Hayden Taylor: What happens if you don’t have Indigenous actors for a play about Indigenous people? It doesn’t get produced

2025/08/08 Leave a comment

Ironic and sad collateral damage:

…Thus, the conundrum. Obviously it would be pretty nice for my play to be produced. After all, Daddy needs a new pair of shoes … or, in my case, moccasins. In today’s world, hiring a non-native isn’t even considered. So the whole potential production has to suffer, being thrown out with the theatre water.

For me, the play is a loving tip of the hat to our elders, showing their perspective on the world and presenting a vision of the First Nations community that is seldom seen. I consider it a warm and humorous play about elder love in a fish-out-of-water context. This, I believe, explains the interest in the play. The characters are native but they don’t have to be. The story and characters are easily relatable by all people.

Crees in the Caribbean has been produced a few times already, but alas, the reservoir of Indigenous actors is quite low, especially ones who might be interested in doing theatre. The artistic director of the cancelled production told me that she contacted some of the more well-known television actors with little luck, and in one case, an agent actually laughed at her when she pitched her proposal. The budgets of theatre run shallow while television/movie resources run substantially deeper.

My real fear is that this could set a bad precedent. Do not write any First Nation characters older than, for the sake of argument, 55. Unless you know many out-of-work television actors. Or the theatre company has a makeup department skilled in aging people. But nobody wants that. Again, all part of the conundrum. 

The scariest possibility is that, at 63, I may have to start acting to fill this vacancy. And nobody wants that! 

Source: What happens if you don’t have Indigenous actors for a play about Indigenous people? It doesn’t get produced

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Cinq ans après «SLĀV», les minorités visibles se taillent une place 

2023/06/27 Leave a comment

Of interest, increased diversity in Quebec cultural sector:

Depuis la controverse entourant la création des spectacles SLĀV et Kanata, il y a cinq ans, les artistes issus de minorités visibles foulent plus que jamais les planches des théâtres québécois. Au cinéma toutefois, leur présence évolue en dent de scie, montrent des données inédites compilées par Le Devoir.

« On sent que les théâtres se sont emparés de cet enjeu plus radicalement. Malheureusement, ça bouge moins vite au cinéma, où seuls quelques projets tirent la moyenne vers le haut », constate la présidente de l’Union des artistes, Tania Kontoyanni, à la vue de nos chiffres. Selon elle, on peut tout de même parler « d’un avant et d’un après » SLĀV et Kanata dans le milieu culturel.

Il y a cinq ans, ces deux pièces du metteur en scène Robert Lepage ont engendré un débat enflammé sur l’appropriation culturelle et la place des minorités visibles dans les productions culturelles d’ici. La première, SLĀV, s’inspirait de chants d’esclaves afro-américains, mais ne comptait que deux comédiennes noires sur six. La seconde, Kanata, se voulait une relecture de « l’histoire du Canada à travers le prisme des rapports entre Blancs et Autochtones », mais ne comptait pas un seul comédien autochtone.

En 2020, Le Devoir avait mesuré l’impact de la polémique et constaté que la proportion d’acteurs, de réalisateurs, de metteurs en scène et d’auteurs de minorités visibles au cinéma et au théâtre avait quasi doublé entre 2017 et 2019. Mais qu’en est-il aujourd’hui ? Est-ce que les efforts dans ces milieux se poursuivent ?

Notre équipe a répété l’exercice pour l’année 2022, en utilisant la même méthodologie, soit d’éplucher la programmation de sept théâtres et les génériques des 10 films les plus populaires en salle durant l’année. Malgré les limites de ce genre d’exercice, les chiffres compilés sont tout de même révélateurs.

En théâtre, 21 % des metteurs en scène, auteurs et interprètes des compagnies recensées étaient issus de minorités visibles pour la saison 2022-2023. Cette proportion était de 14 % en 2018-2019 et de 9 % en 2017-2018.

En cinéma, selon l’analyse des 10 films les plus vus en 2022, 11,5 % des scénaristes, réalisateurs et acteurs étaient issus de minorités visibles. Une proportion qui a plus que doublé en comparaison avec la période avant SLĀV et Kanata, où l’on ne comptait que 4 % d’artistes de minorités visibles. Mais c’est bien moins que 2019, où l’on se retrouvait avec une proportion de 18,7 %.

Fait à noter : le gouvernement canadien définit comme « minorité visible » toutes « personnes, autres que les Autochtones, qui ne sont pas de race blanche ou qui n’ont pas la peau blanche ». Pour notre exercice, nous avons inclus les Autochtones dans cette définition.

Selon le recensement de 2021 de Statistique Canada, 16,1 % de la population du Québec s’identifie à une des minorités visibles, et il y a 2,5 % d’Autochtones dans la province.

On sent que les théâtres se sont emparés de cet enjeu plus radicalement. Malheureusement, ça bouge moins vite au cinéma.

— Tania Kontoyanni

Le théâtre dans la bonne voie

« On est vraiment rendus ailleurs, je trouve ça très encourageant », commente Charles Bender, comédien d’origine autochtone.

Selon lui, depuis le congrès du Conseil québécois du théâtre (CQT) en 2015, il existait déjà un mouvement pour plus de diversité au théâtre. L’affaire SLĀV et Kanata a permis de faire connaître ces enjeux à l’ensemble de la population et d’accélérer le changement.

« Les membres de la communauté sont plus sensibles aux réalités de tout le monde, on se pose des questions à chaque étape de création sur nos façons de faire. On va dans la bonne direction », renchérit la coprésidente du CQT, Rachel Morse. Mais beaucoup reste à faire, selon elle, pour rendre le milieu encore plus inclusif.

Elle pointe du doigt le déséquilibre d’une institution théâtrale à l’autre. « Certains ont besoin de temps. On a lancé une trousse d’outils sur l’appropriation culturelle [la semaine dernière], c’est quelque chose qui pourra les aider à mettre en marche ce changement », espère-t-elle.

Si la proportion de minorités visibles parmi les auteurs ou les metteurs en scène aug, ente sans cesse depuis 2017 en théâtre, cela va bien plus lentement que du côté des interprètes. Or, de l’avis de Charles Bender, il faut néanmoins continuer de porter le regard au-delà de la distribution sur scène. « Il reste encore beaucoup de travail pour faire davantage de place aux créations des minorités visibles », plaide-t-il.

« Les espaces pour les accueillir existent, les diffuseurs sont au rendez-vous, les spectateurs aussi. Maintenant, il faut leur donner le temps et les moyens de créer. Il faut encourager la relève et grossir le bassin de créateurs autochtones ou issus de la diversité », insiste-t-il, rappelant que la pandémie en a découragé plus d’un à continuer dans ce domaine.

Le cinéma à la traîne

Du côté du cinéma, le portrait est un peu moins reluisant, considérant la baisse enregistrée en 2022 du pourcentage de minorités visibles à l’écran selon notre exercice. « Ça montre que ça dépend vraiment des projets et que cette volonté de faire de la place à la diversité n’a rien de généralisé », commente Tania Kontoyanni. Parmi les films analysés, Chien blanc et 23 décembre tirent en effet la moyenne vers le haut.

La présidente de l’UDA retient tout de même une amélioration depuis l’affaire SLĀV et Kanata. « Il y a aujourd’hui une plus grande préoccupation pour cet enjeu. On le voit pour les rôles, et il faudrait maintenant le percevoir aussi du côté de l’écriture et de la réalisation », ajoute-t-elle, réagissant à nos chiffres qui montrent qu’en 2022 — dans le palmarès de films analysé — aucune production ne comptait un scénariste ou un réalisateur issu de minorités visibles.

Proportion d’interprètes issus de minorités visibles parmi les dix films les plus vus au Québec

L’auteur-compositeur-interprète Ricardo Lamour invite quant à lui à regarder plus loin que les chiffres : « Oui il y a plus grande représentation [des minorités] sur scène et à l’écran, mais quelle est la qualité de leur expérience ? » Les personnes noires — et ça vaut aussi pour les autres minorités visibles — décrochent rarement des premiers rôles, constate-t-il. Elles se retrouvent encore beaucoup dans des rôles stéréotypés ou se font offrir de petits rôles dans l’unique but de montrer qu’une production est inclusive, selon lui.

« La place des personnes noires dans l’industrie culturelle reste très fragile. […] Même lorsqu’elles ont trouvé une place, beaucoup marchent sur la pointe des pieds dans ce qu’elles peuvent vraiment dire au sujet d’une production. […] Je m’attends à plus de notre milieu, on peut vraiment faire mieux. »

Avec Sandrine Vieira, Alex Fontaine, Janie Dussault et Charles-Olivier L’Homme

Source: Cinq ans après «SLĀV», les minorités visibles se taillent une place

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More than a hashtag: Making diverse, inclusive theatre the norm

2017/05/02 Leave a comment

Interesting story on some of the challenges in improving diversity in theatre:

Personal stories of race, gender and sexuality shared in a Caribbean hair stylist’s chair. A glimpse into a convenience store and an Asian-Canadian family’s struggles. A thoroughly remixed Hamlet delivered in English and American Sign Language.

Canada is no stranger to acclaimed plays told from diverse perspectives, but a new wave of theatre artists is pushing past existing boundaries to make inclusive storytelling the new normal.

“I want a contemporary colour palette. I want the people of the world that I see around me to be telling those stories,” says director Ravi Jain.

“That homogenous world that I see onstage [traditionally]? It’s just not my world. I don’t recognize that.”

Toronto-based Jain’s latest work is his Shakespeare reboot Prince Hamlet, featuring actors in gender-swapped roles, performers from different racial backgrounds and a key character who is deaf and narrates the story in American Sign Language.

Prince Hamlet

Why Not Theatre’s latest production is Prince Hamlet, a reboot of the Bard featuring actors in gender-swapped roles, performers from different racial backgrounds and a key character who narrates the story in American Sign Language. (Bronwen Sharp/Why Not Theatre)

It’s the latest reason his aptly named Why Not Theatre, currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, has earned kudos for innovative, thought-provoking and entertaining productions that offer something fresh to devoted theatre-goers, while also appealing to communities underrepresented in the performing arts.

“That’s the thing for me,” he says. “Can we let people be their fullest selves when we tell stories and let their experiences they had growing up be the lens through which we see the story told?”

Making change

Canada has seen past blockbusters like Trey Anthony’s da Kink in my Hair or Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience and the work of indie troupes such as Cahoots, FuGEN and Obsidian, which specialize in stories from diverse communities. But Canadian theatre overall has long been a bastion of white, European stories. There’s still a distance to go toward more inclusive representation, especially for the larger, more established companies.

“If you look around, you go to the theatre and a lot of times – especially at the established ones – the audience is predominantly aging white people,” admits Martin Morrow, president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association.

“There’s definitely a serious awareness of a lack of diversity in the past and a real sincere attempt to improve that today,” he says.

Theatre has yet to regularly reach some large, untapped audiences – in part “because what people are seeing on the stage are not the faces on the street,” according to Morrow.

Chantelle Han and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee in Kim's Convenience.

Despite the massive success of plays like Kim’s Convenience, truly diverse stories and productions are still more the exception than the norm in Canadian theatre. (Bruce Monk)

A generation of artists raised on traditional Canadian theatre is now changing the game, settling into roles as sought-after and influential creators, leaders and decision-makers.

They’re revitalizing the scene by casting a wider net of collaborators and highlighting unheard perspectives. The argument heard in the past, that Canada didn’t have the necessary pool of diverse actors, directors, playwrights and other creators, no longer holds. Being inclusive – as other industries have shown – makes financial sense.

“The private sector figured out that it was good for business and good for society to have a more diversified workforce and to try to promote change at all levels of leadership. It seems like we’re just figuring that out now [in theatre],” says director and playwright Jovanni Sy,

The challenge of every theatre company in Canada, especially in urban centres, is to navigate the divide between engaging existing subscribers and attracting new ones, he says. Sy has seen thousands of new audience members visit Richmond, B.C.’s Gateway Theatre for the first time after he introduced a contemporary, Chinese-language adjunct to the mainstage offering: one that appeals directly to residents of Chinese heritage (who comprise nearly half of Richmond’s total population).

As artistic director, Sy’s approach has been two-pronged: choosing programming that “shows the rich, multicultural nature of modern-day Richmond,” and reaching out with initiatives like the Gateway Pacific Theatre Festival “as a way of opening our doors and making a bigger tent.

“People want what’s comfortable to them,” he explains, but “one of the beautiful things about theatre is it lets you glimpse into someone else’s reality, lets you sit in someone else’s shoes for a couple of hours.”

Source: More than a hashtag: Making diverse, inclusive theatre the norm – Entertainment – CBC News

Rick Salutin’s related comments about entry barriers to the arts, particularly for those from less wealthy families:

A recent depressing study of Toronto schools found that kids who go into public high schools for the arts are disproportionately white and wealthy: 67 per cent white versus 29 per cent in the general school population.

Half of the students come from 18 “feeder schools” that lacked diversity; a quarter from just five largely “homogeneous” schools; 57 per cent come from “high income” families versus about half that in the general school population.

Not surprising since the former, unlamented school board director Chris Spence once said the purpose of “academies” and special schools was to offer “private school opportunities within the public system.” Whose kids did you think all those special programs (including French immersion) were created for?

But it got me thinking about who rules in the arts altogether. A few years ago I found myself frequently checking family backgrounds of actors, mostly because with Wikipedia, you can: they usually start with family background.

So Hugh Grant’s forebears are “a tapestry of warriors, empire-builders and aristocracy.” Zooey Deschanel’s parents were a cinematographer and actor. Benedict Cumberbatch’s are actors; his granddad was from “London high society” and his great-granddad was Queen Victoria’s consul-general in Turkey. Gene Hackman’s dad, though, was a typesetter who abandoned the family.

Let’s not overstate. The arts have typically implied nepotism and privilege, even in cases of black sheep who scorned the family firm to run off with a theatre troupe. But there was something down-market about the arts that made room for the lower orders — especially with the mass audience that came along with movies. Most of all, you didn’t need a university degree to get a foot in.

There were outsiders and scalawags like Charlie Chaplin, who grew up rough and learned to hate middle class dogooding social workers; or Edward G. Robinson, who lived in a tenement and became a toney art collector to compensate. There was a coarser look to many of them; you didn’t need perfect features. It was even was an asset not to have them since that mass movie audience could identify. Charles Laughton actually played romantic roles. One of the last was Hackman, who didn’t seem to know he wasn’t Cary Grant. (Grant’s parents, on the other hand, were a factory worker and a seamstress.)

But the privilege element has now moved up to another level. This is partly due to the so-called “culturalization” of the economy, where art is no longer economically peripheral. It’s as gainful and respected (or more so) to be an actor, musician (or news anchor) than a tycoon. In fact, they all sort of blend.

This shift gets most noted, naturally, in the U.K. with its hyper sense of class. There’s debate about a takeover by “posh” actors: Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hollander — stars of The Night Manager — who all went to the same private elementary school; the former two went on to Eton, alongside Eddie Redmayne and Damien Lewis. Almost everyone attended Oxford. This may underpin the “Downtonization” of British TV drama. In Canada, we tend to phrase these trends in terms of race, but it largely amounts to the same thing.

Much (in fact, too much) depends on education, especially with the decline of other routes to the arts, like provincial rep companies in the U.K. In the early years there are arts programs, where wealthier parents can fundraise for supplies, such as musical instruments or theatre trips — though here they can’t yet buy actual arts teachers for their kids’ schools.

Then come university programs that are harder to access with rising tuition; and even if you get there as a poor kid, you probably need to work rather than try out for plays.

The grad programs follow, which require auditions (which often demand fees) and prepping for those. The same goes for writing, where postgrad creative writing degrees have become ubiquitous, though what they mostly provide is simply time to write.

What gets lost? Voices — literally in the case of actors. I knew a theatre director who made a note during auditions: “has access to class.” That won’t matter much if you don’t have writers who write about class, as David Fennario did in Canada.

What would’ve been lost if Mozart’s or Chopin’s dads hadn’t been composers and teachers? But wait — what of all the latent Mozarts and Chopins whose dads weren’t? How much richer might the world that kids arrive in have been?

Not to mention the small matter of justice (social variant).

Source: Guess who’s coming to auditions: SalutinThe arts use to be more welcoming of outsiders and scalawags but now appears to be the domain of the privileged.

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How to bring theatre to an increasingly multicultural Canada – The Globe and Mail

2014/04/29 Leave a comment

Good initiative in terms of recognizing the diversity, and richness of that diversity, broadening audiences and improving cross-cultural understanding and appreciation:

Enter the Gateway Pacific Theatre Festival. This August, Sy and festival producer Esther Ho will bring in three productions from Hong Kong and present them with English surtitles: The Isle, by leading Hong Kong playwright Paul Poon; Fire of Desire, a contemporary Chinese-language adaptation of La Ronde; and Detention, a “non-verbal physical comedy” by Tang Shu-wing.

And this festival is only a pilot project to measure the demand for what Sy plans to roll out in 2016 – the Pacific Series, a year-round, Chinese-language (English-surtitled) alternative to the Gateway’s subscription series of English-language plays.

Rupal Shah, a Toronto producer who holds the Cultural Diversity Portfolio on the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) board of directors, thinks Sy may be on to something. She’s been hired by theatres in the past to do community outreach to the South Asian community, but has given it up lately. She’s disappointed that producers will lure in new audiences to an individual play that may appeal to them, then simply cross their fingers that those new spectators will stick around for the Chekhov and Shakespeare to come.

How to bring theatre to an increasingly multicultural Canada – The Globe and Mail.

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