Culture and institutions

Here's a fascinating article written by Marcus Youssef, Interim Artistic Director of our sister company NeWorld Theatre in Vancouver. Marcus is also the co-creator of The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil.

In 2004/05, I spent a year teaching in the theatre department at Concordia. On several occasions I listened to students talk to each other about credits for Equity membership. These conversations were always driven by one student who had gotten or was about to get a credit for a co-op with established artists in the city. Their excitement was palpable; as was the fear and self-doubt of the students who were listening to the young actor explaining how Equity apprenticeship works.

They stuck with me, these very ordinary exchanges, essentially no different than those of artists of all kinds talking with each other about getting or not getting work. What intrigued me was how they didn't talk about the show they were working on (or the many other projects the other students had on the go, which, in the context of the one students' "professional" gig, became totally irrelevant). What was notable or important, and what carried all the status within the interaction was the perceived institutional legitimacy that the elusive Equity credit conferred.

I remember that feeling so well, as an actor just out of school, that desperate need to be legitimized, to be told, not by my friends but by an institution, that I was real, that I counted. And, 15 years later, listening to students in the same place, I felt compelled to challenge it. I told them about actor-creators I've gotten to know recently. They're highly successful, making a living and creating some of the most exciting work happening in Vancouver. They've also made the conscious decision NOT to join CAEA. Their reasons are fairly rational; as creators, they feel Equity membership actually creates barriers to their working (or layers of paperwork that there just isn't time to pay for); and because they are successful and confident artists, they are hired by PACT companies and are perfectly capable of negotiating their own contracts.

My Concordia students gave me quizzical looks when I told them this (which I ask you not to read as a big critique of Equity; the same questions can be asked, I think, about the challenges any large institutional structure faces in responding to individual circumstances. The large institution is, I think, a modernist idea. And, in many ways, I think the most efficient way to make our own things happen is in small, hybridized and fluid structures). But to 20 year olds facing the "what do I do when they take away school, where I've spent 80 percent of my life" question, the idea seemed, frankly, absurd.

And yet it's not a whole lot different, I don't think, than a bunch of questions we've been asking in our circle of friends/colleagues. We who work with small companies often ask if the Regional Theatre Model which recognizes one theatre in every major city as the standard-bearer of national culture (and rewards it with a commensurate amount of funding) really reflects the impact / reach / range of cultural activity in our cities. Within its relatively narrow context, I think the Canada Council Theatre's sections recent decision to create a program for on-going funding to companies without a significant administrative structure is an attempt to address this issue. Clearly we don't need more companies; what we need is for artists whose work is reaching people to be able to access funding with the least amount of hassle possible. And to jump around, make connections, switch directions; not to attempt to perpetuate an institution that conforms to an outdated and counterproductive model.

And lots of people could turn around and ask the same institutional question about our company (neworldtheatre which receives relatively small amounts of operating funding) as well. I worked on a project with young sex-trade workers a few years ago. They regularly met and performed truly out-there shows for each other, in unpublicized, word-of-mouth evenings. They were totally off the radar and outside the official-culture structure, but in some ways those events reflect, I think, a manifestation of culture true to a deeper sense of the word. Their shows were an enactment by and for a community ... and to hell with what anybody but they and their friends thought. Preaching to the converted? That was the point.

I also think the direction of more and more funding (at all levels) to community-based projects that involve collaborations between institutionally sanctioned professionals and so-called regular people is a reflection of an emerging or newly defined mistrust of the utility of institutionally driven art. I think this is at once a healthy anti-elitist impulse and simultaneously a potentially dangerous push to attempt to quantify art by a social impact we are increasingly called upon to measure. And there, for me, is the rub. There's nothing inherently better about work that is outside of traditional institutional structures. There are successful, innovative community-based projects; and there are community-based projects that are a sham and relevant to those elusive "real people" in Grant Speak only.

As always it seems to me like money and art are strange bedfellows, and that so much comes down to individual contexts and relationships; just the sort of thing institutional structures have a hard time figuring out.


This article first appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of The Works, a terrific publication from Playwrights' Workshop Montréal.