EQUITY QUARTERLY SPRING 2010 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NAC THE HARSH REALITY OF CENSORSHIP EQ CAN WE SPEAK FREELY IN CANADA? BY CONTINUING TO CREATE PERFORMANCES THAT HELP PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD from different points of view — we CAN ENSURE ARTISTIC EXPRESSION THRIVES HERE IN CANADA, AND AROUND THE WORLD. EQUITY QUARTERLY SPRING 2010 EQ VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1 2 President’s messAGE NAC’s resident 6 3 NOTES FROM ARDEN RYSHPAN acting company 4 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 10 Artistic freedom 5 EQ MOVES in Canada 8 EQ&A 9 BacKSTAGE 15 The worldwide 18 FONDLY REMEMBERED struggle facing 20 EQ CLASSIFIEDS artists 21 EQ FLASHbacK Equity members are encouraged to submit ideas for articles, memorial notices and letters to the editor Coming issue: SUMMER 2010 via email ([email protected]) or on disk with accompanying hard copy. The copy deadline for submissions is Subscriptions are available at an annual rate of $35, including GST. EQ Monday, May 3, 2010. EQ reserves the right to edit for length, style and content. Publications Mail Agreement No. 40038615 SPRING 2010 – Volume 4, Number 1 EQ Equity Quarterly (ISSN 1913-2190) is a forum to communicate to Equity members the activities of EQ is published four times a year by Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lynn McQueen the Association and issues of concern to the Association. With the exception of the editorial staff, the National Office views expressed in solicited or unsolicited articles are not necessarily the views of the Association. 44 Victoria Street, 12th Floor, Toronto, ON M5C 3C4 EDITOR Barb Farwell Tel: 416-867-9165 | Fax: 416-867-9246 | Toll-free: 1-800-387-1856 (members only) Canadian Actors’ Equity Association (Equity) is the voice of professional artists working in live [email protected] | www.caea.com DESIGN & LAYOUT Chris Simeon, performance in English Canada. We represent more than 5,500 performers, directors, choreographers, September Creative Western Office fight directors and stage managers working in theatre, opera and dance, and support their creative efforts 736 Granville Street, Suite 510, Vancouver, BC V6Z 1G3 by seeking to improve their working conditions and opportunities by negotiating and administering Tel: 604-682-6173 | 604-682-6174 | Toll free: 1-877-682-6173 (members only) collective agreements, providing benefit plans, information and support and acting as an advocate. [email protected] COVER: Thanks to Equity member Tara Nicodemo for letting us censor her with mannequin arms representing the faceless opponents of freedom of expression President’s message One of the great challenges in writing this column is the early editorial deadline relative to the date it finally lands in your mailbox or inbox. As I write this, the Olympics are still in full swing. The urge to say “Hey! Guess what we just did!” is always tempered by the knowledge that, by the time you read it, it won’t be “just” anything anymore. Enter the blog! In the last issue, I mentioned that it would be up and running soon, and now it is. I used the first few postings for a basic introduction to Council. Now that my inner teacher is (mostly) satisfied, I have moved on to more timely announcements. You can find the blog at councilconnection.blogspot.com. New posts come out roughly every other week at the moment. Swing by on a regular basis, but if you like, we’ll come to you. You can sign up for an RSS feed to receive a short preview of each new post. If the topic is of interest to you, you can jump right from the preview to the full post. The link to enable subscription appears at the bottom of the blog page. And you can write back, which is the other bonus of the blog format. Don’t be shy. If you are of a generation (not so far removed from mine) for whom the word “blog” suggests an affliction you really ought to call the plumber about, never fear: Important topics will continue to appear in this column and in the Council Link – just not quite so fresh off the presses. Council held its first all-business meeting of the term in late February, where the agenda included reintroduction to most of the major topics carried over from last term, and some new ones as well. Current major issues include a review of the process for joining Equity, insurance benefits, and inde- pendent or member-initiated production. Add to those a constant stream of the many mid-size and smaller topics that help keep the organization running smoothly, and it is always a very full agenda. Fourteen hours of meetings, more than 20 significant topics, plus administrative items – boy do we know how to have a good time! Before I sign off, let me make the annual pitch for honours nominations. Every year, Equity Council presents Life Membership, Honorary Membership and the Larry McCance Award to candidates proposed by you, the members. It is our opportunity to recognize excellence within, and outside, the membership. The last honours presentation was held at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto and it was a fantastic evening. This year the presentation will be held in Calgary in late October, and it promises to be just as good. (Hint to Calgary…) Somewhere, among the membership and the greater live performance community, are this year’s honourees, but we don’t know who they are yet. You may. Take five minutes, consider who among your colleagues deserve special recognition and let us know. There are many mini-communities in this business, and we will never know of some of the most deserving candidates unless you tell us. Application details are on the home page of EQUITYONLINE (www.caea.com) or available by calling either of Equity’s offices. Here’s hoping spring has sprung wherever you are. Allan Teichman President 2 EQUITY QUARTERLY SPRING 2010 Notes from Arden Ryshpan It is astonishing the things that some people find objectionable. I remember many years ago when the police attempted to close down an exhibition by an extraordinary Canadian sculptor named Mark Prent on the grounds of obscenity. No, his work was not about sex, but did contain human body parts displayed in an admittedly disturbing way. They weren’t real body parts, just for the record, only exceptionally life-like ones. Twenty odd years later, someone paid British artist Damien Hirst $12 million for real animal parts displayed in much the same way as Prent’s not real human parts. My, how our perception of what is appropriate (and what has value) has changed. Theatre, partially because of its immediacy, has always been a platform for the exploration of difficult subjects and therefore (also because of its immediacy), has been subject to its fair share of controversy and censorship. However, given what is now available over the Internet (porn to propaganda) one has to wonder if there are still new boundaries to challenge, at least in the Western world. Are there actually any taboos anymore; could there be anything so far out on the edge that it would bring down the wrath of Big Brother, or big government? Well, apparently, there is. We were all surprised to read about the clause in the contract that VANOC insisted that artists par- ticipating in the recent Cultural Olympiad sign. The clause basically said that the participants couldn’t say anything bad about either the Olympics or any of the many corporate sponsors. While many (most? all?) of the works didn’t even contemplate taking on that subject matter (as most of the work wasn’t even about the darned things in the first place), a number of people refused to sign. They stated that it had an inappropriately chilling effect on free expression and therefore declined the opportunity to participate. Furthermore, it was quickly revealed that no such statement was required for the partici- pants of at least the previous two Winter Games’ Cultural Olympiads. (I should add a note here – the copyright restrictions on the use of a long list of words during the Olympics were so specific that I am not entirely sure as I write this that I am not in violation by stringing that particular sequence of words together. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the powers that be bother to come after me.) We had talked about doing an issue of EQ on censorship and this controversy during the Olympics was all the encouragement we needed. We waited until the games were over as we would not have wanted to deliberately or inadvertently put any of our members or their work at risk as a result of anything published in this magazine. But what happened in Vancouver is ample proof, if any was needed, that the right to free artistic expression is never guaranteed. Artists choose their subjects for all sorts of reasons, including the desire to see issues and concerns that normally reside in the dimly lit recesses of our minds or of our society get dragged into the light and thrashed out. Theatre, with its visceral power, its in-your-face presentation, its “you can’t turn me off and leave the room” urgency, is the ideal place for this stuff – this dark stuff – to find its voice and speak to whoever will listen. We must all be vigilant in order to ensure that those voices don’t get silenced. Arden R. Ryshpan Executive Director SPRING 2010 EQUITY QUARTERLY 3 Letters to the editor To Douglas Campbell’s friends it comes to funding. We have seen sporting LEttERS on subjects of concern to Equity members will be considered for publication.