Canadian Heritage Committee on May 25th, 2015

[Emily Molnar]

We were invited to go to New York City and we didn't actually have the funding, and the National Ballet of Canada tried to go to New York City and they had to do the funding privately through their donors. That just shouldn't happen.

We should be able to do those tours because we have Canadian content that needs to get out there.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Do I have time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Fifteen seconds.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Okay, great. So lots of time.

I want to say thank you.

I've heard recommendations about the inclusion of dance in schools, the inclusion of dance as a sport throughout the community basically, and also the changes to the temporary foreign worker program and movement towards international mobility programs.

Is there anything else that any of you want to quickly add in three seconds?

[Zab Maboungou]

I would like to really insist on the fact that the aspect of cultural diversity is very important.

In French we're calling ourselves des passeurs.

Our companies are cultural messengers, so to speak. I, myself, am from another country but I meet Canadians who identify with me, through the culture I represent. And because of that, my company, meaning the artistic expression and development I offer, acts as a bridge between cultures. As a result, we are able to share local identities and reinterpret them in a contemporary way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Okay.

On that note, that's going to have to be the last word.

Thank you very much to our witnesses.

This is the last day of witnesses for our dance study, so if you have any further contributions to make to our study, we really need them by tomorrow.

Thank you very much. We will briefly suspend.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

We are going to call this meeting number 48 of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage back to order, where we are continuing our study of dance in Canada.

We have a number of witnesses with us, all by video conference. First from West Vancouver, British Columbia, we have from the Dancers of Damelahamid, Margaret Grenier, who is the executive and artistic director. From Toronto we have from Sampradaya Dance Creations, Ms. Lata Pada, the founder and artistic director; and from Calgary, Alberta, we have from Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Kathi Sundstrom, the executive director.

We will start with Margaret Grenier for up to eight minutes. You have the floor.

Margaret.

[Margaret Grenier, Executive and Artistic Director, Dancers of Damelahamid]

Thank you.

[Witness speaks in her native language]

First, I'd like to acknowledge the ancestral land of the Algonquin Nation, and I thank them for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Gitxsan Nation.

Second, I acknowledge this committee and thank them for the opportunity to speak about my dance practice.

Growing up in a small community on the northwest coast of British Columbia, I was immersed from a young age in the practice of song and dance that has been passed down from countless generations. It was through this experience that I entered into a relationship with my ancestral memories.

Today, as a Gitxsan dancer, a practice that interweaves many artistic disciplines, dance has become a place from which the embodied processes of my Gitxsan teachings can form. As I am the executive and artistic director for the Dancers of Damelahamid, the work that I do is to ensure the continuation of what has been of such great importance to my parents and grandparents, and now to me.

My grandmother, matriarch Irene Harris, awakened the songs and dances of her lineage, having lived the majority of her life through the potlatch ban. Therefore, I treasure dance as the most significant inheritance that I have from my ancestors, and it will be a life journey to strive to develop the art to its full potential.

For me, dance, song, and story have provided a protective environment to address the limitations placed on our indigenous peoples. In our performances we are not only turning to our ancestral knowledge for our own reconciliation, but we are also sharing and supporting others through art.

Gitxsan dance is an educational tool. The healing space created by dance is very powerful for indigenous people and all Canadians. The Dancers of Damelahamid share our professional practices with students at elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions. These instructional workshops on first nations dance are central to the company's activities. The benefits of these educational workshops for students include empathy, cultural appreciation, focus, agility, teamwork, and discipline. This vital work supports the company's mandate and ability to influence social change through art.

Gitxsan dance advances the ongoing processes of reconciliation. The Dancers of Damelahamid have a longstanding relationship with Vancouver choreographer Karen Jamieson. Her generosity of spirit has inspired collaborative projects for over 25 years.

As a result of this success, the Dancers of Damelahamid support the Canada Council for the Arts new funding initiative entitled {Re}conciliation. This unique initiative will promote artistic collaborations between aboriginal and non-aboriginal artists, investing in the power of art and imagination to inspire dialogue, understanding, and change. This initiative precedes the release of the report from Canada's truth and reconciliation commission and seeks to help artists and Canadians alike to reflect upon and help repair historic injustices. With this initiative and the new program of aboriginal arts, the Canada Council is working to better recognize and support the work of first nations artists.

Gitxsan dance promotes cross-cultural understanding of first nations heritage.

The Dancers of Damelahamid are set to tour their new dance work through the Made in BC—Dance on Tour in the fall of 2015. The Dancers of Damelahamid's presence in these B.C. communities provides an important opportunity to open cultural dialogue as the majority of these venues have never presented a first nations dance company up until now. It is timely that relationships are developed between presenters and aboriginal dance artists.

The Dancers of Damelahamid produce the annual Coastal First Nations Dance Festival in partnership with the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. The festival is a celebration of the stories, songs, and dances of indigenous peoples of the northwest coast. The festival presents dance artists from British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska, as well as national and international artists, and demonstrates that these traditions are very much alive, vibrant, and relevant today. Guest artists from across Canada, as well as international groups from New Zealand, Australia, Ecuador, and Peru, have been invited to share their traditions, allowing the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival to connect with the global community of indigenous dance.

The Coastal First Nations Dance Festival receives moderate support through the development component of the Department of Canadian Heritage's Canada arts presentation fund.

The impact of this festival nationally and internationally as a platform for serving a diversity of indigenous dance warrants significant funding. The Canada arts presentation fund program should move forward in a way that strengthens and increases its ability to be inclusive and more supportive of these distinct art forms.

Thank you.

[Witness speaks in her native language]

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Toronto to hear from Lata Pada.

You have the floor for up to eight minutes.

[Lata Pada, Founder and Artistic Director, SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations]

Good afternoon and I welcome this opportunity to speak today.

I'm actually based in Mississauga and I'm the artistic director and founder of SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations. This year we celebrate our 21st anniversary as a company. At the same time, in 1990, I also established SAMPRADAYA Dance Academy, which is a professional dance training organization. They're two separate organizations, separately incorporated, and they both are independent not-for-profit charitable organizations governed by separate boards and separate staff.

We are a culturally diverse dance training and dance production and creation organization, and specifically work in a form of South Asian classical dance. I arrived in Canada 50 years ago and I've seen this really incredible arc of dance development for South Asian dance in Canada over the past 50 years. I'm very proud and pleased to say that South Asian dance today is recognized on the national landscape as a Canadian art form, as opposed to the situation when I first arrived, when it was seen as some sort of exotic dance form. They didn't quite know how to describe it; it was seen as a folk form or some kind of ethnic art form. I think, over the years, the efforts of several South Asian dance pioneers have been able to demystify the art form and also to build a better appreciation and understanding of its importance as a Canadian artistic expression.

We are based in Mississauga and have been very active in developing dance in the Peel and Halton regions here in Ontario. Our history with Canadian Heritage is a long one. The company SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations has received support from Canadian Heritage through their Canada cultural spaces fund to enhance and to enlarge and renovate our dance space. Today we're very pleased to say that we have a 7,000 square foot dance facility that also has a 95 seat black box theatre, which is professionally equipped with sound and lighting. This is thanks to the Canada cultural spaces fund in addition to the Ontario Trillium Foundation's community capital fund, which supported this capital program for the company.

Several years ago the academy also received support from the Canada cultural spaces fund to bring in special audiovisual equipment for dance training. We have also been able to access some small amounts of arts presentation support. We are not yet on CanDance, the Canadian Network of Dance Presenters.

So far with what we've been able to accomplish over the past 25 years, the academy is now Canada's leading South Asian classical dance organization. We receive support from the Canada arts training fund from Canadian Heritage.

Our graduates now—34 of them—are dancing in professional dance both in my company and as well as independent dancers. They're sought after dancers working both nationally and internationally. Our academy also holds the only summer intensive for South Asian classical dance professional development and training across Canada annually, which is a very important aspect of what we do.

SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations is a professional dance company. We create and produce work and present it on main stages. That's a very important statement that I need to make because we're no longer performing just for our own cultural community. Indeed, our dance is seen across Canada on national stages, and we are touring internationally as well. We're seen as a Canadian company, not as a South Asian dance company from Canada. That's an important distinction to make.

We are creating, producing, and presenting many artists. Over the last 10 years, SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations has actually expanded its mandate to be a South Asian dance development organization. That means we don't only create and perform dance, but also foster and nurture the development of our community of dance artists and have special presentation theories, such as the horizon series, for emerging new-generation artists. We also have another series for established artists in our theatre.

We collaborate extensively with community groups in the Halton and Peel regions in all disciplines—in theatre, dance, music, literature, and in film—so I think it's vital to state that this opportunity to receive support from cultural spaces has been incredibly important for a small organization such as ours to become a hub for the arts in the Peel region.

I would like to make the following recommendations.

We as a company collaborate with many international artists from across South Asia and the U.S.A. to create work that tours Canada and internationally. Just this past week, we had our 25th anniversary celebration and we had five artists come from India to be part of this production. These artists came under the international mobility program, which is so critical to our ability to bring in foreign artists. We applaud Canadian Heritage for having facilitated this program, instead of going through the very onerous, lengthy, and complex process of having to go through the labour market impact assessment program. I urge Canadian Heritage to continue to allow artists from abroad to come under the international mobility program, which allows us to collaborate with artists from abroad, because it's vital that we do so. I urge Canadian Heritage to remove some of the restrictions.

I will talk about the ripple effect of bringing international artists here. They actually open up direct opportunities for artists from Canada and companies such as ours to go into foreign markets, because these artists are returning to India, talking about the wonderful work that was done in Canada, and are speaking to presenters in India and taking our work back to India and other parts of Southeast Asia. I cannot overstate the importance of disseminating Canadian work across the world. Canadian art, I would emphasize, should not be seen as art that just comes from Eurocentric traditions. I think Canada today is a very pluralistic arts community and we need to be looking at Canadian art as being extremely diverse in both its interdisciplinary work and its artistic voices.

I also would urge Canada—

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Ms. Pada, I'm going to have to—

[Lata Pada]

Am I out of time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

You are quite well past the time, but you will get a chance to expand upon it in the question period.

We will now go to Calgary, Alberta, to hear from Kathi Sundstrom. You have the floor for up to eight minutes.

[Kathi Sundstrom, Executive Director, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks]

Good afternoon. Thank you for providing me this opportunity to talk to you about dance in Calgary, jazz dance, and DJD.

Decidedly Jazz Danceworks was born in 1984 out of the University of Calgary. Vicki Adams Willis had founded one of the only jazz dance programs at a Canadian university and had two graduating students who wanted to pursue their passion for what they had studied, and they did not want to have to move away to do so. They convinced Vicki to join them in starting a dance company. For the first couple of years, DJD existed as a part-time company on summer employment grants. They had a dream of hiring 10 dancers for 10 months to work full time to train and perform.

In 1987, DJD applied for a Canadian jobs strategy grant, a program not designed for this type of project. But armed with a strong application and piles of reference letters from the community, it was a success. That was the launching pad to become a full-time company. Who would have thought then that today, 29 years later, we would be partnering with the Calgary Foundation to build a $43-million facility?

DJD, now in our 31st year, has an annual operating budget of $2 million to $2.5 million. Fifty per cent of our expenses are paid to people: dancers, admin staff, dance teachers, musicians, designers, and theatre technicians.

The cornerstone of DJD is to employ dancers and to offer respectable contracts, wages, and benefits. We strive to employ 8 to 12 dancers full time for 32 to 42 weeks. We invest in their training and professional development. Sadly, for the last five years we have had to reduce the size of our company and the number of weeks of work. This is a direct result of the lack of growth in operating funding, combined with ever-increasing operating expenses.

We face a chronic shortage of male dancers, so we have often hired American, Cuban, Jamaican, and Brazilian male dancers. This past season, we had a male dancer from Brazil. Because our style is unique, rarely can we hire a dancer above what we refer to as an “apprentice”. Now, an apprentice, in our definition, is someone who has trained for years, has danced professionally, and often has post-secondary dance training. We have to meet what is deemed by Service Canada as the prevailing wage. In 2014, it was $17 an hour. This year, when we started the process to renew his work permit, the prevailing wage was deemed to be $25 an hour, a dramatic acceleration and completely unfounded based on our wages and those of the Alberta Ballet and the other dance companies we researched.

The process does not allow us to dispute or challenge that wage level, even though we can prove the data to be incorrect. If we can't pay the wage, our application is denied. So in this next season, we'll be short one male dancer position and will not be able to build on the training we have invested in this Brazilian dancer.

I would like to talk about the wages for dancers. First of all, our philosophy at DJD is that we base all wages on what we pay a dancer. We benchmark our dancers' salaries against three to four other contemporary companies in Canada. In a city like Calgary, you can imagine the challenges we face in filling some of our roles in marketing and development with lower salary envelopes.

Sadly, the arts sector is not one you pick if high wages are expected. We pay an apprentice $595 a week at $17 an hour, and the biweekly take-home pay is $978. If you look at a five-year dancer, you'll see that their pay is $770 at $22 an hour, with a biweekly take-home of $1,233. DJD covers 100% of their health, dental, and short-term disability.

You can imagine that in a city like Calgary, where the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,409, it is beyond challenging to make ends meet. With the present operating realities of increases in operating costs, no growth, and some decreases in operating grants, combined with the challenging climate for fundraising growth post-2008, it is impossible for us to make meaningful increases to wages.

Jazz, as you may or may not know, is truly a North American art form. Jazz dance was born in North America as a result of the melding of the influence of European art forms and the African traditions of song and dance that the slaves brought with them. DJD invites audiences and students to experience how jazz music shapes movement and feeling, to explore the connection between personal expression and collaboration, and to move.

We strive to bring dance to everyone: to the professional dancer and to the audience members. Performance is one way in which we do that, but equally important are education and community outreach. We offer community classes for all levels and from ages 2 to 90. We work in the school system. We work with special groups, such as high-needs schools, and unique communities, such as Parkinson's patients and adult women recovering from addiction.

DJD has one of the only Canadian professional training programs for jazz dance. In the words of Dr. Darwin Prioleau, who is in the Department of Dance at SUNY Brockport, New York, “Who would have thought I'd have to come to Calgary Alberta Canada?.... It's the only place in North America where you can study authentic jazz.”

This past year, in our professional training program, we had 12 students from across Canada studying for 32 weeks. We have a partnership with U of C and Ryerson, and our dream for this program is to expand it in our new facility. We have made initial inquiries regarding the Canadian arts training fund, but we understand this program is highly subscribed to and there are limited opportunities for new intake.

DJD moved into its current facility in 1993. It is 9,500 square feet, and we paid $30,000 a year in rent. Every five years, our rent doubled. When we reached rent of $140,000, we had maximized all opportunities for increased earned revenues in our schools, and we were still under market on what we paid for rent. If we could not solve our facility problems and ideally find some kind of philanthropic partner for a landlord, we would be out of business.

In 2005, we began conversations with the Kahanoff Foundation, which was looking to expend its Kahanoff Centre, which is a one-of-a-kind facility that rents to charities at 75% of market in downtown Calgary. We were invited to become part of their expansion. This journey has taken 10 years and has not been without many challenges. Projects of this size are a bit like a house of cards; you need many partners to make them a reality, and some support is contingent on other support and you have to balance different budget years.

There are many moving objects. But I am proud to say that in April of 2016, we will open the DJD dance centre on budget and on schedule. This 40,000 square foot facility is the podium of a 12-story tower. The first five floors will be for DJD, with seven studios, one that converts to a 200-seat theatre, a community living room space, costume construction area, and administration offices. It will be a major expansion for DJD, but most importantly, an important cultural hub for Calgary and a home for dance.

DJD's capital fund is $26 million. We have now raised $23 million and are in the final stretch to raise the last $3 million. And yes, I must say, I'm a wee bit worried about how the downturn in Calgary will affect us.

The establishment of an operating endowment is a critical piece to our future financial plan. The opportunity for matching by the Canadian heritage endowment incentive program has been a significant piece to motivate donors. Our cities need strong and vibrant arts organizations. We need stable funding to continue to make the impact we do in our communities. Many of us are small organizations working hard with very limited resources to accomplish what we do.

Speaking from the point of view of an executive director of a $2 million company with a small administrative staff, I would say it serves us more effectively to have a base of stable operating funds than to have a maze of various program grants to search out, apply for, and hope for a positive outcome.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of Canada, we do have to pause and celebrate that moment. We will do that celebration very much using culture and arts, for that is what defines us as a society. I encourage you though, along with having a celebration, to demonstrate a commitment to the healthy future of our sector by making important needed investments to ensure we have healthy, vibrant organizations. We need to nurture and train our artists, and we need to have places to employ them.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Zita Cobb, the force behind Newfoundland's Fogo Island, speak, and this quote has stayed with me: “Nature and culture are the two great garments of human life.”

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you very much.

We will now go to the questions, starting with Mr. Young for seven minutes.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, everyone, for taking the time for us today. The presentations were very interesting too.

First, Madam Pada, would it be helpful for you to have a free minute to finish off your thoughts?

[Lata Pada]

Certainly. Thank you very much for that.

I was going to speak about the importance of the dissemination of Canadian dance internationally. That's why Canadian Heritage's support to Canada Council for international touring is truly valuable.

I recently sat on a jury, and it was heartbreaking because there were so many deserving individuals and companies that were not successful due to budget constraints at the Canada Council. I would ask that Canadian Heritage consider enhancing support to the Canada Council to take Canadian dance across the country and internationally. I also cannot speak enough about the importance and the power of dance to build social cohesion. We work a lot in the schools and at seniors centres and at new immigrant centres, and I can see the impact that dance makes in the lives of young people, in the lives of new immigrants who do not speak the language or who have no experience living in Canada, and particularly for seniors. I think there has to be support to allow artists and dance companies to provide these very important aspects of social and emotional identity and social cohesion.

That would be all I was going to say.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you very much.

Kathi Sundstrom, I'm very interested in what you're saying. My daughter lives in Calgary now, so I'm extra interested in what you're saying.

Did you say you raised $23 million for a facility?

[Kathi Sundstrom]

Yes.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

First, I want to say congratulations.

[Kathi Sundstrom]

Thank you.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

I was really surprised to hear about that. It must have been a tremendous project that you worked on for a long time.

[Kathi Sundstrom]

Yes. It's been very exciting and it's been a lot of work.

We did receive $1.9 million from the Heritage fund as part of that $23 million.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Well, congratulations. I'll be very interested to see what happens with jazz dancing in Calgary in the future. That is so cool and really fascinating. Thank you very much.

[Kathi Sundstrom]

Thank you.