By Mike Levin

In 2010 when Plosive Productions entered stage right into Ottawa’s theatre community it used Internet-based communications to explain who was involved, how each new show was progressing and even what cast members were thinking. What the company didn’t talk about was its $5,000 grant from the City of Ottawa in 2011 to help finance shows at the troubled Gladstone Theatre.

To be interested in the story of local Ottawa theatre is to watch talented people congregate and separate like amoebas with some versions surviving and others disappearing. So when a new creation gets a financial nod, that should be exciting news: a recipient showing enough promise to make the entire community optimistic; a funder believing enough in the value of local theatre to risk writing a cheque.

The same story goes for Rag and Bone’s puppets ($10,000), AB Series’ poets ($6,500)and John Geggie’s jazz career ($5,500) – lots of promotional news from them but nothing celebrating the City’s financial support (short of small onsite acknowledgements). No hoots from either giver or taker at a time when any success in Ottawa’s arts should be publicly cherished.

Could Ottawa's arts community be its own Aesop's fable? Courtesy of Google Images.

Brett Delmage, of Ottawa Jazz Scene, pestered the above figures early out of City arts developer Nicole Zuger. Here’s a little more information about funding to 104 groups and individuals last year, out of an overall arts-and-culture budget around $7.5 million:

Theatre –           $131,250 (26 percent)

Music -              $122,000 (24 percent)

Literary -            $105,500 (21 percent)

Visual arts –       $98,250 (20 percent)

Film and video – $28,500 (six percent)

Dance -              $15,500 (three percent)

The numbers say little about Ottawa’s arts scene except to show that it does get some attention. Without context these grants represent just another spreadsheet. So why no trumpet fanfare heralding Plosive or any of the others?

The City has long done its arts funding with transparent blandness. Much of this comes from the cloak of defensibility that shelters all public-sector organizations. If I broadcast that I gave money to you, then I’ll have to explain to your neighbours why they didn’t get the same treatment. That’s pain most people try to avoid.

Delmage says he was on the verge of filing a Freedom-To-Information request to get the numbers. This act of interest is adversarial and explains why the City uses blandness as a shield. Bureaucracy by its nature is only capable of being reactive and gets little reward for doing its job. Celebrating its successes can provoke attacks.

Ottawa’s creative community has no such skin because it operates in silos. It has no leadership, or even a champion, to knit connections. Insulation produces a sense of tribalism (survivorism) that social-media’s distracted pervasiveness so greatly underscores. There is less and less willingness to co-operate with those outside the tribe, so when resources are allocated, the reaction is: “we’re as good as they are, did we get our share?”

When grants are announced, artists who haven’t even applied will smile but will also feel envy. What often comes next is envy’s inevitable conclusion of contempt, for the grant recipients but also for the smilers themselves. And the value of those little chunks of give-away cash can get dismissed pretty quickly, something Aesop used grapes and a fox to explain 2,600 years ago.

Arts funding is too often a yardstick for measuring victimhood in the pursuit of personal creativity. It shouldn’t be. When artists feel badly about a “competitor’s” success, it’s an admission that art is not the communal experience it’s supposed to be. To celebrate any artistic success is to engage in personal motivation and also to retreat from blaming external systems for being dysfunctional. Blame and contempt are common tribal bedfellows.

The City of Ottawa’s hesitation to pay tribute to its arts-grant recipients seems mostly a result of artists’ inabilities to honour themselves. (Don’t try and tell me that artists have problems bragging.) It would be great if this city had organizations similar to those in Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal, Quebec City, Winnipeg, Vancouver and dozens of other urban centres that don’t shy away from using their funding trumpets.

But arts organizations only reflect the artistic communities they represent. Of the 104 group-and-individual-grant recipients here last year, not one to my knowledge sent out emails or  tweets saying “Hey, we just got $5,000 from the City. Now we can do this……”

And this reticence, however motivated, keeps the silos confident in their desperate belief that Ottawa’s arts are indeed a place of winners and losers.