Defunding Alternative Voices

The Tories' funding cuts to the SummerWorks Festival reflect a broader agenda to silence critics.

It has been a rough year for indie theatre artists and Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival.

The trouble started last August, when Sun Media’s David Akin broke ranks with the media pool. With the rest of the journalists at Rideau Hall agreeing to ask Prime Minister Stephen Harper a question about the long-form census, Akin used one of two English-language questions available to the press to ask about Catherine Frid’s play Homegrown, which had just played at SummerWorks. Harper replied that he was “concerned” that federal funds had gone to support the play about a lawyer’s relationship with a convicted terrorist, even though he had not seen the play.

No one ever got to ask the PM a question about the census.

The news got worse for SummerWorks in the winter, when the very same journalist revealed, through a freedom of information request, that the festival had filed a grant application late. Said journalist then used this faux-bombshell to generate more outrage-inducing headlines for his Harper-aligned media conglomerate. The shoe finally dropped in June, when it was announced that SummerWorks was being denied federal funding – causing ticket prices to increase by 50 per cent.

The response to the defunding of one of the country’s most important generators of contemporary performance art was immediate and significant. In an open letter to artistic directors, playwright Michael Healey called on every theatre that received federal funding to participate in a reading of the play Homegrown as an act of national cultural solidarity.

Two weeks later, over 70 theatres across the country – from Whitehorse to Stratford to Vancouver to Halifax – participated in public readings of the play.

Heritage Minister James Moore, himself an ex–radio host, took to CBC Radio’s Q, where he discussed the decision to cut funding to the indie theatre festival while announcing that 10 times as much federal money would be given to the Walk of Fame Festival, which celebrates important Canadian artists like Alex Trebek. When the host of the show, Jian Gomeshi, questioned him about the decision, Moore responded saying, "People can draw up whatever conspiracy theories they want. The fact is that funding went to another festival, and other festivals are going forward."

Whether or not you entertain conspiracy theories, it’s hard not to perceive this as a move to use cultural funding in much the same way that the Conservative government has used other discretionary monies: a riding-by-riding funding system that shores up Conservative support and abandons those citizens that are unlikely to vote for the party.

Moving away from supporting independent art and artists while increasing monies to cultural festivals is also a win-win beyond the obvious pork-barrelling benefits: It allows an ideologically driven government to minimize the impact of alternative voices, while making the claim that it is actually “increasing” arts funding.

This is no small potatoes in an era in which the prime minister is making speeches claiming that “Conservative values are Canadian values” one month after 60 per cent of the country cast ballots with different values in mind. The plan seems to be to close the gap by creating an ethos and funding structure that punishes those cultural producers that provide evidence that the Emperor is really only wearing 40 per cent of his clothes, and that he would be right down to his skivvies if young people were more involved in our democracy.

This year, I find myself a participant in the SummerWorks Festival as a director of a play I am sure Stephen Harper would be “concerned” by. Written and performed by G20 detainee Tommy Taylor, You Should Have Stayed Home recounts the way he was arrested and detained on his way home from attending his first ever protest at the “Free Speech Zone” at Queen’s Park as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen during last year’s summit.

While it is mostly a one-man show, we have decided to think big, adding a section where we could use up to 30 volunteer performers in a scene that depicts the conditions at the G20 detention centre. With no political will to have a public inquiry into what Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin called, “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history,” we felt compelled to move beyond just what happened to Tommy, and to depict what happened to some of the hundreds of Canadians who were deprived of their Charter rights that weekend.

This is not the type of art our federal government wants to see made. It would rather spend tax dollars on festivals in swing ridings, celebrating American game-show hosts, and the occasional tax credit for piano lessons. If nothing else, members of the next generation can grow up to cover John Lennon’s Imagine as well as the PM, even if they don’t grow up with enough cultural awareness to be impacted by the terrible irony of it all.

Lately, there has been heated debate in the theatre community about whether defunding SummerWorks constitutes “censorship.” In the final analysis, the question seems to be a red herring. The real question is whether our government is making a mockery of democratic principals – through defunding or otherwise – by actively punishing those voices in our civil society that are critical of the state.

Origin
Source: the Mark