Arts Curators Reaching Back, Carrying Forward

Dear colleagues, dear friends:

My grandfather was a historian. He was born in 1923, when the internet was not yet a thing and knowledge lived in books, newspapers, libraries, and inside people’s heads. For him, being a historian meant, to some degree, being a living archive: knowing not only the facts but what connects them, how they can be explained to make sense.

It is no surprise then, perhaps, that as a programmer, as a festival maker, I am drawn to artists who examine this sense-making, who reach back in time to retrieve an idea (a story, a song, a reality) that has not made it into our conscious, rational, productive, modern present. An idea that was left behind, or suppressed, or eradicated with purpose. These artists reach back—Sankofa—and what they bring is a challenge to us here and now, in particular to us white people, to us Europeans and people of European descent.

nora chipaumire, well-known to many of you, reaches back to the nineteenth century spiritual and political leader Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana of the Shona people in her native Zimbabwe; myth, history, and resistance come alive through her dancers-singers-musicians. Émilie Monnet and Waira Nina weave Anishinaabe and Inga stories handed down through generations into a call for the protection of our forests, bringing Turtle Island and Abya Yala, Amazonia, and the Canadian boreal forest into resonance. Lukas Avendaño mourns the loss of his Zapotec language, the traditions his grandmother was not able to pass on. Amrita Hepi rewrites the history of dance from a Bundjalung/Ngāpuhi perspective, revealing the political nature of where we choose to place the beginning of a story, a people, a nation.

If we think of ourselves as teammates in the relay race of arts programming—one generation of curators handing the stick to the next, sweaty, panting, exhausted—what is it we want to have carried forward?

We all know the story of this continent does not start with three greedy ships on the horizon (Niña, Pinta, and Santa María) or a covenant with a god from faraway lands—although much could be said about how that moment catalysed a specific kind of violence, and so was a beginning of sorts. Speaking of which, a land acknowledgement is not the worst way to start: we have gathered on Lenape homeland today; I live in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal/Montreal, where the Kanien’kehá꞉ka are recognised as stewards of the lands and waters. That much we know—but what does this mean for us, caretakers of arts spaces, amplifiers of stories, custodians of cultural and symbolic power? If we think of ourselves as teammates in the relay race of arts programming—one generation of curators handing the stick to the next, sweaty, panting, exhausted—what is it we want to have carried forward? Three thoughts:

One: Exactly a year ago on this stage, Dorcy Rugamba talked about the absent presence of his parents and siblings, who were murdered in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1984. He spoke to us in English then, but his show Hewa Rwanda is written and performed in French. Now I have been raised in Luxembourg on a diet of, among other languages, so-called standard French. But when I saw Hewa Rwanda I had been living among Montrealers and their Quebecois French for three years, and suddenly Dorcy’s Rwandan French made sense to me as a non-metropolitan, de-centered, reappropriated colonial language. This use of language has always existed; I had just not been paying attention to the non-standardized, the non-dominant—or the mestizaje, if we want to bring this idea closer to the Americas. Language as a place of resistance and a call to listen closely: how can we carry this forward?

Two: When I arrived in Montreal in the summer of 2021, the festival I work for, Festival TransAmériques (FTA), tested an immersion project for Indigenous youth keen on a career in the performing arts. It was developed by Charles Bender, a Wendat actor and translator who also runs an Indigenous theatre company, and Jeanne-Renée D. Lorrain, our education officer at the time. Knowing very little about my new home, I tagged along with these six youngsters from far-flung Innu communities who would, by the end of their stay, give the project its lasting title: Eka shakuelem, which is Innu-aimun for “don’t be shy.” And so now every year a new cohort spends a week at the Festival, exploring how not to be shy in a colonial society that even today does so much to make them fail. For all the beauty and joy that the world’s most renowned artists bring to the Festival, Eka shakuelem is perhaps the most valuable of our activities. Serving the artists and arts workers who need our support most urgently: How can we carry this forward?

While providing access and support is great, sharing power is better.

Three: This year at FTA, Jeannette Kotowich, a Nêhiyaw-Métis choreographer based in Vancouver will present a new dance piece called BOLT—“bolt” like a sprint, like lightning, like a horse on the run. She is developing not only a show, but an Indigenous-led process of working with a cast and crew of diverse origins: different First Nations, white settlers, recent immigrants—although this means she cannot apply for the federal funding earmarked for Indigenous artists. She insists that we need to learn how to do things together. This reminds me that while providing access and support is great, sharing power is better. For the past four years, FTA has operated under a shared leadership model where my colleague Jessie Mill and I are co-artistic directors. What other models can we, the arts community, explore or invent? What will they enable inside our organizations and around them? Reinventing structures in order to share power: How can we carry this forward? And of course, stubbornly doing things together: Maybe this is a good place to stop and to start.