Lindy Sisson:
I guess it’s my turn.
I’ve only been with the Vancouver International Children’s Festival for a year and a half, but I have been in Vancouver Since ’91 and before that I produced the Edmonton International Children’s Festival in Alberta.

I’ve worked in all different fields and I think that that experience has been the best in regards to producing festivals because, our festival is a multidisciplinary festival, obviously for children and young audiences. Next year I think I’m going to brand it E for Everyone because the companies that have performed at this festival over its 25 year history have been appreciated by all ages, all cultures, anyone who’s interested in the arts or just learning about the arts.

It has a phenomenal legacy and I don’t have a lot of stories of its history and don’t have a huge list of all the companies that were featured at the festival.

I think what I’ll speak to is the larger topic.

I was very inspired by this morning’s session and speakers, especially Margo’s comments about inspiring the importance of building the support in your community and the interpersonal relationships that make you go beyond yourself and the value that that has in educating our children or broadening their experience.

The Festival’s history is so interesting because 25 years ago the climate in Vancouver and in Canada was so very different than today.

Once there was money.

Once upon a time, Ernie Fladell and Franny Fitzgibbon and Marjorie MacLean and Norma Graham all travelled the world and found amazing talent to bring to Vancouver and then spawned other Festivals.

Now there is a whole network of Childrens Festivals, not only through Canada and the United States but around the world in Scotland and hopefully, in 2004 we’ll be helping to develop one in Japan as well.

Today, the festival is still very respected and almost taken for granted.

What if something happened to the Vancouver Childrens Festival? Well, that could never happen, it’s an institution. Actually, our name is the Canadian Institute of the Arts for Young Audiences. Very solid.

Well, the festival has a substantial deficit as a lot of arts organizations do, but it doesn’t have the benefit of being one of the institutions like ballet, theatre, symphony where you can go to VAST and get help with your deficit reduction and things like this.

But I do have a $7000 POD grant and I’m going to do a strategic plan.
We’re going to have deficit reduction and we’re going to over come like Dugg and the Folk Festival have.

But I find it all very interesting, because when Spirit of Vancouver happened and Vancouver decided that we were a ‘Fun City’, well, a lot of the fun has come from Festivals.

The fun comes from festivals, fun comes from all over the place, but what is the support for festivals and how has that changed? Well, one of the first things I had to cut was my travel budget. Right now if I get to go anywhere it’s because I’m invited and someone else is paying.

But I hope that will change because I have to continue the tradition of bringing new groups in.

Now I’m going to tell you my one story.

Once upon a time there was a group called the Secret Dance of Brazil, Capoeira de Santana. If some of you were at the showcase last night you might have read your programmes so I can’t ask the question, ‘Who knows who is still in Vancouver today from this group that was brought in in 1990. This was all the art work they had. This is the Edmonton brochure and this is the Vancouver brochure.
This was a group of street kids in Brazil that were brought together in a community centre and a Nun -- oh, I wish I could remember her name because she was so amazing -- put together this show. Sal Ferras from Vancouver worked with them on their stage presentation and making it an accessible show for North American audiences. They toured to Canada thanks to the Vancouver International Childrens Festival and they also came to the Edmonton one and a number of others.

The Edmonton one was their last stop. I took them to the airport myself because I just had so much fun dancing with Marco the night before at our closing party I just didn’t want to say goodbye to them. Well, they didn’t want to say goodbye to us either. Well, Echosan and Marcos did not get on that plane. The group was -- I don’t know if we put the ages in here -- but they were like eight years old to 18 and Marco’s wife was actually in the group, too and they had children back at home. So the wife went home and he stayed here.

And I said, ‘But the festival is over. There’s no more hospitality room, there’s no more hotel. I can help you, but only personally. Do you have a plan?’

Well there was someone in Vancouver who said, ‘Come back here and I’ll help you start a school. Because what you do, Capoerra, is so amazing.’ We hadn’t really been exposed to that particular art form before.

They stayed with us for a couple of days -- actually, one of them stayed because he was in love with our janitor’s daughter. That one didn’t work and he did go back. But the other two got on the bus and came to Vancouver. Now we have Ashe Brazil and Axe Capoeira and both companies are doing very well. Every time I see them -- I wasn’t a mother at the time, but I have this great feeling that it was wonderful how we could help this group.

Of course not all groups want to stay.

Another group that came through that year was Music of the Andes. It was before Pan flutes were really popular as well.

So they did a lot of touring, there was a lot of demand for this group.
But in the end they decided it wasn’t really their artistic vision anymore. They actually wanted to go home and work with their own culture and help support young artists in their own country.

There’s a million stories like that with all of these companies.

What has changed so dramatically from the first 10-15 years to the last of the festival is the cultural presentation and integration in North America.

Sal Ferreras said it very well when he talked about mixing different kinds of music and now it’s becoming Canadian music or it’s World Music and that is everywhere.

That’s very exciting to me -- the effect that these festivals have had on local artists and the growth of artistic forms because of their legacy.

The next thing that stuck in my mind from this morning was the idea of paying lip service to different cultures. Then I wrote -- versus development of real relationships.

So, how do you, as an individual -- because that is where they begin -- do that?

I’ve started doing that with the Native community here by being invited to a sweat lodge and other ceremonies like this. For me it’s been very spiritual and a wonderful experience.

Now, how do we then translate that beyond ourselves? And not everyone is going to be lucky enough to have the experiences of festival directors and be really welcomed into communities in this way. Phyllis said it really well in her closing remarks about being respectful and inclusive.

I’m just going to talk about what we’re doing this year with our festival.

It’s a different way of programming. A lot of you, I think are from different communities where you might be involved in broader aspects of cultural development in your cities and communities and so a lot of people have been involved in public art development. And there’s all this talk about ‘plop art’ versus art that is integrated into infrastructure. So, I’ve come to think of it as ‘plop programming’ versus ‘inclusive programming.’

My goal is to build a new way of working with the programmers in the community so that it is not just me making the decision.

This morning -- was it Phyllis or Bronwen? -- one f the ladies at the end of the table was talking about not actually appreciating certain kinds of art or knowing if it’s good or bad. I think some of us have affinity to different types of music or art but have lack of interest or ear. I don’t know a lot about Chinese music but I know we have a large Chinese population so how do I work with that community?

A great example is that we’ve started a theme programming initiative, not knowing where this would lead us, not having a lot of time or money to put into it.

What it’s brought us is so gratifying because it’s been really welcomed and every dream I had of how this would work is coming true.

So Asian Cultural Month, Heritage Month, is now helping us with our Asian Cultures Day and we’re meeting with all kinds of different cultural groups in Vancouver. What my hope for the growth of the festival is that it will once again, or just renew its roots in the community and invite them to help us with the programming where they decide what groups they’d like to see on our band shell, doing storytelling in the storytelling dance workshops so that we’re not dictating to them or our audience what we think is good but we’re doing it in a respectful and collaborative manner.

One of the disappointments I did have in that process though was, I applied to the City of Vancouver for Cultural Diversity Funding but I learned a lot through that process. This funding is, I believe, more meant to bring artists together for collaborations and festivals are excellent a doing that as well. But what I had wanted was try to support the aboriginal group that was going to programme with so that I could pay them for their work. I’m not able to do that so we‘re doing it in other ways. I’m hoping as I solve my deficit problems I can move money around in the budget to spend it in different ways so that the people that are helping to programme the festival are respected for their work.

The other way of doing this is through, what was talked about as well, was mentorship.

Mentorship programmes are very interesting. We just had a phone call about someone ‘shadowing’ one of us and we’re thinking, ‘Well…’ Working with volunteers is a whole other aspect of festivals and including different cultures in your volunteer effort is another way of making the festival the community’s, but it’s also a lot of work.

These methods are done because of philosophy or artistic vision or wanting to be your community’s festival. They’re not done because you have the money or the energy or the time because they’re all very labour intensive, so many meetings and so many different ways of working. But it’s very rewarding.

Now I’m going to talk a little bit about the youth aspect of the festival.

I believe that the Childrens Festival teaches the joy of participation and experience in the arts. It does have a beginning educational value for teaching etiquette in theatre except for, of course, we’re in tents so we -- and it is intense as well but -- it’s a little less intimidating than going to the Chan Centre say, or that kind of experience. Often, our festival has the ability, and most outdoor festivals do, to take away that wall and it does depend on the performers ability to reach the audience, so that’s always key in choosing who you present.

Also, I believe it teaches respect for the artist and the various art forms and cultural traditions. Luckily children are a renewable resource. I’m not programming for the same crowd year after year where I’m challenged to do something different, though we do something different every year. You always have the new five-year-old coming who has perhaps never had any theatre experience in his life.

So that is wonderful.

We always have to keep putting that in our grant applications because, you know, sometimes programming gets stale. Well, but that’s what they want.

So what do teachers want, what do parents want? Then you come up with the censorship issue. We have different censorship problems. There are cultural traditions that aren’t acceptable to the -- what? -- the mushy pea crowd. But I have a six-year-old son who is in love with Captain Underpants right now, and I want my children to embrace different cultures and not be fearful of them. So I believe that it’s really important to have different cultural programming just as it’s important to have different genres of dance theatre music storytelling puppetry circus what-have-you.

The other issue that we face is commercialization of our festival and sponsorship issues, but that’s a different panel discussion, I believe.

So we’ve committed to interactive programming with children so that they have that hands on experience that Wendy Newman was talking about is so important this morning and so many people this morning.

The workshop aspect is difficult in a festival that runs over a week, that attracts 50,000 or more children and their families, so we have more than 22 different activity tents and different cultural expressions or artistic expressions for them to experience. And we’ve added workshops this year.

But this year is a very difficult year for me to evaluate how successful our programming is. We’ve added workshops but teachers aren’t buying tickets right now. Our ticket sales are down about 40% over last year because of continuing job action from the teacher’s strike. So what that requires us to do is more target marketing, more individual contact with teachers. We’re getting the sanction of the BC Teachers Federation who does say it okay to come to the Children’s Festival still and is encouraging teachers not to hurt their community partners in this effort.

If any of you are having troubles like that in your community, I don’t know if working with your school board or principals might help you but partnership between school and the community are essential to both the school climate and the community climate. Non-profits and cultural groups are unfortunately already under funded and in often difficult situations.

So, hopefully this won’t cause too much of a difficulty. Last we had a transit strike so public tickets were down and the school tickets were up and this year it’ll be like this and who knows what it’ll be next year.

I want to move out of the box and take all of this experience of cultural programming and continue to let it enrich the lives of children and youth in our community.

I just talked to Val Dare after the last session, who’s with the Britannia School, about a new programme we want to introduce next year for youth at risk in downtown Vancouver by developing a circus camp and teaching circus skills to youth at risk. Also, we’re working with Mortal Coil to develop the next stage of their ‘Ultimate High’ project which is all about stilt walking with a particular smaller group of youth that would then work towards performance at the festival.

Nest year’s festival, the 2003 festival, will focus more on getting youth groups from around the world with youth groups from Vancouver. This collaboration that I’ve witnessed between professional international performing groups and professional artists in Vancouver I think could be extremely exciting to put the youth performing groups together. There are often in circus, music and dance especially, youth groups that are phenomenal and I’m hoping that we can create a more meaningful experience.

In the days of CIDA funding there was an opportunity to more of that kind of work. That funding is really hard to get anymore. The Festival used to do a lot of symposia and so I’m hoping we’ll create a programme that will be really meaningful for youth.

We’ve also started Excite Night which is a night on Saturday night for 12 and up. It speaks to what I call bridging -- creating bridges, bridging the gap between mainstream culture, that is global as well, and traditional cultures.
We have a group called Ish this year, which is all about mainstream stuff. It’s inline skate, dance extravaganza from the Netherlands.

So if I can get these kids in the door at the festival to have their own festival and also we’re working with them on it being their festival, not us telling them what they’re going to do with it, so we have a youth committee working on the programming. So this year we can have Ish and it’ll be very exciting -- it’s like Stomp for youth, kind of thing, on skates with tap dancing and whatever else -- and then take them down the path, just as when you present dance -- and I was lucky enough to work with Peter Feldman on presenting dance at U of A in a really great time in Alberta when there was money and enthusiasm and we presented a lot of dance companies, but you have to be careful where they are. You’re not going to resent Marie Chuinard right now, you have to start with Judith Marcuse and her educational programmes till you can get to the point where they can sit through a performance and enjoy it for themselves and not have to have it explained, but you have to go through the alphabet from A to Z to get there.

This is what my hope is with the teen community as well. That ones that aren’t participating in your cultural venues, that maybe with this festival for themselves that we can also take them on a journey to more risky presentations.

The Festival has done a lot of work in the area of ‘issue theatre’ I guess, with different issues of bullying or racism. It’s interesting how that’s accepted. Teachers say they want educational programming, but what do they buy? tickets to Circios. Last year’s Health Class show, which was our sex show, wasn’t very well attended, so we did other things to get that show appreciated. This year we have -- moving into dance -- Mopitan coming back from South Africa. They’re working with Joe Lauchlin. He’s created a piece called Every Body, which is about understanding, appreciation for our own bodies and different cultures and the effects of racism. It’ll be a very powerful piece and I hope you all come and see it, because it’s going to be excellent for children and adults.

I just talked to Sandy Scofield and she wants to do a youth programme for us next year. The ideas of artists are often what inspire us to change our programming and create something new. So dialogue with artists and your community is the core of what will create what we need in the future.

Phyllis Stenson:
And talk about performers not wanting to go home. You should ask me about the 36-piece choir from Uganda a couple of years ago.

Dugg Simpson:
Still got the scars.

Phyllis Stenson:
I do.

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