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

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Theatre Canmore’s artistic director, Melanie DesRoches, says a lot of people in the region have gone to school for acting, stage management, sound and lights or set design, but most of them work at a ski hill, restaurant or hotel because housing in the Bow Valley is expensive and they need a steady income. At the same time, she adds, entertainment options for residents and visitors are limited. “We have tourists, we have weekenders, we have locals—and we have all these people that want to perform,” she says. “So we decided, why don’t we start our own theatre group?”

DesRoches, who has a background in business, and artistic producer Gerry McAuley, who has experience at the local community theatre, started Theatre Canmore as a professional company that provides services to local artists who have small shows but not the time or resources to produce them. The company will take care of the venue, promotion, ticketing, technicians and stage crew. Once the costs are covered, profits will be returned to the performers and crew.

More than 120 people have expressed interest in getting involved, including some artists with performances ready to go. The company has also formed partnerships with the Town of Canmore and the developer of Spring Creek neighbourhood—both want to support affordable entertainment options in the Bow Valley.

“Local artists don’t always want to be dressed in bear costumes.”

In September, six months after the idea was hatched, Theatre Canmore announced its 2017–18 season. For its first show (Oct 20–22), the company will partner with Artists’ Collective Theatre in Calgary for a presentation of The Haunted House Hamlet: An Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Classic by Peter Eliot Weiss, at Canmore Collegiate High School.

For Halloween, Maxine Bennett and Annie Pumphrey will present Canmore Ghost Walks (Oct 28–31). Drawing from local stories and folklore, the pair will perform as residents from the past, taking audiences from one downtown historic site to another as the play progresses. Bennett and Pumphrey are Parks Canada employees who provide educational programs for tourists. “They do shows about bears and wolf packs and those sorts of things,” says DesRoches, “but they also have other projects they want to do—they don’t always want to be dressed in bear costumes.”

On November 10, Mary Schäffer: Mountain Woman by Banff actor Shirley Truscott will run at Canmore’s artsPlace. The play uses slides from the Whyte Museum to help re-create the life of Schäffer, an artist, photographer and writer who was the first non-native woman to travel through Banff and Jasper national parks.

The holiday show, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, will have three performances at artsPlace (Dec 9, 16, 17) presented in partnership with the town, and one at Spring Creek’s 100-seat Canmore Opera House (Dec 10), which is a replica of the original opera house now at Calgary’s Heritage Park.

In February, Stéphane Prévost of Banff directs Sex With Strangers by Laura Eason, which will run in Canmore (Feb 2–4) and Banff (Feb 9–11). The contemporary play is about a popular blogger and an academic writer and the impact of social media on their success. Theatre Canmore will also host a “pop-up” dinner theatre at the Legion for Valentine’s Day.

The final event of the season is a 10-minute-play festival March 16–19 at Canmore Opera House, which will showcase local theatre artists in a fringe fest atmosphere.

Professional theatre is scarce outside Alberta’s larger cities, but DesRoches says the enthusiastic response so far indicates Theatre Canmore is filling a void in the region’s arts scene. “It’s been very easy to get this started,” she says. “I think the idea speaks for itself, because it’s just exploded.”

—Maureen McNamee

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“I wanted to bring together theatre practitioners with people in the community to create a piece about identity—what it means to be visible and invisible in society from the female perspective,” says artistic producer Kate Newby.

Newby, an actor and director, took the helm of the feminist-based theatre company formerly known as Urban Curvz two years ago and rebranded. She says the name felt dated and its reference to “curves” suggested a comment on the female form.

The “Alice” of the new name refers to the character from Lewis Carroll’s novels. “She is an extraordinarily curious, rebellious, strong voice,” says Newby. “Those are the elements I’m looking for in this company.”

She paired “Alice” with “Handsome,” a word sometimes used for women who are seen as strong, striking and intelligent. “I really wanted to incorporate the masculine and feminine aspects that are in all of us, so that makes it more inclusive to the world around us.”

Newby says the name reflects the company’s progression to the third wave of feminism, which aims to better reflect diversity. That’s also the goal behind inVISIBLE. Newby reached out to the broader community through partnerships with the Calgary Sexual Health Centre, Mount Royal University’s department of Diversity and Human Rights and the University of Calgary’s School of Creative and Performing Arts. For several months 40 participants came together about once a week to discuss their lives.

“They have very individual experiences but also share collective experiences that we all face as women or female-identified humans,” Newby says. “It’s been fascinating to explore this unique bond between very different people.”

From there, a core group of 20 is creating an immersive and intimate “slumber party” that explores the ebb and flow of life through a female lens. The show will feature about a dozen people onstage, with the others involved in design, movement, sound and direction. In keeping with Handsome Alice’s mandate, all participants identify as female.

Newby says the lack of opportunities for women in theatre is an ongoing issue. The Playwrights Guild of Canada’s annual Theatre Production Survey found that 26 per cent of the country’s 804 productions in 2016–17 were written by women, compared with 64 per cent by men and 10 per cent by mixed gender partnerships. Not only do females have fewer acting opportunities, but women in executive positions are also paid less than men. “We’re still in the dark ages in that respect,” says Newby. “It’s a male-dominated narrative even though the majority of audiences are women.”

Under her leadership, some of the works presented by Handsome Alice have included an all-female version of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and the dark comedy The Tall Building by Edmonton playwright Jill Connell. The company’s website also features a photo gallery of Calgary’s female theatre artists and administrators.

Newby plans to continue involving people from outside the theatre community in the creation process. “Ultimately, it takes all of us to progress, to advance our society.”

—Maureen McNamee

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The Council hopes to increase exposure for its artists and give people more opportunities to see professional fine craft. Outgoing executive director Tom McFall, who retired in June, believes it’s critical for Albertans to see the best of craft in the best of places for it. Fine craft, he says, “is taken much more seriously when we can present it well.”

The ACC is a provincial organization but until now has been primarily based in Edmonton. At the same time, a large portion of the senior members of the council are affiliated with Alberta College of Art + Design. McFall says a Calgary location has been in the works for decades. “It significantly increases the public profile,” he says. “The space is quite a bit smaller than the one in Edmonton, but it’s still fairly high-profile by being part of King Edward.”

“Fine craft is not toilet roll Santa Clauses. It’s everything from beautifully made furniture to exquisite jewellery.”

The first exhibition in the new space, “Citizens of Craft,” runs until September 23, but the gallery’s official grand opening coincides with Alberta Culture Days, September 29 to October 1. The latter will feature “Along the Bow,” a show by members who are inspired by the Bow Valley region. The retail gallery sells ceramics, jewellery, scarves and more.

Alberta has a strong craft art scene. Medalta, in the historic clay district near Medicine Hat, was home to some of the early designers in ceramics and continues to attract artists from around the world. “The ceramics scene in Alberta is unusual even beyond Canada for that kind of concentration of activity,” says McFall. ACAD also plays a significant role in developing a sophisticated, professional level of craft in the province, he adds. In total, “Hundreds of people work in Alberta on a full-time professional level doing studio-based creative artwork in craft media such as metal, ceramics, fibre, fabrics, glass, wood, stone, some in leather, some very specialized.”

McFall says the Calgary space will enhance members’ careers by providing another venue to show and sell their work. The retail gallery also serves as an “incubator” for some emerging artists, who get to show their work alongside more experienced members. Emerging artists “tend to be working in isolation more than they should or than we would like,” says McFall. “It’s a fairly solitary activity, even when you have a degree or two or have a network of friends, to be working out of a one-person studio.”

McFall recently handed the Alberta Craft Council reins over to Barry Moss, the new executive director. Moss believes the Calgary space will provide a chance to introduce more Albertans to contemporary fine craft and to what it is—and isn’t.

“There are misconceptions when people hear the word craft,” he says. “Fine craft is not toilet roll Santa Clauses. Fine craft is everything from a beautifully made piece of furniture to an exquisite ceramic bowl to amazing silver earrings or jewellery. We’re blessed with some high-calibre artists in the province and we have to celebrate this.”

—Maureen McNamee

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Executive director and chief curator Catherine Crowston says the changes are part of the AGA’s strategic plan to increase attendance, expand demographics and grow the potential audience of culturally literate adults. The initiative will be funded by an extra $250,000 from the city; at the end of two years the AGA will evaluate its impact. Admission and membership sales account for up to 10 per cent of AGA’s revenues, but an increase in visitors is expected to boost sales at the gallery’s gift shop and restaurants.

The move follows a pitch by the gallery in 2015 to eliminate admission fees altogether, which failed to receive the support of city council. Attendance has dropped off since the initial excitement of the gallery’s opening in 2010—the AGA had 48,420 gallery admissions in 2015 compared to 123,000 in 2012. Crowston says the decline is typical for new museums, and the goal now is to get people back in the door.

The recent changes build on the popularity of past events with free admission, including the last Thursday evening of the month, which started when the gallery opened, and holidays such as Canada Day and Family Day. “This past Family Day we had about 5,500 people here in one day, so we know that people want to see the art gallery, they want to see the exhibitions. But cost really does seem to be a barrier, particularly for families,” Crowston says. “We see a huge change in demographics when we have free days. Many new citizens to Edmonton take advantage and come to see the gallery.”

“People want to see the art gallery. But cost really does seem to be a barrier.”

She adds that the changes target youth and students because that’s where arts appreciation and understanding begins. “If we make it easy for them to make the art gallery a habitual part of what they do, [if we] remove that cost barrier, then I think that will help to grow the future audiences of adults who will be museum supporters, arts educated, culturally literate people.”

In Calgary, Glenbow is in its second year of opening its doors for free on the first Thursday evening of the month. At the debut event in January 2016, more than 4,000 people attended. “Our goal was 500. It was shocking, we were gobsmacked,” says Jenny Conway Fisher, marketing and communications manager. The second event attracted more than 3,000 people and since then free nights have averaged about 1,000—more than double what the museum sees on a typical weekend. “The awareness of Glenbow existing and being a place to go to—it’s advanced that cause exponentially.”

Fisher says one of the Glenbow’s main challenges has been attracting adults who visited with their school as children but never came back. The free events are a chance to show them that there’s always something new to see beyond the permanent exhibits.

Fisher adds that the positive response to these events has prompted discussion about examining other barriers to museum access, such as limited hours. “Many of us who work at Glenbow believe access is so important to what we do,” she says. “The more we can get people connected to Glenbow, the better.”

Maureen McNamee is an associate editor at Alberta Views.

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“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.

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“I had GWGs as a kid. They were called ‘Wee Gees,’” says Gerry Morita, artistic director of Mile Zero Dance. “I never knew much about the factory and its history until Gene Dub opened up the former factory downtown as the Red Strap Art Market and rented space to craftspeople and artists and even had a few performances there. My parents also told stories about it.

“I can vaguely recall when it shut down, but I wasn’t very aware of the history until I began researching it. I often do projects like this that delve into history—usually of a building—to inquire into what Edmonton is today compared to what it used to be.”

Morita says she was surprised to learn that a lot of Edmontonians had never heard of the city’s clothesmaking past. She compares the closure of the GWG factory to the city losing its status as “City of Champions” when its hockey team stopped winning. “For a period of time we were the home of GWG and we were this proud, working-man clothes factory place, but then that got closed down and we promptly forgot about it.”

Morita’s co-creator, Lin Snelling, a dancer and choreographer who teaches at U of A, brings a global perspective to the work. “Blue jeans today are still sewed by sweatshop labour in much the same way that they were 50 or even 100 years ago,” Morita adds.

In collaboration with other artists, they’ve developed a performance piece that combines visual art, dance and sound. The show, running May 26 and 27 at Sugar Swing, will have different stations representing activities such as sewing or dyeing denim, and the audience will be free to move from one to another. At the same time, a soundtrack will play stories about GWG from people who recall wearing the jeans or working at the factory.

It’s not surprising Morita, an advocate for the city’s arts, chose to tell a local story. She regularly includes Edmonton artists in the company’s Dance Crush series featuring Canadian movement-based artists, and invites people from different disciplines to curate other series.

Mile Zero Dance also takes art directly to the people. The mobile show RV There Yet? travels to different Edmonton neighbourhoods in an old trailer, and the company hosts art shows in the storefront windows of its Little Italy studio as a way to engage shoppers at street level.

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts recently named Morita one of the province’s 25 most influential artists of the past 25 years, recognizing her innovation as well as her efforts to bring local artists and audiences from different disciplines and communities together.

“I see lots of gaps, culturally and artistically, in things that could happen—ways to engage young artists and keep them working, ways to have audiences be more proud of work that comes from here,” she says. “By having work that’s a direct expression of here, it gives people a voice about the place they live in.”

And you won’t find local stories like the rise and fall of GWG on Netflix. “That’s the competition now—this global culture that you can consume from your bed…. So I make events that are interesting for people to leave their houses for.”

—Maureen McNamee

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“The reality of what a monstrous undertaking it is kind of hit me,” says Balkwill. The Old Trouts were in no position to take over—members were working on different projects in different cities. Instead, he suggested creating a separate entity to run the festival and serve as a hub for local artists involved in “all things animated”—puppetry, masks, animation—including CAOS, the Old Trouts, WP Puppet Theatre, the Green Fools and Quickdraw Animation Society, among others.

“I was interested in seeing the Calgary festival become its own thing, not unlike its sister festival in Montreal,” he says, referring to the Festival de Casteliers, a larger annual event. Cook, who had previously moved the Calgary event to better align with Montreal’s so that international artists could perform at both, stayed on board to help out.

Cook and Balkwill have been part of Calgary’s puppet scene for years. Cook helped establish the Green Fools in the 1990s before starting CAOS, and Balkwill worked on summer amphitheatre shows with friends who later became the Old Trouts. They were attracted to the art form because puppets have no limitations. “You can dismember them, murder them, make them fly, make them go underwater,” says Cook. “You can shrink them, you can explode them,” adds Balkwill. “The puppet has been around as a vehicle to tell stories since before there were words.”

With a renewed vision for the festival, they joined forces with some like-minded friends to create the International Festival of Animated Objects Society (IFAOS). The new standalone, not-for-profit organization will produce the March 16–19 festival under the management of Gwen Murray, who has experience in arts development.

This year IFAOS scaled back the festival in an effort to consolidate its base before expanding. The all-ages event will include the usual puppet shows, screenings, workshops, lectures and the popular Dolly Wiggler Cabaret, but with a particular focus on local talent.

Calgary has a healthy number of artists to choose from, which Balkwill says is due to trailblazer Ronnie Burkett and his marionettes. “His inspiration and his dedication to the puppet arts, particularly for adults, really opened up the door for other crazies to follow.”

The 2017 lineup includes some familiar Calgary names such as clown and puppeteer Mooky Cornish and the Old Trouts themselves with a remount of their debut show from 1999, The Unlikely Birth of Istvan. That production started the Trouts on a path that has taken them around the world with well-known works such as Famous Puppet Death Scenes.

The festival will also highlight emerging local artists such as Long Grass Studio and Pape and Taper—both have appeared previously in the cabaret, but this is their first time presenting full-length work. “It’s important that the festival give local artists a chance to push their art to the next level,” says Cook. Talent from outside the city includes the Wonderheads from Portland (Loon, Grim and Fisher), a Montreal puppet troupe and a selection of animated films.

Cook and Balkwill will both remain involved in the festival, at least until the society is on its feet. As Balkwill puts it, “Xstine ceremoniously handed me the reins—and I handed half of them back to her.” Cook doesn’t bear any grudge: “With all these amazing people involved we’re going to push it further than it’s ever gone before.”

—Maureen McNamee

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