Touring artists are Canada's affordable diplomats

There are dozens of reasons why Stephen Harper needs to support and promote arts funding, especially when it comes to federal cash for touring grants. One of the reasons is this: artists on tour perform acts of low-level diplomacy with people that Harper and trade ministers will never meet. Touring shows form a creative interface between countries that gives Canada a more positive position in global dynamics.

I began thinking about this after a conversation with three Vancouverites who took a one-woman show on tour to Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago this late August/early September. Gravity, produced by Vancouver's urban ink productions, was one of the last tours to receive funds from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) this year before PromArts and Trade Routes were cut.

Tricia Collins (Gravity’s writer and solo actor), David Kerr (the stage technician) and Diane Roberts (urban ink’s Artistic Director/Producer) were the hard-working crew that took Gravity on the road.

Besides presenting Gravity twice in Guyana and twice in Trinidad the three Canadians participated in community-based discussions. In Guyana, they joined a symposium about art as a tool for community-building. In Trinidad, Roberts had the chance to lead a day-long “Personal Legacy Workshop.”

This series of story-building exercises encourages people to investigate the immigration experiences of their ancestors and build stories from those themes. Professional actors, a group of young men from a grade nine class, and other individuals joined in the day and the feedback was so positive that the University of the West Indies has invited Roberts to lead the complete, three-day version of the workshop next summer.

But as anyone who has travelled to an unfamiliar culture will know, the truest cross-cultural understanding happens spontaneously, and often through difficulty.

Gravity’s first stop was in Georgetown, Guyana, for Carifesta 2008. This festival of theatre and music from the Carribean islands that has taken place every four years, and on different islands, since its inauguration in 1972.

Kerr had checked with the theatre technicians each day between arriving and set-up; he was assured that the requests on the technical rider, sent months earlier, were being met (the rider lists set, sound and lighting requirements). But on opening day, when Collins, Kerr and Roberts showed up at the theatre to do a technical run-through of Gravity, they had a shock. Instead of a stage set up with a wooden box roughly the size of a crouching human, two projectors and a sound system that could play a CD through the house speakers, they walked into a space that had: a bare proscenium stage. Turns out the festival organizers had moved volunteers from staffing Gravity to staffing the previous night’s gala opening.

Collins had prepared a stripped-down story-telling version of the show but even that version still depends on one prop: a wooden shipping container. One character is forced to travel in this crate; another uses it at certain points for height and specifically choreographed movement. Without it, the story doesn’t work.

Stress levels rose. And communication began. Instead of trying to figure out why the stage wasn’t ready – was it a difference in production values, in the use of time, in training, in technical capacity? – the Canadians and a group of willing Guyanese volunteers got to work. “We got really creative,” says Roberts. With the help of the volunteers, mostly young men in their mid to late teens, the Gravity crew discovered a stack of discarded wooden pallets behind the theatre and built a box from those. “We had to work right up to the opening,” Roberts recalls, “so there was no time for a run-through. But it looked really authentic, like a shipping container, the best box we ever had.”

Creative configurations became the norm that day. “I already knew it would be a challenge because it’s technically heavy,” Collins says, “and we really depend on the tech help. But it was funny because the things we thought we would be able to get easily – two projectors, two CD players – were impossible to find. It was like using tongs on the baby’s head trying to pull it out of a crazy uterus.”

Kerr had to mic a boombox through the house system because it couldn’t connect to a CD; when it broke mid performance he had to crawl under a table to whisper a segment of text that is usually recorded through the mic, that fortuitously was there. Aside from the pallets for the set the young men helped with the rest of the set décor and it all finally came together.

“It became a community-building event,” says Roberts. “What couldn’t be achieved by the folks in power was achieved by people on the ground. The young people were really excited to be involved, and stayed with us for the whole run of the show.”

Collins performed well. Gravity is both a fictional and factual account of four generations of women in the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora. Loosely base on Collins' great-great grandmother, the girl in the box is captured and sold into the British indenture system and shipped from China to Guyana in a crate. The girl in the box births Ling, the first Chinese-Guyanese generation, and mother to Josephine who rebels as a young woman and has a child with her true native lover while marrying an older Chinese gentleman to appease her mother. Her mixed race daughter Maya moves to Canada and becomes an environmental engineer set on stopping the floods in present day Guyana and sorting out her family story.

The narrator relates each story gradually, poetically. Layers of voice and landscape are added by occasional video projections. Gravity explores immigration and diaspora, dispersions that have affected so many Canadians. It’s also a story about subtle but specific pressures from family to love or not love in “radical” ways.

In Trinidad, the discussion periods following Gravity were even more enthusiastic, says Collins. Trinidadian casts are generally large – thirty is an average number – so to see a one-person show was “kind of mind-boggling for them,” she explains. There is also a tradition of possession in Trinidadian theatre, where an actor will switch from one character to another through a choreographed, symbolic “seizure.” “From the question period we realized it was a completely new thing for them to see someone shift between characters seamlessly,” says Kerr.

The learning went both ways. Collins says she was able to see the core of Gravity more clearly after the tour, since she was able to reconstruct it in two completely different kinds of spaces. And Roberts, a senior artist to Collins by a couple of decades, says she saw Collins go through a distinct change. “In our post-partum discussion, I heard Tricia taking a much stronger sense of ownership around the show,” Roberts says. “She came back so much stronger and clearer about herself as an artist. Before the tour, she was handling Gravity like a precious jewel. She only wanted to show it in countries where people had an experience of diaspora. And to continue the metaphor, now she’s ready to offer the show like a piece of jewellery – she's more confident that Gravity can speak to a wider audience.”

Back to the funding question, however. Gravity was first produced at Chapel Arts in Vancouver in October 2007. (I saw it and found it both intelligent and beautiful, by the way.) In the lead-up to that performance, urban ink presented Gravity to a gathering of the Guaynese community. That night generated an invitation to Carifesta 2008.

In response, urban ink hired tour manager Kiran Michel to build a Carribean tour that would be worth the expense. Pickney Productions, a new production company associated with The University of the West Indies were excited to bring Gravity to Trinidad and Tobago.

It’s interesting to note that DFAIT funding is only part of the support that it takes to organize a tour. The federal travel grant covered air travel for three people, plus food allowances for the two-week period they were away. British Columbia Arts Council and Canada Council funding covered the preparatory lead-time that allowed the Vancouverites to rehearse and reconfigure the show.

Another thing I learned is that, even with such a small group of travelers, Gravity would have been too expensive for the hosting companies of either of those countries to bring in. The host companies covered the cost of ground travel, accommodation and advertising.

“There’s no way we would have been able to do it without that funding, absolutely no way,” says Roberts. “As well, the communities we wanted to connect with don’t have the infrastructure we have in the West to bring in artists. They couldn’t bring us in even though, from our point of view, the size of the show is reasonable – covering air travel for even just three people is a lot for presenters in Guyana and Trinidad.”

The three related many wonderful anecdotes while we talked. Collins enthused about sculptures and paintings she saw in Trinidad. Kerr reported that the rum provided at the Canadian Consuls house (15 year old Eldorado), where the 3 were invited to an unveiling of a statue of Captain James Douglas, the original Governor of British Columbia, Guyanese by birth (and the next dramatic subject Collins is tackling), was much better than the rum offered by Hamilton Green (only an 8 year old) at his house, where all of the artists of Carifesta had a chance to come together. Maybe Harper will contact one of these three ordinary, yet remarkable, Vancouverites to hear what else the tour involved. For myself, it’s enough to know that Canadian art was appreciated, and that a Canadian artist grew, from a tour. When Collins says – “It was rewarding for us, and rewarding for them” – I’m completely content to put my tax money behind that.

Looking outside of Canada, many countries have learned that their diplomatic presence benefits when they include cultural activities alongside political and trade discussions. Britain (British Council), the French (Alliance Francaise, and the Embassies' culture centres and libraries), the Germans (Max Mueller centres), the Indians, who have Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and even the Americans (USIS), commit budgets to bringing music, visual art and performing arts from their home countries to their embassies. Besides being enjoyable, educational, and often surprising, this commitment builds all sorts of good will among very ordinary middle class people.

In Canada, maybe we don’t have to use an embassy model. But we should actively take care not to chop out the funding for the positive relationships that are already being developed through PromArts and Trade Routes, among other touring grants. The nation-to-nation understanding that develops when ordinary, intelligent people from one country connect with ordinary, intelligent people in another country is far more long-lasting than connections cultivated over the diluted cultural information that circulates at a black-tie business dinners. That’s why Harper needs artists out there, making connections between Canada and other countries, creating conversations with people that he’ll never have time to meet.