Article critical of Olympics disappears from Globe and Mail website

On 25 November, 2009, the Globe and Mail reported the following story:

Cultural Olympiad artists say they’re being muzzled.

The arts-festival portion of the 2010 Olympics risks sliding into a squabble over free speech, as artists who signed on to be part of the Cultural Olympiad learn of a clause in their contracts that prohibits negative comments about the Games and its corporate sponsors.

Four days later, the story appears to have been removed from the Globe and Mail website. Attempts to access the archived story generate an error message. CTVglobemedia is the official media partner for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

The Marsha Lederman-authored piece was still online at ctvolympics.ca as of November 29 at 10:00am.

The rest of the text of the piece is below:

Some artists contacted by The Globe and Mail, along with organizers of other Olympic and Commonwealth Games cultural events, called the requirement unusual and disturbing. Several artists didn’t realize they had signed such an undertaking.

“This is Canada. I can’t believe that we’re being asked to limit our comments to the press,” said Andrew Laurenson, artistic director of Vancouver’s Radix Theatre, whose critical comments about arts funding and the Olympics have drawn the attention of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC).

Laurenson’s Radix Theatre group is to be part of HIVE, an innovative theatrical event involving 12 local companies performing in a single, huge location as audience members move from show to show.

He sent out a newsletter in September that decried cuts in British Columbia government funding for arts and culture and addressed the perception that “massive overrides in Olympic expenditures” were at least partly to blame.

“Good news: HIVE 3 is coming,” he wrote. “Bad news: It involves Olympic money.”

A VANOC representative called HIVE’s producer after the newsletter was sent out, and the producer subsequently sent an e-mail titled Gentle Reminder to everyone involved in HIVE about the need to keep commentary separate from the logo of the Cultural Olympiad. A HIVE 3 image – including the Cultural Olympiad logo – had been sandwiched between Laurenson’s good-news/bad-news comments.

The controversial clause in the VANOC contract signed by artists involved in the three-year, $20-million Cultural Olympiad festival reads: “The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell and/or other sponsors associated with VANOC.”

The Olympics have previously faced criticism over possible restrictions on public demonstrations during the Games and the police questioning of Olympic critics.

Other VANOC contracts contain similar clauses, and the Cultural Olympiad’s program director, Robert Kerr, says it is standard practice for an event of this scale.

Artists say otherwise and appear to have backing from organizers of similar events. “There was nothing from Salt Lake in which we in any way censored or shackled [our artists] through their work of art or in anything they wanted to say about the Olympics,” said Ray Grant, artistic director for the Cultural Olympiad at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002.

“If this is a trend, it’s a bit of a dangerous trend for the arts.”

Nor was there any such language for artists participating in the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Australia.

“I cannot recall anything which forbade artists from saying anything negative about the Games,” Andrew Bleby, executive producer of performing arts for Melbourne’s Cultural Program, wrote in an e-mail. “Our artists certainly signed no such thing.”

One HIVE participant interpreted the VANOC response to Laurenson’s letter this way: “Are you in or are you out? Don’t be in [the Cultural Olympiad] and then stab us in the back, basically.”

Kerr said the newsletter did raise eyebrows at VANOC. “We were a little surprised, but we didn’t put any handcuffs on anybody. It was more a question of, is the artist still comfortable being a part of it,” he said.

Kerr insists VANOC is not interested in controlling artistic content and points out that many of the works involved in the Cultural Olympiad have dealt with difficult subjects.

Indeed, a visual-art exhibition that was part of the 2008 Cultural Olympiad featured a restaging of an infamous anti-Olympic protest photo. When asked about the photograph in a January, 2008, interview, Kerr was emphatic.

“These are artists expressing their views and observations and I think we have to embrace that,” he told The Globe. “We can’t shy away and try to put a lid on things.”

In an interview last week, Kerr again stressed his belief in artistic freedom, but said there has to be some control.

“If someone were to get up in the middle of a production and all of a sudden start coming off on an anti-Olympic rant, well that would be completely antithetical to the context of the work and the Games and the presenter,” he said, later adding: “We’re not asking anyone to promote our sponsors, but that they not come out and disrespect our sponsors.”

 

Award-winning theatre NIX gets set to melt the coldest hearts

Take the magical location of Lost Lake, 200 tons of snow and ice, a set carved by Canadian Snow Sculpture team member Carl Schlichting, a hosted ice-bar for pre-show cocktails, plenty of pyro including fire-breathing musical instruments, the death of a snowman, AND a love story set at the end of the world, and you have NiX – the most unique cultural event for winter lovers ever to come to Whistler.

The show just nabbed two Betty Mitchell theatre awards, for outstanding set design and outstanding lighting design. (It was also nominated for outstanding costume design, outstanding new play and outstanding production of a play.)

Tickets for the show will go on sale this week. The limited run kicks off January 22, until the end of the Olympics.

Whistler Chamber hires writer Rebecca Wood Barrett

The Whistler Chamber of Commerce went looking last month for a creative writer to develop a series of 2010 Business Success stories, and they found Rebecca Wood Barrett.

Wood Barrett, a founding member of the Vicious Circle, is a local writer and filmmaker, a two-time finalist in the 72 Hour Filmmaker Showdown, documentary producer, the winner of the 2008 Whistler Select Writing Awards’ Postcard Jam contest and the 2008 Sea to Sky Literary Contest for Long Fiction. Most recently, she’s been working on her UBC Creative Writing MFA, wrangling a toddler, and launching the first green circle creative writing seminar series for Whistler, the Feeding the Seed program.

All of which to say she is eminently qualified to tell stories about local folk who got a leg up from the Olympic juggernaut.

The first story that came to mind was about the Whistler Writers Group. That piece was submitted as an example of her writing, and is reproduced here. It’s longer than a blog-attention-span might typically last, but worth every minute. 

This fall, Wood Barrett will teach a workshop on Writing a One-Page Screenplay, at the Whistler Readers & Writers Festival.

Rebecca Wood Barrett reviews the Joseph Boyden/Shelagh Rogers event, and makes the case that the pillars of the Olympic movement are the things that anchor our humanness

No Boundaries

by Rebecca Wood Barrett

On an icy night in February, a hush falls over a Whistler theatre stuffed beyond capacity. Extra chairs have been squeezed onto the end of rows, and the opening presenter warns us that if there is a fire, everyone must leave in an orderly fashion. The audience laughs. They inch to the edge of their seats, eager for the presentation to begin.

But this is no show about hucking off cliffs, or shredding the gnar. There is no ski-bum speaker to regale us with tales of how they survived an avalanche, won a gold medal against all odds, or lived off-the-grid for two years in a van in Lot 4, chasing the powder dream. You won’t hear a pumping soundtrack, no tortured vocals by disaffected youth. This is no filmmaker showdown, no wet-T shirt contest, no homage to the extreme, featuring risky stunts in the mountains on boards or skis or bikes.

This is literature, baby. And it’s sold out.

If you didn’t snap up your tickets early, you can be forgiven. A literary reading and Q&A⎯even with a CBC icon⎯is not your typical high-octane Whistler spectacle. But it seems that the word-nerds have dug the spike of their literary crampons in and secured traction.

The apparent overnight success has in fact been germinating since 2003, when the Celebration 2010: Whistler Arts Festival and Whistler Arts Council granted seed money to the Whistler Writers’ Group to put on a literary event. The first plantings of the Literary Leanings Reading Series evolved in the attic space at a Creekside restaurant, where writers read to an audience of fifty. Along with up-and-coming authors Nancy Lee (Dead Girls), Lee Henderson (The Man Game), and Adam Lewis Schroeder (Kingdom of Monkeys), our own local writers read from their stories to an appreciative, but all-too-small audience.

Stella Harvey, founder of the non-profit Whistler Writers’ Group and organizer of the event, credits the annual injection of Olympic cultural funding as raising the profile of the literary arts by attracting quality authors to Whistler. Over the years, headliners have included Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Ivan E. Coyote, Noah Richler, Warren MacDonald, David Gilmour, John Valliant and Annette Lapointe. Harvey says “It also gives local writers from the Sea to Sky a chance to share the stage with their better known counterparts, to showcase their talents when they wouldn’t otherwise have this opportunity. The local writers come from Squamish to Pemberton, some of whom include Stephen Vogler, Lisa Richardson, Jude Goodwin and Pam Barnsley.”

Seven years on, Literary Leanings 2009 has grown in stature and become a must-see event at the month-long arts festival⎯which has now morphed into the Whistler Winter Arts Festival, co-presented by the Whistler Arts Council and Cultural Olympiad Vancouver 2010. The Whistler Winter Arts Festival was created in 2003 to build capacity and create excitement for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Harvey says, “The funding allows us to bring in a big name. It makes for a marketable show, something unique and different, and of a quality that people will come and watch. Now people want to attend a literary event⎯it put us on the map.”

The Big Name this year is Joseph Boyden, fresh from his Giller Prize win for his novel Through Black Spruce. Boyden’s wife and author Amanda Boyden (Babylon Rolling) and Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo) join him onstage as Shelagh Rogers of CBC Radio moderates the discussion and interviews each writer. Later, the show will be broadcast to the country on national radio.

Take a step back, and you might ask why this cultural convergence, taking place in the exquisite venue of the Squamish Lillooet Cultural Centre, is being funded by the world’s greatest sporting event? What do Canadian Joseph Boyden, who is Metis, and Amanda Boyden, who is American and a former trapeze artist, have anything to do with the pinnacle tournament of winter sports? What can Galloway, who is bookish in glasses and with a self-deprecating wit, offer to the 2010 Olympics? No world records for speed skating or ski jumping are being broken tonight.

However, there is something strange and serendipitous happening, and the audience senses it. Rogers asks Galloway a question about how he came to write his book. In it, a cellist plays in a bomb crater in Sarajevo for 22 days to commemorate the same number of people who died one day during the siege. “We have a tendency,” Galloway says, “in North America in particular to view art as a luxury item, things like music or books as almost a frivolity. But the way Europeans look at it, and kind of the way I look at it, is that one of the points of art and music is to remind us of our innate humanity.”

The audience nods, as though Galloway has expressed a collective thought⎯yes, this is why we are here, listening to these authors read.

Is it possible then, that the three pillars of the modern Olympic Movement⎯sport, culture and environment⎯are the combined values that honour our very humanness? That the link between the desire to race beyond physical boundaries in the extremes of winter, is not so far from the hunger of writers to explore, through literature, the edges of our humanity in times of extreme duress?

Perhaps the audience seems to think so, for at the end of the evening the applause lasts a long time.

In the great Native hall after the show is over, the audience members line up to buy the authors’ books, and ask them for their autographs. In one year’s time, the world will come to Whistler to watch our athletes, and at the same time honour our artists, the core of our community.

Stella’s Oscar speech slash letter to the editor

Stella Harvey’s words of thanks appear in this week’s local papers,  hailing the success of the Between the Sheets Literary Leanings event on February 18. Kudos have been pouring in.

Huge props to the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, The Four Seasons, the Whistler Arts Council, the Holiday Inn, Armchair Books, The Pique, The Question, The Vicious Circle board, and the public.

Check out some of Joern Rhode’s pictures from the evening.

For word-nerds and lit-fans, the Vicious Circle will be defending its grant request for the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival before Council on Tuesday, March 3, at 2:45pm, at Millennium Place.  Feel free to cheer them on.

Highlights from Between the Sheets of February, with Shelagh Rogers

Wednesday evening saw the Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre showcase the poetry of its architecture, as 120 folk gathered in the cedar-lined theatre to hear Shelagh Rogers tickle some truths from Joseph Boyden, Amanda Boyden and Steven Galloway. The interviews will be broadcast on Roger’s CBC program, The Next Chapter, which airs Saturdays at 3pm. 

Everyone will have their take-away moments, but here are a few of mine:

Hearing Amanda Boyden admit that it can be hard being married to another writer, whose Canadianness has helped his career to have more pointy high-points, especially after watching her first novel fall alongside the World Trade towers in a cataclysm of bad timing.  And then seeing them spontaneously, unselfconsciously, pick lint from each other’s shoulders.

Discovering that palmist lore suggests that if the lines on a person’s hand change, then their life will change as well.

Steven Galloway, amidst quips and jokes, throwing down a challenge to anyone who loves language – to despise the abuse of words by the use of phrases like “ethnic cleansing”, ‘because there’s absolutely nothing clean about it.’ 

And rallying around his call to protect civilisation through the arts, because civilisation is not about roads and bridges. They may be a result of a civilised society, but what civilisation is about, is an agreement between people to behave in certain ways, an implied agreement between Steven Galloway and Shelagh Rogers not to start smacking each other over the head with a microphone… and there are two ways we prop up civilisation, these contracts of agreed behaviours and limits – through the law, and the arts. And the law fails us before the arts do.

Shelagh Rogers referencing an early interview she had done with Timothy Findley, in which she asked him why he writes.

“Against despair.”

And for Galloway, Boyden and Boyden, this deeply moral act of writing seemed to be to write/right the wrongs… of Hurricane Katrina, of the siege of Sarajevo, of colonialism…

Power to all our scribblings. We are writing in our garrets, in the corners of Pasta Lupino, on our laps in the bus, against despair, against those who would turn a blind eye to suffering and press on in their campaigns for power and money, to hold up civilisation… Simple enough.

Word-nerd gathering in Whistler for Joseph Boyden

Holly Fraughton, the arts and entertainment editor at the Pique, has got your number.

You’re a word-nerd.

Admit it.

And the chance to get Between the Sheets with five-star authors like Joseph Boyden, Amanda Boyden, and Steven Galloway, as Shelagh Rogers probes for the intimate details, is something that word-nerds can’t resist.

It will be a gathering of word-nerds. A scrabble. A babel. A biblio-lust-fest.

It’s sold out, and it’s at the Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre February 18 at 7:30. (Don’t miss forthcoming events – sign on to become a member of the Vicious Circle for the latest event and contest details. Or subscribe to the Vicious feed, to ensure you’re always the first to know.)