The Doras

This morning I attended the Dora Mavor Moore Awards press conference, where the nominees for that award for the 2007/2008 season were announced. This season, which is now coming to a close, is the first season that I have been a figure – albeit a small and inconsequential one - in the arts scene in Toronto. But here I am, in this room, at this event, part of it all. What a great feeling. How lucky I feel today. I don’t know everyone in the room, but I know quite a few, even if they wouldn’t recognize me I know them and their contributions, I respect them, admire them and feel a camaraderie with them. I have seen many of the shows that were nominated for awards, and more excitingly have worked with quite a few of the people who put them on, since they were performed on our stages here at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

What an amazing thing to be part of this community. To be in a room with the actors, dancers, opera singers, producers, directors, playwrights and administrators who make the Toronto performing arts scene hum. Who work together and collaborate and support one another. Who create and perform and support productions that electrify and provoke people, who evoke tears and laughter, fear and anger in their audiences. To see people honoured, like Fiona Reid, the late Richard Bradshaw and Bluma Appel, who have worked in this field for years to not just add to the aesthetic of the city – although that aim also holds its place in this city of concrete and steel – but who are political. They are dreamers, but they are active dreamers, who take it past the questioning to actively challenge the way things are and put forth ideas of how things might be. Who give their life and their personal finances to stage performances that provide this platform for questioning and change because to them it is what must be done. These are artists! Not flakes, not irrational idealists, but pillars of society, no less than lawyers and doctors, who are dedicated against some phenomenal odds to this career choice – no, this life choice, which is important, essential, and very, very difficult for so many reasons. As Ken Gass, Artistic Director of the Factory Theatre, put it, these are people who work to put bread on the table and raise families but who do so with a conscience of what is happening in the rest of the world. Above all, I think, they are free, and that is what the artist in me envies and admires the most. They have done what they wanted to do, and the results are beautiful.