Dugg Simpson:
It’s interesting to see how many resonances there are between the different kinds of work that are going on and the ways in which we each talk about it. It’s quite fascinating to me and I’d like to thank Joanna and the people working with her at contact for creating this opportunity for us all to talk about this, cause I think that—well, as I get into this, you’ll get my feelings on it.

At the risk of perpetuating a certain kind of West Coast stereotype or coming of like Chauncy from Being There, my starting point for thinking about a lot of things, including diversity, comes out of nature. It’s one of the fundamentals of nature that the more diversity there is in a given eco-system the healthier that eco-system is. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think about programming and cultural production as an eco-system, which means, in a sort of ipso facto ergo way, that diverse programming is the sign of a healthy cultural organization.

Creating diverse programming is the most important work you can do in culture, and when I say this, I am a serious as a heart attack. I think it’s crucial to the world ever getting any better, I think it’s an expression of everything that is great about being a Canadian and I think that if you’re not doing this work, then you are short changing your audience, the rest of the communities where you live and yourself, ultimately.

The reason that I say that stems from a happy place, which is, while this is very serious work it is also the most fun you will ever have in your entire life, bar none, swear to God, money back guarantee.

Working with people from different communities to create events together is the most fun I get to have as a programmer. I get to spend time with interesting, intelligent, concerned, passionate people, and I get to learn a tonne of stuff about the world I live in that I would never find in books or on the web. So, if you remember one thing from the things I have to say today, remember that. It’s so much fun and you will become addicted to it, the more you do it.

Working with different communities has brought amazing stuff to our stages over the years that otherwise would never have been so widely shared and at the same time I have seen my audience and the volunteer body at the festival evolve before my very eyes. And I don’t think, in cultural work, that it gets better than that. If it does, I haven’t come across it.

I have not, do not now, nor will I ever claim to be an expert about this process, but I’ve been working at it for a few years now and I’ve learned a few things, mostly from my own mistakes and from the patience and good advice of other people, which I’m happy to be able to talk a bit about today.

It’s been my pleasure, passion and privilege over the past 7 years to be the artistic director of what I regard as one of this country’s finest cultural events. And the chance to work with people that I otherwise would never have met is something that I will always carry with me.

In terms of the audience, the stage would be the obvious starting point for a conversation about diversity, I guess. Cause this is where the rubber would seem to hit the road for all this serious fun, so let’s start with the stage and see where it goes.

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘diversity’?

I’d lay better than even money that for many of us, race is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s certainly what came to my mind when I started thinking a lot about it.

I grew up in the 60s in Ontario in a little town outside Toronto. It was little at that time, anyway. Our idea of racially different people was Italians. It wasn’t until my last year of high school that there was even one African-Canadian in a student body of 1600 people. And to this day, I thank God for Multiculturalism. That particular government initiative and the activities that came out of it, changed my life and continue to reverberate.

And now, interestingly enough, 40 years later, this concept is suddenly very hot in Europe. I have been in meetings with journalists from France and British government people and they are all just so keen to talk to us about ‘Multicultural France’ and ‘Multicultural England’. In all honesty, I find it really cool that they finally got the idea. I also find it really cool to be working in a zone where for more than 20 years, Canadian Folk Festivals have been programming all kinds of artists from all kinds of traditions and backgrounds and countries and provinces and territories.

Before there was World Music, before the Gypsy Kings, before Ry Cooder called his travel agent to book a ticket for Havana Canadian Folk Festivals were already there. If I sound like a proud Canadian, it’s because I am.

I think that what began 40 years ago as Multiculturalism, and the way we talk about this work, became then, community I think was the next evolutionary phase, and now we’re here in the room today talking about diversity. I think this is much more than a change of labels. Because Multiculturalism was very concerned with ethnicity when it talked about diversity. But I think now, 40 years down the line, we can see that diversity includes ethnicity, but it is not only ethnicity. To jump to the immediate obvious point I guess is, there are diverse genders. Women, as is said in Africa, hold up half the sky. Why don’t they hold up half the stage across this country. I’ve done some statistics on some of my peers in Ontario and so on, doing festivals with 70% male programme, 30% women. Then they invite me in to do workshops with them on how to create better workshops at your festival I say, ‘Book More Women! They play better with others.’ Literally and figuratively.

People have diverse ages, which means as a programmer thinking about how it is that we ask and invite our elders onto the stage and into the audience. At the same time it means, thinking about programming for children, single moms and dads. How, as a programmer, can you do some things that will interest these diverse peoples. Go for the Golden Circle. Try and think of something that you could programme that would interest all of them, from young children to our elders.
It’s also about the rest of Canada, for me. Big Time. This is a really big country and we don’t get to see each other live very much, which I think, is really too bad. There are so many terrific artists and ancient traditions alive in this country today and I thinks it’s really important that more stages feature more artists from different parts of Canada.

A couple of little examples have come through my life:

When I first started some years ago to try and bring young artists form Quebec to Vancouver some of them asked me if they would be safe because their English wasn’t very good. If they would be physically safe coming here and performing on the stage. Most of the others were just entirely sceptical that anybody in BC, i.e. anybody outside Quebec, would want to hear Musique Traditionale de Quebec. I have to reassure and reassure. And when they get here, of course, people love it. They adore it. It explodes.

It’s just not known and I think that that’s just one of a whole series of cultural tragedies across this country—you know, we won’t even go to Nunavut yet, or Newfoundland or on and on.

Other sides to diversity: people have diverse personal incomes, mother tongues, sexual preferences and even names for God. How can we even begin to address all the diversity that there is once you start rolling it around.

This brings us to, for me, the next stop on the road, which is, diversity is bigger than the stage. Diversity is bigger than the stage. I think, as my colleagues have brought out really clearly with their examples, it’s who you work with and it’s how you work with them to bring the show to the stage.

I’ve got a tonne of examples, but I’m going to try to do one sort of well rather then just touch on fifty of them. Which I’m dying to talk about, because, as I say, I’ve just had the most fun and learned so much.

A few years ago, some of the Canadian Folk Festivals were working to bring two great bands across the country from the Roma tradition: Taraffta Hyduque from Romania and a group from Turkey called Carshalama.

Most people know the Roma as Gypsies, I certainly did before starting on this project.

The music was stunning and it was a great opportunity for everyone involved. But how to make some kind of sense of this so that the audience would be there for them and have some idea just how special an opportunity there was.

I knew of one Roma group in town, they’re called Los Canosteros. They play flamenco every Thursday night in a small café on Cambie St. here, a guitarist, dancers and Lolo, the singer. Lolo, as it turns out, grew up in Spain but he left there after he was imprisoned and tortured for several weeks by the Franco regime for basically being an uppity Roma. He came to Canada. He’s a member of the World Roma Congress, an organisation that is pushing the UN to recognise the existence of the Roma, period and to try and draw attention to their situation in the new Europe, which is actually worse than it was in the old Europe. Villages continue to be burned, women continue to be raped, there are murders and little chance of escape because borders continue to be closed to ‘the Gypsies.’ He introduced my to Julia, who had recently moved to Vancouver and was one of these ‘fireballs’ that you will find in virtually every community you go to, who was active with immigration rights and helping people to find houses and on and on; a phenomenal woman. We began to talk about Los Canesteros as part of a programme with the Terraff and Carshelama, which, to my joy, was incredibly exciting for them, as the Roma live in a world wide Diaspora and they don’t get to run into each other very often. Lolo and Julia and her father started to teach me bout their history, some of which I’ve shared with you now, and their language. And I started learning things about my place, where I live that I didn’t know anything about. I learned that the Roma in Vancouver were still being targeted by Nazi youth and members from other communities from the ‘old countries’ where certain attitudes about the Roma, Gypsies, are widely held. That here in Vancouver, beautiful, peaceful Vancouver, their homes would be graffitied, their tires slashed, death threats left on their voice mail. This kinda knocked me for a loop, I had no idea whatsoever. Within six moths we sort of worked out a thing where Los Canesteros would be the local hosts for the other groups while they were in town and that we would also work with Los Canesteros and people in the community to create a singing, dancing, storytelling history lesson for our audiences on one of our day stages.

This ultimately came to involve lessons in la palmas, the way people clap during flamenco, which I’m hopeless at, the breaking of bread and the sharing of songs and stories and customs that they had never shared outside of the Roma community. We were going to work together to bring members of the Vancouver Roma community, which ultimately included people who had only been living in Canada for a couple of weeks at that point to where we were going out and borrowing guitars for these people to be able to participate. We contacted a professor that they recommended to us to write an article for our programme book about the history of the Roma and their music, Julia wrote a piece explaining why they didn’t like to be called Gypsies. A local writer here in town, Tony Montague, developed what would become a cover story in the Georgia Straight, about the Roma community in Vancouver, i9nterwoven with profiles of the artists that were coming to the festival. We started working with a film crew that was making a documentary, working with Lolo and Julia that was being prepared for international broadcast. When Julia and Los Canesteros met the members of the other groups they became inseparable, both at the festival and at gatherings they had organized for them here in town. There were tears and laughter and meals backstage where they would fill in the gaps in each other’s vocabulary. And onstage, each of those groups just inspired the next one to go to places—I’ve seen Los Canesteros many times and I’d never seen the women in the group dance the way they danced that day. And when she came off she just about collapsed. She didn’t even know where she’d been, she’d just gone to another place. It was stunning.

During the weekend Julia and Lolo helped us deal with some of the members of the other groups when they became somewhat aggressive in their busking around the park. What began as very cute stuff, later—let’s just say the Roma have another attitude towards busking which comes as a survival skill of 800 odd years. But Lola a Julia stepped in and began to explain things, translate basically our customs to them, everything was jake. I will say they’re the only artists we ever had who sold their own bootlegs of their own recordings which were on sale, in the tent. Including cassettes, some of which had their music on, some of which were blank and some of which had music which remains unidentified to this day. But, when people complained about it after the festival we just said, ‘Well, you’ve just had a very complete cultural experience, haven’t you?’ The workshop that they did with the Vancouver Roma community was two hours of the most amazing exchanges I’ve ever seen between the audience and artists at the festival. The final evening at the festival, Los Canesteros performed on our big stage in front of 8000 people. You could look out and see people in the audience trying to do la palmas while they were performing that they’d been taught that afternoon. When Julia dropped off a copy of the completed documentary at our office many month later she included a little note saying, ‘thanks for some of the best days of my life.’

That’s one of dozens and dozens of stories over the years, thank God.

In the end, what could have been just a presentation of some exotic musical groups—and I like that phrase ‘plop art’—I’m trying to get my colleagues to get beyond, ‘book the band, put it on the stage, say good-bye when they’re done.’—been there, done that. It became an experience that brought a lot of different people together. Everyone learned things, and even people who didn’t come to the festival learned more about the city that they lived in and the culture of the Roma. There was a level of passion that came out of everyone’s commitment and the generosity of spirit that everyone involved in the process brought to it.

So it’s very clear to me that diversity is not just about ethnicity and that it is bigger than the stage so, key point number three—which follows on what my colleagues again have said—diversity is about collaboration: it’s how you work with other people and get the idea there. I will put in a caveat here: this is not work well suited to control freaks or those who aspire to what I call now, the ‘illusion’ of control. Many of you have worked in the arts for any time at all, you know what I’m talking about.

When you’re working with people form different communities, you have to let go of that illusion form the get-go. It’s only going to get in your way and impede the whole process.

You ca go into a project with your idea of what you think might work, what might be possible, but that idea has to change and grow and otherwise evolve over the process. And it can be time intensive. It’s not a ‘phone the agent, book the band, we’re done, click, get the posters printed.’ It’s not that kind of a process, which is better. It’s a good thing.

Why does it have to change and evolve and grow? For starters, because you don’t know everything, nobody does, and because there are very real differences between people that you will not know about until you start this work.

Howe real? How profound?

Start with something like your understanding of time—the existence of time—go from there.

Think about what it means to you if you’re having meeting with someone and a certain kind of bird goes by, or lands in a tree beside you. It may well not mean the same thing to the people that you’re meeting with.

That said, this is not something to be frightened of. Understandably, one’s a little nervous. I still get nervous meeting new people. But this is people talking to people stuff.

I feel a bit like paraphrasing Charlton Heston at the end of Soilent Green, you know, ‘Festivals are made of people!’ It really is that way. If you go into any of these situations with a sincerely open heart and to celebrate a tradition, the rest really will take care of itself.

I come from one of the most PC places on the planet, in fact, we’re probably implicated in the creation of PC in this period, and I had to do a lot of unlearning along the way before I realized that it was okay. Nobody in any of the communities I’ve gone to expected me to know everything, and everywhere that I went I was met with an enthusiasm and patience that astounded me.

There are some things you can do before the meeting, like we talked about: go to the library, surf the web, buy some CDs, learn a little about the tradition and community you want to work with before you set out. You’ll feel more comfortable when you go into the process, you’ll enjoy the conversations more and you’ll have some context for the immense amount of information that will be given to you so freely. It will also help you, on occasion, from putting your foot in your mouth every time you open it. I say that as someone with a great deal of experience with that particular aspect of cultural production.

But it is not your job to know all about the culture, the tradition, the community, what have you. It is you job to know about your event and to be able explain it clearly to people who have probably never been. They may have heard of you, but the odds are probably against the fact that they’ve ever been there. You need to be able to describe your event or the work you want to try and do and you need to be clear in your own mind about the limits of what you can bring to bear to the project. Starting with the obvious like the budget that you have in mind, the number of hours on stage, those kinds of things. You do need to have that kind of framework before you start out and then you can begin to evolve things together.

Another important thing to remember is it’s probably safe to assume that your audience will know even less than you did starting on the project ‘cause something twigged you into wanting to learn more about this.

So look for ways throughout the process to bring a deeper context to the proceedings, in your brochures, your programme book, websites, media. They can all stimulate people’s curiosity and help them to better appreciate what is being presented.

Did you ever do that thing when you were a kid of writing your address where you start with your house number, your street and you end up going all the way up to ‘the Earth, comma, the Universe?’

Like a lot of things that seven year olds do, that one is really important to me, because I think a discussion about diversity is really a discussion of representing where you live. And that starts with the number of your house and your street and then it goes as big as you can imagine. And that to me is the test for a presenter, is, what are you capable of imagining in this kind of work? Who do you include in your notion of community and diversity?

If the only thing that is happening on one stage is that it begins to take on the complexion of what I call in my circles, a Unicef greeting card, I don’t think that your work is done, or that you have achieved a state of diversity. I think it’s what you could call, ‘a good start.’ But, if that’s where it stops, then your organization doing the work, will not have evolved, no new, lasting bridges will have been built and the audiences, finally, firstly and always, the audiences will not be as large or as enthusiastic as they could be. You’ll also have missed out on an awful lot of fun.

The urge to diverge, I think, comes from passion. One of the reasons that we work the proverbial long, thankless and chronically underpaid hours that we do on bringing artists and audiences together, I think, is because our lives have been changed and charged and illuminated by our experiences of live music and dance and theatre. And we then have this thing—we have to see this shared, we have to see this happen more often because we know, it’s changed our lives, it can change others.

Opening our stages, our organizations and our own lives to diversity enhances our own understanding and appreciation of just how much, ironically enough, we all have in common and how wide and how deep our community can be.

In those moments we all, audiences, artists and presenters, experience, in a very real way what Bernice Reagan of Sweet Honey in the Rock has called, ‘the beloved community.’

It’s the best work we can do, and I also think it’s the most fun.

Thanks.

JM:
This is wonderful.

It has taken us to noon, however, and I know that some of you may want to go off and have other thing that you have to do. We could probably entertain a few questions to the panel if Dugg and Lindy and Phyllis are—we did get started a bit late if some of you wanted to stay, if some of you wanted to leave that’s fine too.
I would like to draw your attention, though, that, in the programme, under each of the sections on panels you’ll find email addresses for people on the panels, websites in some cases, and I would venture a guess that Dugg and Lindy and Phyllis would be happy if you wanted to send and email. I think there’s lots of opportunity in the future to talk to people in festivals, these in particular, about how artists travel. I know that, in many cases, that around their festival dates, there may be artists looking to book other days, or if they are presenting artists at other times of year, that there may be a way to look at starting to move artists into the community. Dugg?

DS:

One thing that I was hoping to get a chance to bring out is, you may all have more allies and people to work with on than you know. I’m part of a network with Phyllis of about 25 festivals between here and the Manitoba border—western roots music festivals basically—and there is a growing interest in all of these summer events with working with artists through the year and doing more presentations with artists through the year. And a lot of these people are already well down the road. They have connections to artists, to agents and that sort of thing. They’re very keenly interested in seeing those relationships last and doing work that they can’t do at their festivals. The odds are, if you live in the west, there’s a roots music festival near you. Feel free to give them a call and say, Hi, I got a theatre. Hey I got somebody that I really want to present.’ We each have our mailing lists and so on and so on. So I would encourage you to get in touch with your local folk music festival and see what the possibilities might be there.

JM:
I would like to thank Dugg and Lindy and Phyllis for the session today. Feel free to coral them if you want. Again, thank you so much for this.

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