Volume 25 Issue 9 - July / August 2020

“Exquisite Corpse” and Other Coping Strategies
continued from page 7
One of the contributors to our Community Voices feature in our
previous issue (Tricia Baldwin from the Isabel Bader Centre for the
Performing Arts in Kingston) made an astute remark: that COVID-19
“has brought forward the tipping point, [and is] hastening the creation
of new structures to support the creation and production of the arts in
a different way.”
It’s happening everywhere I look, although “structures” is perhaps
too solid a word to describe some of the improvised storm shelters and
advance bases springing up: for people wishing for a “new normal”
that sounds and behaves more like the old one; and for those of us
hoping that the built-in inequities of the old normal never return.
For example, I chatted briefly with Mervon Mehta, executive
director, performing arts at the Royal Conservatory in late June. It
was right after the RCM made the brave (or foolhardy, depending how
the winds blow) announcement of a full season commencing at the
beginning of October. Much of what was on his mind had to do with
really nitty gritty concerns: How many can we accommodate in our
three halls at one-third capacity? How do we get them in and out?
Who among our visiting artists will agree to do a 70-minute performance
without an intermission at 3pm and repeat it at 8, instead of the
one performance they were contracted to do? Things like that. But at
the same time he freely admits that the new plan, detailed as it is, may
have to go right out of the window if the same dispensations being
offered to places of worship, for example, are not extended to the
performing arts. Or if the hoped-for stages of recovery don’t pan out
and even places of worship are locked down again.
Another example: the Show One Productions/Starvox staging of the
Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit now under way at the former Toronto
Star building at One Yonge Street. It started first as a “drive through”,
thereby capturing the attention of media that would likely not have
given the exhibit a second thought. And now it enters a second stage
with agreed start time walk-through admission where you must stay
within a projected moving circle of space as you move through it.
What parts of this, I wonder, have applicability beyond this particular
exhibit? Even if only in helping control bottleneck ingress and
egress at the larger venues that are Show One’s more usual stomping
grounds, and which are themselves in peril if they do not solve these
very problems.
Meanwhile for smaller venues without organized “arts” credentials,
like our city’s jazz clubs, it’s a different matter. In Mainly Clubs,
Mostly Jazz, Colin Story interviews owner/management at three music
venues (The Rex, Burdock, and The Emmet Ray), which, unlike major
institutions do not have the benefit of time, major financial resources,
and systemic endorsement to stay afloat. Paradoxically, in the longer
haul “it is small venues, rather than large, that will have the greater
capacity to provide space to diverse programming.”
Full Circle
Back to the conversation with Ben Finley that sparked this train
of thought. Finley is a double bassist, improviser, composer and
educator, with deep roots in Campellford’s Westben Festival, where
2020 was to be the third iteration of Westben’s Performer-Composer
Residency (P-CR), with Finley at the helm. In previous years,
11 successful applicants travelled to Westben, some from far afield,
for a face-to-face residency, timed to coincide with the performance/
audience/showcase opportunities afforded by the festival itself.
This year? No festival. No international travel. So, logically, one
would think, no composer residency? Wrong.
Instead of whittling the applicants down to the usual dozen or
so, Finley invited all 90 applicants to this year’s program to join a
month-long digital residency (all of June) instead. More than 60
accepted and were assigned to 13 ensembles based on intersecting,
rather than similar interests.
“So here we are all of a sudden,” Finley says, “having to cross multigeographical
and communication borders, with groups of participants,
covering seven different time zones, having to develop innovative
and satisfying collaborative strategies for distanced music making.”
Crucially, he says, these approaches and strategies didn’t just try to
replicate the in-person musical experience but rather to dive into
what web-grounded meaningful connections would look like. “It has
afforded diverse intergenerational musical practitioners a place to
create,” he says. “It’s as though they have been enabled instead to come
up with their own temporary musical institution – an exciting new
development and something that may not have been possible in person.
This unexpected adventure comes to its close July 5 to July 11,
with 13 premiere performances, in Westben’s new digital venue
(www.westben.ca), of 15-minute multimedia pieces. All the creative
intersections this first Westben digital P-CR has actually provoked in
participants will be on display. But that’s just one step on the way.
“We are not in an ordinary time,” Finley says. “COVID has rippled a
tremendous impact. And now that ripple is intersecting with a tide –
of people coming together to imagine, organize, and participate in an
anti-racist and decolonized world. And we need creative and adaptive
musical institutions to do this. This global residency has been an
(imperfect) experiment in that.”
publisher@thewholenote.com
What a difference a year makes! Westben Performer-Composer Residency, 2019, Campbellford.
WESTBEN
30 | July and August 2020 thewholenote.com