Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer
Location: Room 4270 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal
(Building 27 on the UdM map)
In-Person Session
Risk, redress, and redistribution in Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative
This paper explores a theatrical experiment that cultivated novel approaches to creative risk and social redress. In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 spread throughout the UK, London’s Royal Court Theatre shut its doors to the public. The following winter, amid a nation-wide lockdown, the Royal Court launched an alternative to its planned programming. Drawing inspiration from the US Federal Theatre Project (FTP) and its signature “Living Newspapers,” Artistic Director Vicki Featherstone led a seven-part, hybrid series of new works titled Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative. Conceived, like its Depression-era precedents, to mitigate unemployment, Living Newspaper employed over 300 freelancers and the full complement of Royal Court staff. And like their precursors at the FTP, the company would foreground matters of justice, including public health, labor, racism, and colonialism.
Justice was not only a theme onstage; it was also catalyst for institutional change. As the Living Newspaper company navigated shifting conditions and regulations, it reconfigured the relationship between theatre-makers, audiences, and funders. Playwrights from Palestine, Ukraine, and India collaborated online via Zoom; ushers performed as audience members for recorded “captures” of editions; funds were raised in advance rather than at the box office, freeing artists to focus on their mission rather than commercial success.
This paper engages Bonnie Honig’s feminist theory of “emergency politics” (2009) to interpret a variety of evidence, including original interviews. Engaging Bonnie Honig’s feminist theory of “emergency politics,” I consider Living Newspaper as both an historical artifact and a manifesto for equitable practices of theatrical labor.
Jordana Cox, University of Waterloo
Jordana Cox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her first book, Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers, co-launched the University of Massachusetts Press’ “Journalism and Democracy” series in winter 2023. She also serves as Curator for TheatreAgora, the online meeting place for the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the Société québecoise d’études théatrales.
Lessons to Learn from COVID-19: Looking for Resiliency, Sustainability, and Equity for Theatre Workers and Organizations
This paper examines preliminary results from the Pandemic Preparedness in the Live Performing Arts: Lessons to Learn from COVID-19 grant, funded by the British Academy, which aims to explore how governmental, charity, and informal support for organizations and arts workers in the performing arts across the G7 countries (UK, US, Germany, Canada, Japan, France, Italy) impacted the workforce, the type of outputs produced, and the resilience of the industry.
With a specific focus on recommendations related to the workforce in Canada, we describe how the COVID-19 pandemic underscored issues of precarious employment among independent artists and freelance workers (CACCES 2021) with one in four arts workers losing their jobs in 2020 (Julien 2021; I Lost My Gig 2020). For those working in the arts in the pandemic, three times as many individuals and organizations reported very high or high levels of stress and anxiety today (76% and 79%, respectively) as compared to before COVID-19 (26% and 25%) and pervasive burnout was reported across the sector (Murphy 2023; Saskatchewan Arts Alliance 2020; Borodenko 2021). Based on a literature review of information related to policy context, industry structures, and funding models alongside consultative stakeholder meetings with federal, provincial, and municipal government officials, unions, arts service organizations, funders, and grassroots, we suggest preliminary policy recommendations for industry professionals and support structures to move from the reactive mode they adopted during the lockdown years to a proactive mode that anticipates future shocks and renders the industry more resilient (WIPO recommendation, 2022).
Julien, Frédéric. “2020: The Year One in Four Arts Worker Lost Their Job.” Canadian Association for the Performing Arts, January 15, 2021
The Canadian Artists and Content Creators Economic Survey (CACCES), 2021.
I Lost My Gig, COVID-19 Impact Survey Preview, https://ilostmygig.ca/2020/04/07/covid-19-impact-survey-preview/
Aisling Murphy, “Backstage burnout in Toronto Theatre was always a thing – post-pandemic it’s gotten worse,” Toronto Star, March 25, 2023, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2023/03/25/backstage-burnout-in-toronto-theatre-was-always-a-thing-post-pandemic-its-gotten-worse.html.
Saskatchewan Arts Alliance. (2020), COVID-19 Impact Survey: Artists and Cultural Workers.
Borodenko, N. (2021), National Arts and Culture Impact Survey. Prairie Research Associates. https://oc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NACIS_Organizations_EN.pdf
Meghan Lindsay, Queen’s University
Meghan Lindsay is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and a Sessional Instructor at Carleton University.
Kelsey Jacobson, Queen’s University
Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University.
The New Normal: An examination of funders expectations for applied theatre during COVID-19 shutdowns in Ontario, Canada
The financial and organizational activities of applied theatre organizations can be sites of potentiality (Mullen 20). This session will examine how funders expectations of applied theatre practices changed during COVID-19 shutdowns in Ontario, Canada. The analysis will be accomplished by considering relevant literature alongside qualitative case studies. The case studies are from a focus group and several one-on-one interviews with nine applied theatre practitioners in Ontario, Canada conducted during the Summer of 2021. This was shortly after theatre and school activities had been shut down by the provincial government when funders and practitioners were considering what had happened during the shutdowns, and what was next. This research is vital to share now, as practitioners and funders are returning to their regular activities post-COVID lockdowns.
Since at least the 1980s, how arts funding has affected applied theatre has been top of mind for practitioners (Hope 159), and the topic has been explored within the literature. Indeed, it is established that in Ontario, governments can influence the arts through arts funding (D’Andrea 255). Still, there is a lack of published data on the changes which occurred during COVID-19, which can expose new potentialities in practice. Leniency among funders allowed practitioners to experiment with new ways of working, such as 4-day work weeks. Despite this, funders were selective with their leniency. Ultimately, this session argues that an examination into how funders expectations changed during COVID-19 shutdowns grants new insights into their intent and the power they hope to exert over applied theatre practices.
Works Cited
D’Andrea, Marisol J. “Symbolic Power: Impact of Government Priorities for Arts Funding in Canada.” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 47, no. 4, 2017, pp. 245–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/10632921.2017.1340209. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.
Hope, Sophie. “We Thought We Were Going to Change the World!.” The Failures of Public Art and Participation, edited by Cameron Cartiere and Anthony Schrag, Routledge: London and New York, 2023, pp. 156-175, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003161356-12. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023
Mullen, Molly. “The ‘diverse Economies’ of Applied Theatre.” Applied Theatre Research, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, pp. 7–22, https://doi.org/10.1386/atr.5.1.7_1. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.
Daniel McGuire, University of Toronto
Daniel McGuire is a PhD student from the University of Toronto with the CDTPS. His research interests focus on the complex, multi-directional relationship between cultural policy, arts funding, and applied theatre practices. Daniel also holds an MA in Arts, Festival, and Cultural Management from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.