bell. It’ll seat 300 but that’s just the beginning. When we open the wall at the back, the stage opens to the entire building.”

“That wall opens?”

“Retractable, at the flick of a switch. And when it’s open, this whole building will feel like a music festival.”

I followed him down to the stage and through a door into what you might call the lobby. Two elegant oblong staircases bracket the retractable stage wall, now closed, and in front of us a large space opened up. Light filtered down from skylights and the walls swept up like shards of glass, like icebergs.

“Wow,” I said. “What will this cost?”

Residencies will be not just for musicians but technicians, audio designers and recording engineers. “We want to build the future here.”

The National Music Centre itself is a public not-for-profit organization, but the funding for this building has come from a wide range of public and private sources. The name Studio Bell is part of a $10-million partnership with Bell Media. The federal government kicked in another $25-million through the New Building Canada Fund—a fund for infrastructure projects—and both Alberta and Calgary have committed funds to match that. The building, which sits on both sides of 4th Street SE, is joined by a spectacular bridge and will be literally and figuratively the gateway to Calgary’s East Village. The brand-new community of chic condo towers, cafes and pedestrian malls, even an island, was all planned to rise up at more or less the same time and replaces an old neighbourhood known for dive bars and seedy hotels.

“This has been 10 years in the planning,” said Mosker, “and we’re almost there.” The costs have been rising too. The price for just this building is set now at $191-million. Private donations from Coril Holdings—run by the philanthropist Mannix family—amount to millions. Dozens of others, including the Taylor family and ATB Financial, are also involved, and the funding is not yet complete. Nevertheless, once the building is finished the maintenance costs will be fully covered by admission fees (to be determined) and rentals on various parts of the facility.

Mosker is philosophical. “I know people will ask, Why Calgary Why should the National Music Centre be in Calgary There’s a sense here that Calgary has come of age. It was all in the timing. We have the Alberta Ballet doing pieces with k.d. lang and Sarah McLachlan. We have the Bow Building and the Peace Bridge. And now there’s the East Village. Everything was in place.”

“But why music?” I said.

“We saw a gap,” Mosker said. “Canada needed a national centre to show our musical place in the world. But we also knew that if we wanted to do this, we had to show the rest of Canada that we were serious. Not any building would do. We had to deliver something extraordinary, something of international quality.”

Next we crossed the lobby and entered a passageway leading to one of several galleries at the back. Mosker swept his hand around its bare walls. “We looked at a lot of models from around the world, but we knew we didn’t want this to be just a museum. We’ll have the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in one gallery and Innovations in another [which will feature things done first in Canada]. Twenty-one galleries in all.”

“Storytelling is the idea we keep coming back to,” he said. “But this isn’t about the past. This is about the future. There’ll be artist residencies here and not just for musicians. We’ll have residencies for technicians too, audio design, recording engineers. We want to build the future here. What will not change from the early Cantos days is the educational programs.”

The National Music Centre grew out of the Cantos Music Foundation, which itself had its roots in the installation of the pipe organ at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in time for the Winter Olympics in 1988. That instrument spawned an organ festival and the Cantos Music Museum, a collection of ancient keyboard instruments, later expanded into a private foundation with educational programs. Teachers brought their students down to the building on tours, and the instrument collection, items from all over the world, continued to grow.

“We still have classrooms on the other side,” said Mosker. “That’s not going to change.”

“I like the idea,” I said, “of a kid coming down here, and seeing all this and having that ‘wow’ moment. The idea that that kid will be the new Neil Young or Joni Mitchell or something beyond our imagining now.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

The King Eddy, built in 1905, was a beloved blues bar in a crumbling hotel slate for demolition. (George Webber)

We stepped out onto the bridge over 4th Street. “This is one of my favourite parts of the building,” Mosker said, stopping there, leaning on the handrail. The bridge is two full storeys above the street. The sun was shining in through a triangular window the size of a billboard. From windows in the bridge, we could see south to the Saddledome and north over the East Village towards the Bow River and St. Patrick’s Island.

“We’re going over now,” he said, “into the west part of the building and…”

I knew what was coming. One of the hallmarks of this project was that it would include, envelop really, the old King Eddy. The Eddy, built in 1905, was a beloved blues bar in a crumbling hotel. The hotel had been slated for demolition, and in some ways, saving it was the catalyst for this whole new building.

The Eddy was legendary. Muddy Waters’s band played there. B.B. King and Buddy Guy. All the greats. “We had to take the whole building apart, brick by brick,” said Mosker, “We did a full laser scan so we could put it all back together again exactly. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of. And now we think the King Eddy will become one of the most important music venues in Canada. Touring bands will come through—even big names—and want to play here, just for the sheer honour of playing in these old walls.”

The recording console is a massive board of faders, dials and blinking lights. It’s the unit that Queen recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody” on.

We descended into the old brick building, bare as yet of tables or a real bar. They’re selling some of the bricks now. Funders can get their name engraved on one and have it put back into the wall, so they can be a part of history too.

I followed Mosker again and we entered a garage-sized room at the back of the Eddy. “This will be the new broadcast studio for CKUA radio. They’re thrilled. They can’t wait to move in.”

A radio station, performance halls, exhibition rooms, rare instruments. “What’s your favorite acquisition?” I asked him. “What’s the one thing you got to hold in your hands that really impressed you?”

“Well,” he began, “I studied jazz piano. That’s what I wanted to do at first, so for me it’s Elton John’s piano.”

I had seen this upright piano at the Cantos building. It seemed like nothing special then, except that it was painted white and was in Elton John’s apartment all through the writing of his first five albums. It’s what he used to write “Rocket Man.” “For me,” Mosker said, “it was when I got to play ‘Tiny Dancer,’ playing the same chords that Elton John played for the first time on that piano.”

“And it will be here in NMC, that piano?”

“Absolutely. We have a harpsichord from 1591. We have the TONTO synthesizer that Stevie Wonder used. And here’s the thing: It’s not hands off. These things are not only for researchers in white gloves. A person can come here and record on them. That’s the whole idea. It’s living history. They’re meant to be played, to be heard.”

We headed up another set of stairs. “This side of Studio Bell will have three recording studios. All the electronics are state of the art, but the consoles are—well, come and see.”

He edged into a room on the second floor, somewhere now above the King Eddy. The recording console was a massive board of faders and dials and blinking lights not unlike others I had seen. “This one,” he said, “is the Trident A-Range. This is the same console that Queen recorded ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on. Down the hall, we have another that was used by the Sex Pistols. But the third one is the big one.”

“The Rolling Stones,” I said. “You have the Rolling Stones mobile unit.”

“Exactly. We knew it was coming up for sale and we jumped on it.”

The Rolling Stones mobile unit is actually a whole truck, like a food truck except that it has a recording console and chairs and speakers. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street on it, and Sticky Fingers and loads of other things. Led Zeppelin recorded parts of the Stairway to Heaven album on it. Bob Marley recorded his live version of “No Woman, No Cry.” The mobile unit is even immortalized in Deep Purple’s iconic “Smoke on the Water.” The truck was in Geneva in 1971 when the band’s studio space burned down and Deep Purple had to turn to the unit to finish the album. “Make records with a mobile,” is one of the lyrics.

“The point is,” said Mosker, “young bands from Calgary, from Alberta, from Canada, they can come and record on it.” His voice stepped down to a whisper. “And under the console, we found this hidden drawer. You know, maybe a place for Keith Richards’s stash.”

He swung open one last door and we came out on the rooftop of the King Eddy. Above us the bridge swung out over 4th Street, clad in silver-blue terra cotta tiles.

“The building will reflect the environment,” said Mosker. “The tiles change colour with the time of the day, even the time of the year. There are five different parts, vessels we call them. They’re like hoodoos and glaciers and mountains. We worked very closely with Brad Cloepfil, the architect, right from the beginning.”

I remembered an earlier comment Mosker had made when I’d asked him on the phone about the origins of the project. “This could only happen in Alberta,” he’d told me. When I’d asked him why, he’d paused. “Because we put up our hand and said we could do it. We want this to be a place of pride for Calgarians and Albertans.”

By the end of the tour, I was in agreement. The NMC building is spectacular. The project is a bold venture, unprecedented in the province. It is about the music, yes, but it is more. As Mayor Nenshi said, it will draw attention from across the country, from around the world, and stand as a Calgary landmark for decades to come.

Calgary’s Glenn Dixon is the author of Tripping the World Fantastic: A Journey through the Music of Our Planet.

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You can see the theatre too, if you’d like. The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, Greece, comfortably nestles on a rocky hillside below the Acropolis, where for hundreds of years Athenians gathered during the Festival of Dionysus to view comedies and tragedies. This ancient theatre reminds us, today, of an enormous contemporary challenge. Can we create a theatre as efficient, effective and environmentally friendly as a theatre designed and erected with primitive technology over 2,000 years ago?

Those of us in the arts tend to view Alberta’s environmental problems as principally the responsibility of Big Industry. After all, theatre doesn’t require a smokestack or a tailings pond. However, the energy requirements of the typical theatre are by no means negligible. Utility costs aside, theatres use all sorts of toxic substances—paints, dyes, fibreglass, plastics and acrylics—to create sets that often end up in landfills.

Is it possible for a contemporary theatre to walk its environmental talk If the stories presented in the theatre are intended to truly inspire, shouldn’t the way they are produced and presented inspire as well Can the contemporary theatre move in the direction of a greener theatrical lifestyle, and if so, how?

Two central environmental issues confront every theatre: waste management and energy consumption. Theatre creates waste because of its temporariness—new shows are constantly built and then dismantled. Depending on the particular design, theatres can erect and discard the equivalent of a small house with each production. As for theatre’s energy consumption, part of the challenge arises from the discipline’s visual nature. Audiences pay to see what happens on stage, and if they are to see well, a theatre needs lights, and lots of them.

I asked University of Calgary director of theatre production Don Monty if theatre lights consume as much energy and heat as they appear to. He was succinct: “When we are in production, the lighting system consumes the most energy on a weekly basis. We are in production for about six to 10 weeks per year. The average lighting hang in our theatre consumes between 100,000 and 160,000 watts for two to four hours daily per production period. How much heat those lights generate, I can only put in layman’s terms—a ton.”

Given these difficulties, is it feasible for theatres to reduce energy consumption, reduce waste and consequently leave a lighter environmental footprint?

Penny Ritco, executive director of Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, described the strategies her theatre has adopted. “The majority of our cleaning products are low-toxicity solutions. We have building-wide recycling collection for general office waste, and we’ve hired a waste disposal company that sorts our construction waste at its facility, diverting anything recyclable away from the landfill.” This sounds like a responsible approach for a huge entity like the Citadel, home to many theatre companies, although it invites the question of what percentage of material the disposal company actually manages to divert from the landfill.

Waste disposal poses just as pressing an issue for smaller theatres, but stringent budgetary considerations may rule out hiring waste-disposal services or diverting valuable work hours to sorting through remnant materials. So what’s to be done Calgary theatre designer and U of C professor April Viczko suggests pooling resources and promoting a community-coordinated approach. “A movement for theatre recycling keeps surfacing,” Viczko says. “A centralized storehouse would deposit items from shows, to be rented or borrowed by other productions. One of the main reasons so much of what we make ends up in the landfill is that theatres don’t have the space to store it all; and in the current economy, it’s cheaper to buy new or make new than to store costumes and set pieces. Perhaps bulk shared-storage in every city is the answer.”

Illustration by April Viczko.

As for finding solutions to our theatres’ energy consumption, I asked Monty if it would be possible to reduce energy output by replacing the hot, energy-guzzling tungsten halogen lamps with cooler, longer-lasting, more energy-efficient LEDs. He responded with a definite “maybe.” Monty noted that the U of C’s Reeve and Matthews theatres had already received a number of smaller LEDs and would likely obtain more, but he expressed reservations about transitioning to a full complement of LED lighting, saying the technology is still evolving.

Ritco shares those reservations. “Lighting-wise, the industry has come leaps and bounds in LED theatrical fixtures,” she says, “but they still don’t offer a complete replacement for the old tungsten fixtures, and it isn’t practical to do a straight swap of tungsten fixtures for LEDs. Good-quality fixtures are very costly, so it’s difficult for a not for profit, on a budget, to justify making the switch, even if that switch will ultimately reduce their power bill.”

Viczko says there’s another wrinkle. “The initial investment in new lighting instruments is one thing. But the conversion of a theatre to LED isn’t cheap either,” she cautions. “Why Because LEDs use DC, not AC. That means essentially all those aging dimmers are useless for an LED lighting rig. So, you can’t just change the dimmers, you’ll need to change your entire lighting system. That’s big bucks.”

So if lighting can only be modified as the technology catches up, what can theatres can do in the meantime York University professor Ian Garret’s special research interest is environmental theatre, and he frames the situation in a slightly different context. “Studies show that for most theatres the biggest energy hog is actually everything around the performance space,” he says. “Front of house [lobby, box office, concessions and so on] consumes about 30 per cent or more of the energy used in operating theatres. Administrative offices, costume shops and rehearsal spaces rank up there as well. Though theatres use powerful lights— and lots of them—it’s rare to have them all on, or for them to be all the way on when they are.”

While cooler, more energy-efficient theatre lights are desirable and possible as the technology advances, theatres may be able to wean off energy consumption through the pursuit of everyday energy efficiencies. Ritco notes that the Citadel Theatre has taken steps in that direction. “The facility uses energy-efficient light bulbs wherever possible,” she tells me, adding that during recent renovations “every effort was made to keep energy efficiency at the forefront of the planning. The old, poorly insulated lobby glass was replaced with more efficient, double-pane, less-reflective glass to allow more natural light into the lobby spaces [reducing the need for artificial light during the day] and decrease loss of heat in the winter.”

It seems, then, that short-term and medium-term options are available. Monty proposes a longer-term solution. “Many theatres,” he points out, “have vast, flat roof surfaces that seem ideal for solar panel arrays that could supplement our imprint on the electrical grid.”

He raises an excellent point. The potential to apply solar power to urban workspaces has been underacknowledged in North America. According to the latest report of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, Europe, with more than 58 per cent of the world’s photovoltaic cumulative capacity, still leads the way. Yet solar power has proven enormously useful in servicing applications such as heating and cooling spaces. If, in fact, the ancillary needs of a theatre draw the greatest amount of energy—heating and cooling the lobby and the costume shop, for instance—then solar power could prove extremely helpful. Alberta actually enjoys a prodigious number of sunny days. Based on weather data collected from 1981 to 2010, Calgary, with a fabulous 2,396 hours of sunshine, receives more sunny hours annually than any other major Canadian city. Edmonton, with 2,345 hours of sunshine, is third, after Winnipeg.

Clearly there’s some initial movement towards a green theatre. Solutions are being explored. But a number of the solutions are largely stymied by start-up expenses. Ritco sums it up: “Cost is the biggest barrier on all fronts in attempting to become more ecologically conscious.”

Two central environmental issues confront theatres: waste due to temporariness and energy use owing to the discipline’s visual nature.

Government could take a stronger leadership role. The province already is, in a sense, a financial partner with many arts entities, in that grants account for a good portion of such organizations’ operating budgets. A program that underwrote startup costs for energy-efficient changes would be good for the environment, good for the theatre and ultimately good for taxpayers. Many theatres could benefit from better insulation, and if they were also retrofitted with solar panels, could provide low-cost heat for their spaces.

Looking to the future, is it possible to envision a time when theatres could be operating off the grid and not adding to greenhouse emissions “A completely green, zero-footprint theatre still seems a long way off,” says Viczko. “Maybe this [kind of initiative] could be viewed as a special project. We could attempt one green production a year.” And perhaps an incremental strategy is best. One green production, or perhaps one green production season per theatre, might be an exciting and informative exercise.

Garret strikes a more positive stance, however. “We can expect to see one of our A houses go off the grid one day,” he says. “Between the rapid advancements in technology, which will allow for energy to be conserved, and through the addition of solar, wind or other renewable energy technologies to our theatre facilities, it’s just a matter of time. And when you consider that theatres are only using [their facilities] part of the time, these might be some of the best buildings to feed energy back into the grid when they aren’t in use!”

I find that a fascinating and invigorating vision. A time in the future when theatres have been modified to recycle materials and diminish energy consumption, and are equipped with the tools to generate alternative energy in quantities great enough to supply their own needs, or even sufficient to sell back to the grid.

In a sense, my original comparison of an ancient Greek theatre to contemporary buildings could be viewed as relating apples to oranges. The energy requirements of an outdoor theatre in a Mediterranean climate are bound to be vastly different from requirements of a theatre located in a colder environment.

And yet lessons can be drawn from our predecessors. Greek theatres were built from materials that were meant to endure—and they have. Wherever the ancient Greeks went—Sicily, Macedonia, Turkey—you will still find remnants of their facilities. There were no electrical options, so the architects made the best use of their environmental situation. Theatres were constructed to fit neatly into the contours of the existing terrain. It was expensive and time-consuming to recreate materials for performances, so certain elements—masks and costume pieces—were reused from one performance to the next. There was a sense of simplicity and economy and elegance to the work.

In terms of production, the Greek theatre was a simpler theatre, yes, but not necessarily a less effective one. Our contemporary notions of theatre demand that each production maintain an elaborate, individual and disposable visual component, but if we first adjust our aesthetics to expect something simpler, and at the same time pursue responsible solutions of engineering and technology, we may yet be able to achieve a greener theatre.

Clem Martini is an award-winning playwright, novelist and screenwriter who has written over 30 plays and nine works of fiction.

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