This text is part of the special Theater booklet
Amy Blackmore has always been very involved in English-language theater in Montreal. General and artistic director of the MainLine Theatre, general manager of the Montreal St-Ambroise Fringe Festival and the Bouge d’ici Dance festival, the actress and contemporary dance choreographer knows her community by heart.
“The Anglophone theater community in Montreal is a very resilient community,” she says. We need it to survive in Quebec. Somehow, this habit helped us through the pandemic. »
The multidisciplinary artist says that until 1991, the year the Montreal Fringe festival was created, there were very few places where English-speaking artists could perform. Amy Blackmore points out that the most significant impact of the pandemic period on English-speaking artists concerns their mental health, and that more and more English-speaking Quebec artists are choosing to leave the profession, or even Quebec.
The figures prove him right: the Quebec Drama Federation (QDF) recorded this year the lowest number of members in its history. Still according to the QDF, the pandemic would have contributed to the loss of more than 25% of the members of the organization, that is to say a hundred people.
“I have a friend who said to me, ‘Amy, I’m giving up acting. I’m going to work for a catering service. It’s too difficult, I don’t have a job anymore.” And she is far from being the only one, confides Mme Blackmore. Artists have to put their dreams of starting families on hold because it’s too uncertain an environment. It’s a rollercoaster all year round! »
Two backgrounds, two different covers
Now vice-president of the Quebec Theater Council (CQT), Amy Blackmore believes that the future of theater depends on the next generation and that Quebec’s cultural milieu should be better suited to welcoming young artists. While they welcome the reopening of theaters, she notes, however, that French-speaking theaters opened their doors earlier than English-speaking ones.
“The information you hear in French is not the same as the information we receive in English,” she notes. There is a difference in the way the facts are reported. I think that’s why the English community has hesitated for so long to reopen its doors. »
To this hypothesis, Mme Blackmore adds the fact that English-speaking professional artists and companies do not work with the Union des artistes (UDA), but with an association of Canadian actors, Equity, managed in a completely different way. According to the artist, “it is not because one of the two unions gives the green light to the resumption of rehearsals and filming that the other will follow in its footsteps”.
In order to remedy the cleavage that seems to exist between the French-speaking world and the English-speaking world, certain institutions have decided to collaborate with their English-speaking counterparts, such as the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) and the Centaur Theatre. This union gave birth, among other things, to the play kiss by Michel Marc Bouchard, directed by Eda Holmes and performed on stage at the two theaters last September.
A committed environment
For her part, Amy Blackmore wants to help local artists by increasing the number of local companies that will participate in the Fringe festival this year. Even if the artist tries, to the best of her ability, to make a new place for emerging artists, she nevertheless notes that the task will not be easy after two years of pandemic.
“A lot of artists wrote shows during the pandemic, she illustrates. Today, they all want to play them and that creates a sort of bottleneck for the producers. We do not have the resources to host all the projects, far from it. »
Nevertheless, M.me Blackmore is convinced that the spirit of creativity and self-production that characterizes the English-speaking cultural milieu of Quebec will help prepare a bright future for young artists. “I really believe that the future is art with a social impact, especially from the point of view of diversity,” she concludes. However, we will always be open to diversity because we are part of this rich diversity that coexists in Quebec. »