From Feast to Famine

I thoroughly enjoyed walking around Vancouver’s Olympic sites and all the various pavilions downtown in spectacular sunshine and unseasonably warm weather. I had no idea that there would be all those international and Canadian regional pavilions creating a kind of world’s fair atmosphere in the city core. In some of the pavilions there was a focus on culture and artistry. They featured the visual and performance art that spoke eloquently about their local culture, whether that was the Canadian North pavilion and its beautiful crafts and throat singers or the Italian pavilion that focused on its global design reputation.

And this smorgasbord of culture – this orgy of colour, sound and design that filled my days– followed an opening ceremony that thrilled me and made me proud of my country and my city. And the opening ceremony was very much about art. Artists – dancers, musicians and the creators of indigenous and folk imagery – combined their talents to tell the world about who we Canadians are. I thought it was wonderful and I was particularly impressed by the slam poet from our Northern Territories, Shane Koyzcan, who wowed the crowd – he and k.d. lang.

For me, the Cultural Olympics has been thrilling as well. I saw the profoundly moving Robert Lepage’s Blue Dragon from Montreal, a majestic Taiwanese dance company in its first appearance in Canada, a Chinese multi-disciplinary extravaganza and a personal favourite, Nevermore, by Catalyst Theatre of Edmonton. None of this would have been available to me without the presence of the Olympics and Paralympics arts funding.

Besides the incredible richness of the cultural offerings of the Olympic Games were, of course, the actual Games themselves. The Olympics were a festival of greatness and our “Own the Podium” campaign was a constant topic in our local media. And whereas we celebrated all the athletes who made the podium, our enthusiasm has naturally exploded every time a Canadian athlete earned a medal.

But our roaring wave of cheers at both the Whistler and Vancouver presentation centres was loudest when, understandably, our BC athletes stood proudly on the podia. Maelle Ricker and Ashley McIvor brought the house down.

I had the time of my life during these Games and one reason is that I live downtown and everything was very accessible for me. But I have this feeling that, like Nero, I was fiddling while my city was preparing to burn. Now that all the hoopla is over, I fear that a profoundly anticlimactic cultural famine is ahead because I will be living in a province that has drastically cut financial support to both amateur sports and the arts.

Frankly, all this excess of spending is an embarrassment to those of us who are following the provincial government's cuts to amateur sports and the arts in our school system and in our non-profit sector. After the incredible cultural smorgasbord during the Games, the Liberal government seems to feel that the arts are not important at all for those of us who live here. To them, the arts here will flourish only when international eyes are focused on our region. According to the analysis of the recently announced BC budget, Cultural Alliance executive director, Amir Alibhai, estimates that arts funding in BC will be approximately half of what it was in the past.

How can a government rationalize this orgy of spending on arts and culture for a two-week period of world attention and then halve financial support to the development of the same skills the Games and cultural festival celebrate? And if, as so many fear, the citizens of BC inherit a massive debt as a result of these Games, any hope of restoring funding to the sports and cultural agencies that have recently lost their provincial funding seems even more unlikely. We are robbing the next generation of exactly the experience we are currently so invested in celebrating.

Worse, it seems to me, is the coming economic wasteland of personal spending. I have spent more money on cultural events in the past few weeks than I have for a long, long time and I have bought Games merchandise like so many of us have in Vancouver – the nationally branded mittens, hats and hoodies are omnipresent. (The Bay’s Olympic Superstore did over $1million a day selling nationalistic swag.) As well, I have been spending more money in restaurants than I have in years; at one Olympic event, I bought my friends two small glasses of beer, one hot dog and one green salad that cost me $27!

As a result of all this celebrating and spending, I cannot help but expect my fellow Vancouverites to cut back on discretionary personal spending after the Games and this could be another body blow to our cultural agencies.

There is no doubt that very challenging times are ahead for our artists and I see no solution to the problem. The Arts have never been as compelling a political issue in BC as they have been in Quebec, so I do not have faith in a political solution to the impending cultural financial funding drought. I suspect, however, that the marketplace is going to play a much stronger role in the programming/creation decisions of many of our Arts organizations and artists.

Sadly, for the Arts in BC, there seems to be no doubt in anyone's mind that tough times are ahead. One massive step forward for the Games; ten steps backwards after. What a way to step off the podium!