A workshop of Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Story. The play’s World Premiere was recently postponed due to a presenting partner’s funding shortfall. Image by David Cooper.

For me personally, scarcity means juggling 4 jobs; it means losing a seasonal contract when one of the country’s leading performing arts presenters is too broke to hire me back; it means the unexpected ‘windfall’ of $330 that I’m being paid to write this very article still leaves me a little short of what I need to stop worrying about October groceries and start worrying about November rent.

At the start of 2024, I had a conversation with one of the country’s leading playwrights and theatre creators about how, despite his deep bench of productions and accolades, he still feels a desperation, a fear that there’s never enough time, never enough resources. I’ve been imagining that there’s a level of success I can reach where that goes away and I can relax a little, and resenting that I’ve been busting my ass and haven’t gotten there yet. But there is no there to get to.

I feel like Rose, touring the Titanic and crunching the numbers and realizing there aren’t enough lifeboats. Last year, 16% of project grants submitted to the Canada Council were successful and about 35% of the above mentioned touring grants. At the same time, new austerity measures handed down by the federal government are requiring the CCA to cut back to the tune of $20 million between 2024 and 2027. In this year’s spring intake for the BC Arts Council’s Professional Development grants, 28% were successful, and overall BCAC success rates are around 20%. Funding is in decline, audiences are in decline. But that’s not entirely a product of this moment. The specifics may be, but the scarcity is endemic.

In our conversation about this piece, ECT Core Artist Kevin Kerr talked about a mentor telling him in the 90s they should be starting a company 20 years earlier, that they’d ‘missed the boat’ on having access to funding and infrastructure. Now, another couple of decades on, that’s exactly how I’ve been feeling having joined the Electrics. The idea of building something like Electric Company—a core-funded, artist-run, independent theatre company with a 30-year pedigree of often large-scale productions—feels like an impossible fantasy.

Full Light of Day. Image by Don Lee

But this seemingly unworkable system is the only way I know how to be an artist. Last summer I ended a submission to Rumble Theatre’s cabaret series with the following:

“I'm literally begging, that's the level of desperation I have reached as an artist. Please let me perform something for the audience you have. Every thing else I've tried for 10 years has gotten me fuck all so what's the harm in a little transparent desperation at this point. Please select this submission.”

I want to surrender the need for institutional approval I’ve become consumed by. I want to relate to art as a sacred calling again rather than an impossible profession. The only thing that seems to break this trance is the realization that I’m prostrating myself on a collapsing altar. There’s no surge of new funding coming. There’s no massive increase in ticket sales coming. There’s no miracle that’s going to make the Canadian arts system viable again, even for the minority of people it ever worked for.

Self-portrait. Image contributed by author.

We are stewards of an ancient craft, and it seems to be part of the nature of that craft to be facing a decline. Whether it’s Puritanism condemning art as immoral, colonialism violently suppressing it, neoliberalism excluding people from the systems they set up to produce it, or Terminal Capitalism keeping us stuck in economic precarity, there are always forces conspiring to prevent people from making art. Maybe our work is not to manufacture abundance, but to tell scarcity “screw you, I’m going to do it anyway.”

And maybe we’re not meant to inherit our predecessors’ systems. They made them in response to the conditions making it hard for them to be artists. We need to figure out how to respond to the conditions making it hard for us, in the present. The only thing we ever really inherit is the struggle.

So I could continue to pour my time and attention into these inadequate systems, hoping that I’m able to come up on the winning side eventually. I could write a whiny article about how hard and unfair it all is. Or, I can figure out how to situate myself within the many forces conspiring to make being an artist a challenge so I can spend my one short life making some art. I’m so desperate to be the best and the most special that I’m going to miss out on answering this calling I have felt in the bloody centre of my heart for longer than time or memory.

What a waste that would be.