I certainly think commissioning is a very key way to do this. The Banff Centre has actually run something called the Banff playwrights colony for 38 years. We've had Canadian playwrights coming here and creating work for the past 38 years. In many ways, those plays already tell the story of Canada.
I'm going back to Anita's notion of the archives of Stratford. There's been a lot of work created over time. Every single piece is very much a creature of its own time. When commissioning, which we would be doing in 2017, we're looking to invite artists to interpret what Canada means to them now. In some cases, you're going to have people who, because of the ways they think and express their own artistry, are going to be doing that in a way that may not be a traditional history tale but will in fact incorporate the history of their particular area or the way they relate to things.
For instance, Tono, which I referenced earlier, was a co-commission between Luminato and the Banff Centre. It was a co-commission of a company called Red Sky. It was actually a collaboration of Cree and Mongolian artists, who come from very much a horse background. They were nomads. That very much informed the piece. The piece is about living off the land, as people who lived on horses. In a way, those artists were already expressing their own history.
The commissioning process is merely a way of opening the doors to artists' own interpretations of what they feel they want to express about Canada. I go back to what Fatima has said, which is that most commissioning should always be done in partnership, because when you're partnering you're giving other opportunities and other platforms for the work to be seen. They're automatically built in when you have a co-commissioning process, whether you're commissioning plays, dance, or opera. We've co-commissioned three operas, and all of them told Canadian stories.
Artists are terrific storytellers. Given the opportunity, we'd get some fantastic work.