I Just Want Someone to Love Me...FOR MY MONEY.

'If you want to do art films you have to find another channel. I’ve been attempting to do that the last couple of years, but it means producing it an entirely different way and not relying on any money from the government. It’s the way I’ve been doing theatre for the past 20 years. There’s a point where you say, you’re not going to rely on public subsidies. Maybe we were wrong from the start to rely on that. The system is a monster and we were responsible for it'.

That's from Robert LePage in a Maclean's article.

It's a dream I have, to be able to work with no one allowing you to. He also says: ' I’m not going to crawl and beg and explain what I want to do in front of Telefilm Canada, which will hire a specialist from some university who will explain to me how my project is dramaturgically wrong. They have this bundle of money and they have to find an excuse not to give it to you'.

That's exactly how I feel! With all the people who aren't interested in my submissions to their festivals! Kind of inspiring, kind of demoralizing when you realize that he's at the absolute top of the artistic pile in this country, and he still feels like that.

I think about how we did dust.


First, we did it at SummerWorks, and much like my blog on our throat process, we just threw it up with the stuff we had and the costumes we could find in the time that we could scrape. I made about $150 for seven performances and rehearsals that went on for two months. When we went to Montreal, our show fit in a car, and we put it in the car and drove through the night and put it up with one tech, and did it.

It was pretty fun and is a pretty beautiful way to work, really. We're a group of friends, we care about the show, and we have an opportunity so we ran with it. No one gave us any money, no one gave us any help to do the show, so we didn't make a lot of money, and sometimes work got in the way of when we could rehearse. We didn't wait for any of those things: we just did it because we wanted to.


The recent mayoral election has artists talking about how important grant money is, and it IS, I want some, I need some, and we need to fund the arts in some way. But it can't be the only way. I want to find a way to make art pay, but we have to apply our creativity to that as well as to the work. And it's exhausting. I don't have it figured out. But I think LePage is right, that the focus has to go there rather than hitting up the government.

Because who wants to ask for permission, really?