Nourishing the Arts in Rural Communities

As a newly-landed Canadian in the late seventies, arriving from South Africa after some years in Europe, I found myself on the way to a new job in Northern Alberta just as its harsh winter season was beginning. What Fort McMurray offered me was a place to begin my career in Canada as “musician-in-residence” at Keyano College, which was newly evolved from its recent guise as an industrial campus into an academic institution. Even in those early pre-Richard Florida days the college saw itself as a provider of “quality-of life” activities for the community. Its administrators understood that 18-hour days and large incomes were not going to be enough for the town of 26,000 to retain its employees and build a stable community. The college’s expectations were that I would provide a vaguely articulated vision of arts activities for a remote community in order to give a focus for the many Canadian and international professional and technical individuals and their families who were working at the rapidly developing oil-sands plants.

Furthermore, the college wanted to build links with all sectors in the community - the oil-producing corporate giants Suncor and Syncrude, the schools, the library, the hospital, the aboriginal population there and further north at Fort Chipewayan, and large numbers of people living in trailer parks. We were charged with notions of outreach, and a determination to overcome the sense of inherent remoteness created by the geographic challenge of the closest “entertainment” being located five-hours south in Edmonton. Outreach – a word I heard then for the first time – had a reciprocal nuance: not only providing services to the community and connecting with others to bring them into your own activity, but its corollary – learning from their experience and then building something together.

These outreach and engagement efforts manifested themselves within community activities including: weekly choirs; music ensembles of all genres; drama-producing groups small and large; music mentoring and training for adults and young people in and outside the schools; writing and art-making collectives; and presentations of performing arts groups and writers on tour. These activities were made possible through both financial and human contributions, but I learned that the overriding factor in their successful implementation was the desire of the community to feel that they were acquiring skills even as they were building social structures where they could give expression to their emotional and spiritual lives.

Nourishing the arts in rural environments comes with its own challenges and insights. In this rural environment, I learned a lesson that has guided my work at funding agencies ever since: however professional you as "animateur" know yourself to be and however engaged your rural community is in the work you are doing – as participant, as volunteer, as donor, or as audience – you are going to feel remote from the larger centres of culture. You never feel you are aware of all the resources that are available, and you have very little daily personal contact with professional colleagues in other municipalities. You’re busy, you’re far away, and whether you’re an arts professional or a volunteer, you never really know whether outsiders are interested in what your community is doing.

It is my thesis that it is the melding of a sense of personal aspiration with civic pride that keeps people deeply engaged in the arts in their communities. I also want to propose that nourishing local activity by frequently injecting the presence of local or outside professional artists into local work will go a long way in addressing the loneliness I’ve referred to. In a moment I’m going to give some examples of successful activities that illustrate this. First, though, I want to say something about the intersection of amateur, recreational and professional activity. When these elements are brought together collaboratively and guided by professional artists, the community’s organizations, residents, volunteers and projects are transformed. This is not of course only true for rural communities, but given other gaps and scarcities that do exist outside cities, it sometimes takes special effort to ensure that this synthesis is continual. When this long-term synthesis does occur though, transformation and development is then renewable and sustainable.

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