COVID-19 Resources and Actions for Calgary Artists

As the performing arts sector reels from the effects of sudden and escalating COVID-19 risk mitigation measures, we are being inundated with communications while trying to navigate next steps.

For the artists I represent and other independent theatre artists in Calgary, I’ve tried to provide some practical suggestions below. I’ll keep it updated as much as possible.

Resources & Links

1.      Calgary Arts Development has the most comprehensive page for local artists with links to resources and actions. https://calgaryartsdevelopment.com/announcements/information-about-covid-19/

They are holding a COVID-19 virtual town hall meeting on Tuesday, March 24 at 3 PM MST.

 2.      PACT has also been taking a lead role. https://pact.ca/covid-19-resource-page/

They are holding weekly virtual town halls on COVID-19 starting Thursday, March 19 at 11 AM MST.

 Please track messages from Equity and other associations if applicable to your organization.

 3. Here is one of many artist resources pages popping up:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j5G-290oBGludXRJEV4pS-sdefCX9MWUkwk2WT7K99Y/edit?usp=sharing

The I Lost My Gig Canada Facebook group is becoming a collective conversation and resource.

Granting Agencies and Funding

 1.      All artists impacted by COVID-19 risk mitigation factors, such as cancelled or postponed events, need to be carefully documenting their financial impacts, keeping receipts, contract copies, and correspondence, etc. so that you have everything you need when asked to submit your cases later.

 2.      Stay on top of announcements from your funding agencies and reach out as required, especially if you have approved or pending project and travel grants/applications impacted by COVID-19.

 For example: Canada Council is advising applicants concerned about having submitted an application which is now ineligible or not applicable and which may count towards their annual limits, to withdraw their grant applications. Travel grants are staying open until March 23, 2020 in order to enable applicants to withdraw. More updates to follow.

Please refer to: https://canadacouncil.ca/covid-19-information#Suspension

3. Here's a summary of the new Income Support programs announced by the Federal Government on March 18, 2020:
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2020/03/canadas-covid-19-economic-response-plan-support-for-canadians-and-businesses.html

and a link to their website with information on “Helping Businesses Keep their Workers”:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2020/03/canadas-covid-19-economic-response-plan-support-for-canadians-and-businesses.html

Advocacy and Documentation

 Calgary Arts Development is one of your key advocates.

 1. CAD Survey due March 19, tracking the impact of COVID-19:

In order to measure impacts and advocate to different levels of government, Calgary Art Development has distributed a survey open to all Calgary artists. Please fill it out by March 19 at noon: http://calgaryartsdevelopment.hostedincanadasurveys.ca/index.php/234789?lang=en

2. Department of Canadian Heritage is welcoming submissions to document the impact of COVID-19, and you can resubmit as your situation changes:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeC3lHyx8OGPO8gBrHr-LW-9oR6Y4wwBCtVJAa3I0tJiwSafA/viewform?fbclid=IwAR3NAaee6BGAKpjF5wDALz7dOFyXdOW3yVevhOZcN8Q2co-0WSDLM-tC-Fc

3. TRACKING CANCELLED EVENTS:

I encourage artists to submit their cancelled or postponed events to the various sources collectively tracking them in order to help share individual stories while aggregating the impact. Here are a few:

Calgary-wide:

i.                  Calgary Arts Development event listings: please email events@calgaryartsdevelopment.com so they can update listings and share your information.

ii.                  Calgary Herald is keeping an active list: https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/calgary-cancelled-events-covid-19-coronavirus/. Please email your cancelled or postponed events to jroe@postmedia.com.

iii. CBC Calgary: COVID-19 local updates along with cancellations and closures. https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/localcovid19/?region=AB&subregion=calgary

iv.       Calgary Arts Google Doc: A crowdsourced list of show and work cancellations due to COVID-19 measures. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xd84iEmsrNAnaTcVEKPPt6z-PSr5iTuS3q38NTXsKgU/edit

Canada-wide:

v.                  I Lost My Gig Canada is part of an international “I Lost My Gig” initiative: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ILostMyGigCa

3. Direct Advocacy to Your Members of Government

Reach out to your organization’s members of government with clear and detailed information about the financial and business operation impacts of COVID-19, on the lost opportunity towards community impact, and other lost opportunities to complete your case. Potentially get together with other arts organizations and submit letters jointly. Make sure that your voices as independent artists are heard.

I am sure you know your own reps but here are the ridings that many of Calgary’s arts organizations fall into:

Government of Canada: Mr. Greg McLean, Calgary Centre MP: Email greg.mclean@parl.gc.ca

Government of Alberta: Mr. Joe Ceci, NDP, MLA for Calgary-Buffalo, email: Calgary.Buffalo@assembly.ab.ca

City of Calgary – Councillors and Mayor

Ward 7: Druh Farrell, email: druh.farrell@calgary.ca

Ward 8: Evan  Woolley, email: evan.woolley@calgary.ca          

Ward 11: Jeromy Farkas, email: jeromy.farkas@calgary.ca

Mayor: Naheed Nenshi, email: themayor@calgary.ca 

4. Tell Your Own Story

Use your website and social media channels to tell your story. It’s important for stakeholders and community members to understand the breadth and depth of the impacts fighting COVID-19 will have on our precarious arts sector, and especially to hear from the many independent artists who do not feature in headlines.

5. Participate

Artist-driven initiatives are popping up to share work and maintain an artistic community online – for example, The Social Distancing Festival. https://www.socialdistancingfestival.com/

Calgary Artists as Climate Crisis Edge-walkers

As a new theatre agent representing Calgary-based artists with their touring aspirations, I often ponder whether the aggressive political and economic narrative projected by our city as Canada’s oil and gas industry capital affects outsider views of art being made here. This question stems in part from the fact that when I moved to Calgary from Vancouver four years ago, I myself believed that Calgarians live in a bubble.  Now that I represent Calgary artists, I am keenly aware that such generalizations could affect the views of artistic leaders in our national and international landscape. (If artistic programmers from other countries know anything about Calgary, it is to identify Calgary as a ‘tar sands’ capital.)

As artistic programmers increasingly seek art which speaks to social and environmental issues, how much do I need to counter this narrative with colleagues from outside of Alberta? This dominant narrative of our city which stokes a binary world view is not reflective of Calgary - one of Canada’s largest and most culturally diverse cities - or of the varied, inventive, and progressive work being created within its arts scene.

My frame shifted recently during the 2020 PuSh Festival Industry Series in Vancouver. At the curated Pitch Session which had a climate crisis theme, three Calgary-produced projects were chosen to be pitched:

Extinction Song created by Ghost River Theatre, Downstage, and Bucket Club (UK), explores the human experience of our planet’s sixth extinction event through a kaleidoscope collision of original music, song, movement and animation and addresses our collective climate anxiety in the most vital and preposterous of performances.

Niitsipowsiin, produced by Inside Out Theatre and created by Justin Many Fingers, is a journey through the living history and cultural significance of Back Foot Sign Language, following a Blackfoot woman raised apart from her family, land, and language.

Kinship and Mystery: A Way of Working, performative projects created by interdisciplinary artists Mia & Eric, which investigate interspecies relationships, biodiversity, and ecological narrative in cities, small towns, and rural spaces.

The national and international delegates at the PuSh Festival were especially intrigued by these artists’ perspectives on the climate crisis precisely because they make their art “on the front lines” of the oil and gas industry. For example, a film producer commented on the dire sarcasm hinted at in Extinction Song. Calgary artists may not be on the front lines of environmental impact but they are on the front lines of the debate and as such, the PuSh delegates placed value on their voices.

An aside…

March 2011. I am listening to South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela give a talk on the role of the artist as cultural ambassador. He is taking the position that artists don’t set out to make art to be cultural ambassadors or revolutionaries, but that artists live, engage, and make art in contexts – political, social, environmental. For him, it was under Apartheid. An artist’s context affects their perspectives and artistic practice, and so sometimes, artists inherently become activists whether they intend to be…

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While the artists I represent make theatre for different motivations, all of them are making art in an increasingly heated civic environment situated where Canada’s oil and gas industry is headquartered. As the climate crisis escalates, their particular placement and contextualized art will be important voices in the global conversation.

World Premiere of Men Express Their Feelings

Sunny Drake's highly anticipated comedy Men Express Their Feelings, directed by Clare Preuss and presented by Downstage with the generous support of Hit & Myth Productions, premieres this week, running February 28th - March 15th in the Big Secret Theatre at Arts Commons, Calgary.

Men Express Their Feelings takes audiences behind the walls of a hockey rink dressing room to explore hockey culture, male emotional literacy, cultural relations, and sexuality from the generational perspectives of two hockey-playing teenage boys and their dedicated dads. Sentenced to the dressing room to sort out a misunderstanding, these men ultimately find friendship and teach themselves what it really means to win. As our society reaches to define and create brave spaces, and stories about hockey culture are in the national news, Men Express Their Feelings is a lighthearted way to engage with important civic concerns. 

This lightning-speed comedy is written by critically-acclaimed playwright Sunny Drake, a recipient of Canada's 2019 Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize. “Sunny’s brilliantly humorous and poignant approach to important social issues is fresh and inspires the kind of thought provoking conversation that Downstage thrives on,” states Downstage’s Artistic Director Clare Preuss. “Sunny is a generous playwright with a desire to create understanding through highly entertaining theatrical experiences. It’s a pleasure to collaborate with him on this exceptional world premiere.”

Read Louis B. Hobson’s preview of Men Express Their Feelings in the Calgary Herald.

For presenters: a site-specific version of the play is also being created for intimate settings such as sports dressing rooms which will enable presenters to bring the work directly into community spaces. The Downstage production of Men Express Their Feelings will be available to tour in Summer 2021 and through the 2021-22 season and beyond. 

Extinction Song Selected for 2020 Push Festival Industry Pitch Session

How can we reconcile with the fact that it is our very cleverness, our humanness, our drive to create, to build, to connect, to expand, to reproduce, to make art that will, eventually, destroy us?

It started with two devised theatre makers situated 7,000 km apart. In 2019, Eric Rose, Artistic Director of Calgary-based Ghost River Theatre, and Nel Crouch, Artistic Director of UK-based Bucket Club, received a New Conversations grant to start a conversation.

Funded by the British Council, the High Commission of Canada in the UK, and Farnham Maltings with support from Arts Council England, the New Conversations program is intended to initiate challenging and inquisitive conversations, exchange ideas and practices and develop ambitious creative research and development projects that can offer first steps for artistic collaborations and productions between Canada and the UK.

What could be more challenging, more ambitious, and more universal than the topic of extinction?

Extinction Song explores the human experience of our planet’s sixth extinction event through a collision of original music, song, movement and animation. Both disturbing and very funny, a diverse ensemble of a large number of performers, choristers, and children will unhinge our collective climate anxiety in the most vital and preposterous of performances.

Drawing on Rose’s signature high tech, low-fi, highly visual aesthetic and Crouch’s masterful integration of whimsy and rigor, and bringing Downstage into the collaboration for their expertise in community-engaged theatre - the collaborators have imagined a big, kaleidoscopic, visual, music-filled explosion of a show. They want to give voice to what it means to be human right now. To create a space where both audiences and community participants can digest the knowledge of extinction and imagine ways to keep on celebrating humanness, to keep on living dynamically - and with hope, even on the precipice.

“We want the show to be scary and moving and very funny. We aren’t interested in preaching. We love the dichotomy of  hearing “everything is fine” while reading FUCKED. We want to laugh at the absurdity of this dire situation. We want to laugh at ourselves for buying metal straws and bringing them on our yearly Mexico vacations. We want to weep or cringe or gasp as a child speaks to us of the end.

We want build participation into our process; to engage members of the community - youth theatres, choirs, tai chi groups, dog walkers, non-performers, professionals, and – especially – the young, as the people whose voices and futures are most at stake. Things will be built and destroyed, will multiply out of control, will loop and repeat.”

Extinction Song is a collaboration between Ghost River Theatre, Bucket Club, and Downstage. Currently in development, additional residencies will take place in 2020, prototyping in 2021, with the aim of premiering the work in 2022-23.

Producing and commissioning partners interested in this exciting new project should contact Eric Rose, Artistic Director of Ghost River Theatre, at erose@ghostrivertheatre.com.

ONE to be Resurrected at Toronto's Factory Theatre

Please note that due to COVID-19, the Factory Theatre run of ONE has been cancelled.

Ghost River Theatre

The iconic Factory Theatre in Toronto recently announced their 50th Anniversary - 2019-2020 Season, and Calgary’s Ghost River Theatre is thrilled to be included with their production ONE, which will run April 1-19, 2020. Read the Factory Theatre 50th Anniversary Season announcement in the Toronto Star here!

In curating the upcoming anniversary season, Factory Theatre’s Artistic Director Nina Lee Aquino selected “a lineup of new and existing productions that honour the Factory’s past as well as its future.” ONE was last performed at Factory Theatre in 2011 as part of the SummerWorks Performance Festival, and the stunning work has remained a favourite of Aquino’s. For that 2011 run, Ghost River Theatre’s Eric Rose won SummerWorks’ Canadian Stage Award for Best Direction.

A free-association on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, ONE follows the desperate journey of Philistine, an impassioned librarian searching for the love of her life, George, an astronomer who’s been lost at sea. Her devotion takes her beyond the fabric of the living world and into the strange and all-consuming world of the dead—a realm suffused in memory, imagery, sound and fragments of language. Through stunning visual imagery, highly stylized movement, poetic language, and evocative soundscape, ONE delivers an experience that is at once an engaging narrative and a sensory adventure.

ONE will also be performed in Calgary next season and is available for booking.

ONE (2020)

Playwright Jason Carnew
Director Eric Rose
Set, Light and Costume Designer Snezana Pesic
Starring Amber Borotsik