Sorry it’s been a while. Ken and I were in Montreal for a week at the beginning of the month and also busily working with artists and staff at the Centre over the past few weeks. And the world has been moving so fast that it has been a challenge to have enough room to reflect.
One of my mantras over the past five years was that we can hold two things that can feel oppositional, to be true at once. Often we feel that we have to pick one, and that can lead to a lack of nuance – separating the meeting points where we can work together even with different points of view. This comes up repeatedly, from discussions during our recent work at the National Theatre School Artistic Leadership residency, to our work with artists and staff at the Centre, to our work with our community.
For instance, refugees can be grateful to Canada for taking them in and to their sponsors for caring for them, and also wish they were at home, which they only left because of danger to themselves or their families. It can be true that our country has some work to do and isn’t perfect, and also true that it is worth protecting.
When first starting our camps (decades ago now), I thought about how I wanted to describe our philosophy of arts education and came up with the term “respectful freedom”. I meant values of inclusion and belonging, hard work and also laughter, striving to create, and to pose questions together, and sometimes to answer them through creativity and welcome.
That a child could be free here to express themselves and to avail themselves of the skills and tools we offer and to also have boundaries if their own activity impinges on someone else’s well being. That you can hold the needs of the community and your own needs at the same time and kids can be introduced to the notion of community early on, navigating a civic sense with self reliance both at once.
That is what I believe we excel at here. Through our landscape and our ability to be a multidisciplinary, multigenerational, and multicultural space where people are able to be creative and engaged and respect each other and our shared resources.
Those things we know are under attack around the world right now, and we are committed to continuing to be a beacon of light for the way we can make the world together.
We don’t claim these values as uniquely ours; many organisations and colleagues are also working together to ensure that we don’t fall into apathy or act out of anger but focus on positive and clear-headed connection and care and action. In fact it is what I think of as the promise of Canada, and similarly to Ross Creek, we don’t always get it right, but generally we are on the right path together.
We have recently started working with Artists At Risk to help international artists find residencies to get them out of immediate danger in their home countries. We continue our provincial and national advocacy work not just for funding for the arts but for the acceptance that any country needs to put its cultural expression as a primary value. That arts and culture are central to all of our communities and our sense of ourselves as Canadian, especially in the very diversity that expression takes.
And that voting matters. Every vote matters.
We will be sharing the resources of the Canadian Arts Coalition over the next few weeks to ensure you have access to information about each party and their platforms on arts and culture among other items of importance to us all.
I recently heard a historian say that no matter how painful, now is not the time to look away. And we hold these two things as true: that we can be actively engaged to keep democratic values here in Canada, and support our American friends and colleagues who are affected by events in the US, and that we can work to keep joy and laughter and creativity in our work here. That it is essential to do both, to fill up our well and remember what it is we are working for. To ensure that the kids we work with grow up with that sense of freedom and acceptance and independence that camp offers, and that our youth cohort take their roles seriously as amazing civic leaders, even starting at 13. That artists have a place they can explore and create meaningful forms of expression that reflect who and what we are. That the theatre can create a world that we all inhabit and a journey we go on together. That we take moments to eat and celebrate and work together.
Thank you for being part of this journey.
There are still a few days left to donate for last year’s taxation year. You can see all the ways you can support our work here, including as volunteers. We need many hands and contributions to make this place work and we hope you might consider whatever way to help you can.
Today we welcome the public for a community arts day celebrating that very expression and welcoming our new program director, Veronica Madero. There will be African food, dancing and drumming and also a performance in the amazing interactive gallery work of Andrew Maize. You can also borrow some snowshoes and explore our trails! Please see below for all the things.
With much, much love,
Chris and Ken
