Welcome to episode zero of Only Here, an occasional podcast from Nakai Theatre in the Yukon.

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Transcript:

Welcome to episode zero of Only Here, an occasional podcast from Nakai Theatre in the Yukon. I'm Artistic Director Jacob Zimmer.

This fall, we'll be releasing conversations about creating and producing theatre in these specific times. On life as a production professional in the North, on theatre's relationship to environmental activism, DIY solar event battery projects for the bush, and artists, activists, and academics on working in scenes.

These are episodes dedicatedly in the weeds of performing arts and event production in Canada. It feels crucial at this moment to have candid and specific conversations in a field so often talking for promotion or funding. And yes, these episodes are the conclusion of our professional development series funded by Canada's Department of Heritage COVID Relief Program, the Canada Performing Arts Workers Resilience Fund, or CPWARF. (The acronyms of COVID were amazing.)

Anyways, we began by suspecting that resilience is a collective action rather than a personal trait and that personal resilience required a right relation with the rest of the planet and the people we live with, work with, and for. So we started with local training and practicing together and also by having conversations across distance.

It's those conversations that you'll hear only here.

In these first five episodes on Scenes, we hear from national artists, organizers, and production folks entangled in how the performing arts and creative communities can thrive. We started with a prompt from Brian Eno's articulation of Scenius, the social version of genius.

Here's the quote,

"Like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and gelato and so on, who sort of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution. As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that really wasn't a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people. Some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were. All sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent.

And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. And so I came up with this word, scenius. the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people. I think it's a more useful way to think about culture. Let's forget the idea of genius for a little while. Let's think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work."

So, with that quote in mind, I wanted to talk to artists and organizers who worked in relationship to scenes of some sort. About the promises and the pitfalls and the personal realities of that, and how scenes contribute to their lives.

I'm so grateful for the opportunities to talk with artist, organizer, and teacher, Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware. burlesque performer and academic forsa, or Julia Mateus, theater maker and producer Beth Kates, tap dancer and podcaster Travis Knights, and filmmaker Lulu Keating. Those episodes will be coming out over the next weeks, followed by a series of conversations connecting performing arts and environmental focuses and the realities of being a live performance production worker in the Yukon.

Thanks for listening, and please, like, subscribe, and share. You can find Nakai Theatre at nakaitheatre. com on the internet, and on the Facebooks and the Instagrams.

Thanks very much. Hope you're well.

Music in this episode, from the very accomplished Brian Eno, and the much less accomplished Tenacious Lichen.