Belonging to a (Professional) Community
There is nothing like belonging to a community. Especially when times are tough, nothing feels better than the support that comes from one's peers. We all know this. There comes a tremendous sense of satisfaction when talking something out with the right someone — nothing beats the concurrence of someone who truly understands what you need to talk about. Often the desire to connect to one's community is driven by adversity; another great benefit of peer assembly is to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and the sourcing of materials or services.
Personally, I was driven to find a community because, due to a family catastrophe, I was left to raise myself from the age of twelve. Professionally, my forum of peers provided the education I needed to make my living—I did no artistic training in my university years. Personally, my choice of a life in the arts had a lot to do with the empathetic, warm character of artists. In artists, I found expressive, passionate people like me.
Grade eight was my first academic year after our family catastrophe — my first year alone at home. My homeroom was the art room. Every day, I came into a room that looked different than the day before. There was colour and shape everywhere. Rules were being broken — I remember the marvel of seeing crazy-coloured fish and red clouds. In art, I saw that you could paint the world as you saw it or felt it; art was like photographs taken by my soul and not by my eye. And Miss Cubit, the art teacher, noticed and encouraged my interest. She told me that I was born to be an artist and that as an artist, I would often find myself at odds with my society. Artists, she told me, live by their emotions in a society that believed in "stiff upper lips" and not crying — denying their emotions in other words. Leaving her at the end of grade eight, knowing that she would never be coming back to teach, was heartbreaking.
In the first week of grade nine, I was called to the office where Mr. Berry, the Vice Principal, laid out a new school rule for me — a rule that no one else in the school had to follow. I was not allowed to "talk with my hands." Whenever I spoke in class, my hands would fly as though I was signing in a sign language of my own invention and my school wanted the practice to stop. If my hands came out from behind my back or from under my butt when I talked in class, I was to get a detention. It was difficult to change. I got lots of detentions because my hands moved unconsciously and I developed a mild stutter that year. All I could think about was how much better my life would be if Miss Cubit were there. She had been right. The world of order, sameness and rules was not for me. I belonged in a world of artists; I knew it then and my conviction has never ever wavered.
When I returned for grade ten, my hands came out from behind my back and I resolved to change schools before I would accept another detention for speaking with my hands. I ate lunch in the art room and hung out there after school to expand my circle of artistic friends. We were anarchists expressing ourselves creatively. I felt, as Miss Cubit had said, born to art. And when I asked myself what made me an artist, I decided it was because I was hyper sensitive. My friend Beth later gave me a great gift — words that were a salve to my soul; words written by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck. This is what she wrote: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." She understood me like Miss Cubit did. I finally understood myself.
I am passionate about theatre and the visual arts; I have professional credentials in both fields. As my career developed, I sought community in both the visual and performing arts. As one passion of mine is photography, I founded the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver as a photographic centre. I was also a founding member of a West Coast Advisory Committee for the Actors' Equity Association because we needed a professional association operating in our own time zone (instead of working through an office in Toronto), and the BC Touring Council because the performing arts sponsors of BC needed a community in which to learn and achieve cost efficiencies. I also co-founded the Alliance for Arts and Culture in Vancouver to provide all the arts groups with a powerful single voice. I believe in community.
Throughout my professional life I have been comparing the lifestyle of my visual arts friends with that of my performing arts peers — particularly on the solitary nature of visual art making versus the collective experience of staging plays. Performing artists understand the value of community. There are professional associations for playwrights, directors, actors, designers, stagehands, technicians and producers. Not only that, but there are local, regional and national forums for members of these communities. Visual artists, by comparison, work in relative isolation. Although Canadian Artists Representation/Le front des artists canadiens (CARFAC) is Canada's national professional artists' association, only a small percentage of Canadian artists are members.
The performing arts community has provided me with a family of soul brothers and sisters. This family helped me learn and ease pain like a family member. Nothing has taught me the value of my performing arts community, as has the death of some of our members. We have wakes at the Arts Club when someone passes, and we have built a 99-suite home for family members needing subsidized housing. And whereas I have dear friends in the visual arts, visual artists lack, by comparison, a strong community — at least for a great percentage of us.
There's no question that commerce has fueled the creation of the performing arts communities. Unions exist in the performing arts out of necessity, and earnings are higher on average. Still, the non-material rewards of association are at the base of my enthusiasm for artists belonging to a community. In next month's editorial, I will look at some effective forums that provide a strong sense of community to member visual artists.
ctyrell@shaw.ca
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