Cinderella City: how Hogtown transformed itself into one of the world's great cultural capitals.

Cinderella City: how Hogtown transformed itself into one of the world's great cultural capitals. IT IS A SPRING SATURDAY NIGHT IN Toronto. Municipal tulips glowunder the lights of University Avenue. Bouncers are putting on theirsize 50 jackets, ready for their shifts in the Entertainment District.Fashionistas huddle in cashmere cashmereAnimal-hair fibre forming the downy undercoat of the Kashmir goat. The fibre became known for its use in beautiful shawls and other handmade items produced in Kashmir, India. The fibres have diameters finer than those of the best wools. shawls at Yorkville's HazeltonHotel sidewalk cafe. Everyone on the Queen streetcar is using asmartphone. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] And in the Air Canada Centre Coordinates: ••[ , Leafs Nation is gathered, 18,800strong, full of noisy hope for mayb-e, maybe, this year, a Stanley Cup Stanley Cup:see hockey, ice. Stanley CupTrophy awarded annually to the winning team of the National Hockey League championship. Named for its donor, the Canadian governor-general Frederick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston .Toronto is the home of the '67 Champions. How can the gods notunderstand that it is our turn? If the cup ever does come back, it will arrive in a differentToronto. The Air Canada Centre, the Hazelton Hotel, the EntertainmentDistrict and even the tulips were not there the last time Torontoniansclaimed Lord Stanley's prize. And on this hypothetical Saturdaynight, in this new Toronto New Toronto(tərŏn`tō), part of metropolitan Toronto, S Ont., Canada, on Lake Ontario. , plenty of people have found ways to forgetthe Leafs. Two thousand of them are on the edge of their Jack Diamond-designedseats at the Four Seasons Centre as Tosca stabs the police chief. AntonKuerti's fingers are dancing their way through Mendelssohn for2,500 at Roy Thomson Hall Roy Thomson Hall is a concert hall located at 60 Simcoe Street in Toronto, Canada. It is the home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. . The Sony Centre is under renovation, its3,000 new seats just about ready for the folks who have booked to seeMerchants of Bollywood. There are 700 devout fans of Tafelmusik'sbaroque orchestra The Baroque orchestra is the earliest example of a true orchestra which came into existence in the mid-late 1600s. Its origins were in France where Jean-Baptiste Lully added the newly re-designed hautboy and transverse flutes to his vingt-quatre violons du Roy. in full Annex gear at Trinity-St. Paul's Churchon Bloor. David Mirvish's hoofers are tearing up the scenery for6,000 people in four glamorous theatres, and Albert Schultz For the Australian politician with the same name, see Alby Schultz Albert Schultz (born 1963 in Port Hope, Ontario) is a Canadian actor, director and the founding artistic director of Toronto's celebrated Soulpepper Theatre Company. is making300 people cry at Soulpepper. At the Isabel Bader Theatre, Lethal andhis dance crew, the Supernaturalz, are introducing another totally bucchip hop hip-hop? or hip hopn.1. A popular urban youth culture, closely associated with rap music and with the style and fashions of African-American inner-city residents.2. Rap music.adj. number at the Dare to B school-to-school dance-off. The lights are burning at the Queen Street offices of Luminato,where they are reviewing locations for music, dance, art and theatrethat will be seen by a million people this summer--about the same numberthat stayed up past their bedtime for Scotiabank's Nuit Blanche Nuit Blanche ( literally White Night or All Nighter in French) is an annual all-night cultural festival. The festival lasts from sundown until sunrise on the first Saturday and Sunday in October and has, since its premiere in Paris under mayor Bertrand Delano? in inOctober. The custodians are finishing up at the Royal Ontario Museum The Royal Ontario Museum, commonly known as the ROM (rhyming with Tom), is a major museum for world culture and natural history in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ,the Art Gallery of Ontario The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Toronto's downtown Chinatown district, on Dundas Street West between McCaul Street and Beverley Street. and the Gardiner Museum The Gardiner Museum is a ceramic art museum in Toronto, Canada.Founded in 1984 by George and Helen Gardiner, the museum has been described as a "jewel box of ceramic treasures" [1]. after a crowdedSaturday. They are finding fewer lost mittens now that it is May. AtUnion Station, a gaggle of artists is ready for a drink. They are theDiaspora Dialogues troupe, and they have done a full day of free poetry,music and theatre for surprised travellers. In their homes in Moore Park Moore Park could refer to these places: Moore Park, New South Wales a park and suburb in Sydney, Australia Moore Park, Queensland Moore Park, Toronto in Canada or Leslieville, couples are online, aglass of Prince Edward County Prince Edward County may refer to: Prince Edward County, Virginia, United States Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada Chardonnay beside the PC. They are bookingseats for Stratford (they will be among 600,000 others who visit) or forthe Shaw Festival The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertoire theatre company in North America. Founded in 1962, its original mandate was to stimulate interest in G. , or maybe one of the summer kids' events at theNational Arts Centre An art center or arts centre is distinct from an art gallery or art museum. An arts centre is a functional community centre with a specific remit to encourage arts practice and to provide facilities such as theatre space, gallery space, venues for musical performance, . Cottagers are reviewing the phone numbers for theseptic tank service guys and checking out the websites for the GuelphJazz Festival and Parry Sound's Festival of the Sound. Back at the Air Canada Centre, as crestfallen crest��fall��en?adj.Dispirited and depressed; dejected.crestfall Leafs fans are filingout, glum glum?adj. glum��mer, glum��mest1. Moody and melancholy; dejected.2. Gloomy; dismal.n.1. , but still believers, there is one thing sure. This Saturdaywas a better night for the arts than for hockey. In Toronto, it often is. Although a friend warned me it might bedangerous to say this, I'll do it anyway. In and around this city,there is a diverse, exciting and innovative arts scene that is bringingToronto very close to being one of the leading cultural centres in theworld. Why should it be dangerous to say this? First, we all hate Toronto.As the municipal elections grind on, even the folks who want to run theplace speak endlessly about Toronto's shortcomings. In the rest ofOntario, and certainly in the rest of Canada, to mention that Torontohas done okay at something can provoke a constitutional crisis. Second,the deficit cloud darkens every blue sky. The arts in Ontario sufferedterribly in the mid 1990s and the scars have not healed. If we admitthat the arts are doing well, will "they" cut back again? Andthird, more seriously, art is struggle. Every success is fragile, andthere are not always successes. Actors like R.H. Thomson worry aboutdisintegrating, out-moded theatres. In the last 15 years, at least 30arts organizations have disappeared from Toronto. Nevertheless, as Galileo said, it moves. The accomplishments areundeniable, the quality is indisputable, the passion is everywhere. Thechanges have been jaw-dropping. Those of us who arrived or grew up inToronto in the Stanley Cup 1960s remember that the parades were notCaribana or Pride, but King Billy and Eaton's. What happened? Toronto is neither inspired by nor burdened with a history as agreat arts town. It is not informed by the thousand-year cultures ofAsia or Europe. The struggling citizens of "muddy York" or"Hogtown" or "Toronto the Good" had other things ontheir minds. Outside town, it was worse. Well-bred colonists such as SusannaMoodie, writing in Roughing It in the Bush, told of learning othersatisfactions: "I have contemplated a well-hoed ridge of potatoeson that bush farm with as much delight as in years long past I hadexperienced in examining a fine painting in some well-appointeddrawing-room." Most of the organizations that Toronto treasures as great culturalinstitutions are only a few generations old. The ROM started life as theMuseum of Natural History and Fine Arts in 1857; the Royal Conservatoryof Music Royal Conservatory of Music may refer to: The Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Belgium The Madrid Conservatory (Real Conservatorio Superior de M��sica de Madrid), Spain The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, Denmark The Royal Academy of Music, London was born in 1886, and the AGO in 1900. The first national attempt at an arts policy came in 1951 with theMassey report. Since then, writes Joyce Zemans (art historian and formerCanada Council head) in Where Is Here? Canadian Culture in a GlobalizedEnvironment: "Unlike most European countries, Canada has notclearly formulated its purpose in the creation of cultural policy ...Without the clarity of purpose which underlies policy development inmany European countries or an understanding of what has been achieved,we have no framework for action:' If the steady progress of a long history or coherent nationalstrategies cannot explain the positive changes, then what happened? Here is my theory. A great cultural city requires five things:artists, audiences, creative spaces, patrons and government support. Weare trained to believe that government support is the key. As LouisNapoleon is supposed to have said to a critic: "You say we have noliterature? This is the fault of the Department of the Interior!"But it is not. Government can incent in��cent?tr.v. in��cent��ed, in��cent��ing, in��centsTo incentivize: "would use tax breaks to incent corporations to invest in their future"Scott Canon. and comfort artists, can developand encourage audiences, can finance and make way for creative spaces,and can reward patrons. But government cannot, will not and should notdo it all. The four other conditions must be met by varied means. Thegreat good fortune of Toronto is that, now, all five conditions havebeen fulfilled in just that way. And something else, even moretransformative, is underway too. But first, the five conditions. THE ARTISTS Counting artists is a slippery exercise. The definitions are tough,and artists won't stand still. The figures are always slightlydifferent. But we do not need precision math to get the right answer. Byall counts Toronto has the greatest number of cultural jobs anywhere inthe country. And as the last provincial budget noted, those are jobsthat were not hit by the economic bad times: "In 2009, despite theglobal recession, creative-industry jobs increased by nearly three percent." The artists are in Toronto because the work is here. They are herebecause other artists are here. And there is something else. It is thenature of many artists to feel "different," to see themselvesoutside the mainstream. Toronto is a big city, with all the big citystuff, but oddly enough, it is not a mainstream city. It is a city ofneighbourhoods, a city of minorities, a city of debates and questionsand media to report them from every point of view. It is a city (mostly)of tolerance. It is a city where artists can feel as good as artistsever feel. One of the many reports on Toronto as a cultural city wiselyrecommended that planners "leave room for the outlandish." AndToronto does. THE AUDIENCES Statistics Canada has the facts, in a snappily titled 2005 article"Understanding Culture Consumption in Canada." It is based ona survey that relates people's characteristics to their attendanceat cultural events. The conclusions: you are more likely to buy ticketsif you are well educated and well off. If you are a woman, you are alittle more likely to go, and if you are in management, business,finance, education or administration (as opposed to primary industry ormanufacturing), you are quite a lot more likely to be in an audience.And if you fit all those qualifications, and also have a spouse orparent who fits them, you very likely have a file at Ticketmaster. This profile is a good fit with the average Torontonian. The cityhas the second highest average income in the country and the mostwealthy people. It gets that wealth from a concentration of jobs inbusiness, finance and management sectors. Torontonians are welleducated: 58 percent have post-secondary degrees. That base is a natural arts audience, but yes, it is an elite base.What is growing the base is the city's population of early adoptersof technology. The digital world is providing undreamt-of ways tointroduce, promote and socialize so��cial��ize?v. so��cial��ized, so��cial��iz��ing, so��cial��iz��esv.tr.1. To place under government or group ownership or control.2. To make fit for companionship with others; make sociable. the arts experience. The audience canjoin the ensemble, mash up the scores, rewrite the script, chill withthe artists. Ownership, involvement: powerful forces. Toronto is alsogrowing a diverse arts audience. With a wealth of smaller companies, anestablished television production industry, thriving multicultural artsschools from Sheridan College to the Ontario College of Art and Designand endless cultural festivals, Toronto is experimenting withrepertoire, casting and technology to provide fresh experiences for adiverse city. The audience is never the problem; it is always theopportunity. THE CREATIVE SPACES In May 2003, Toronto's cultural world shook. The federal andprovincial governments announced an unprecedented, massive investment inarts building. They put $300 million on the table and stood back. It wasa gold rush; and when the claims office closed, five organizations drankchampagne: the RUM, the AGO, the National Ballet School, the RoyalConservatory of Music and the Canadian Opera Company The Canadian Opera Company (COC), located in Toronto, Ontario, is the largest opera company in Canada and the sixth largest in North America.It was established in 1950 as the Royal Conservatory Opera Company, by Nicholas Goldschmidt and the late Herman Geiger-Torel. . Roy Thomson Halland the Gardiner Museum also got millions for renovations; and latereven more funding piled up: for the new OCAD, the Toronto InternationalFilm Festival's Bell Lightbox, and for the film and televisioncentre, Corus Quay, as part of the Toronto Waterfront project. The bestinternational teams would be commissioned to design the buildings;Toronto would blaze in architectural glory; artists would feelthemselves valued and inspired as they worked in clean and valid spaces.New exhibits, new genres, new productions would all be possible. Therehad to be a catch. But, incredibly, there was not, and Toronto wastransformed. Suddenly its institutions are making top-ten lists. Torontohas the third largest English-language theatre centre in the world; thefourth largest producing opera company in North America; and creativeindustries in Ontario collectively form the third largest cluster inNorth America, after New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of and California. The openings of these great cultural palaces go hand in hand withanother good news story: the little spaces. The Ontario government andthe City of Toronto have cooperated in innovative ways to establishsmaller artistic spaces populated by little companies and individualartists. In the Distillery District, low-rent art space is availablethrough Artscape; the Toronto Arts Foundation offers artists cheapbed-and-breakfast space on Toronto Islands; the renovation of theGladstone Hotel sparked the development of West Queen West, where zoninglaws encourage galleries and craft shops. Toronto makes its streets cultural spaces too, regularly shuttingdown traffic for buskers, jazz singers, poetry slams, behemoth behemoth(bē`hĭmŏth, bĭhē`–)[Heb.,=plural of beast], large, fanciful primeval monster, like Leviathan, evoking the hippopotamus mentioned in the Book of Job. paradesand huge city-wide festivals like Luminato, Nuit Blanche, Doors Open andthe Toronto International Film Festival. THE PATRONS The great cultural building boom could have been a disaster. Theamount of funding provided by government was not even close to the needsof the major cultural organizations. As Barbara Jenkins of WilfridLaurier University Wilfrid Laurier University is a public university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It also has wing in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. It is named in honour of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the seventh Prime Minister of Canada. wrote in the Canadian Journal of Communication in2005, only about 35 percent of the funding would come from government."These new institutions will have to rely on private funds, eitherthrough increased attendance or from private donors;' she says."A total of $488.5 million must still be fundraised from privatedonors, far more money than has ever been donated by private individualsin Toronto's history. Individual cultural institutions will have toorganize these funding drives on theft own." The institutions did organize the fund drives. But they did notraise $488 million from the private sector. They raised $899 million.They had to: the lovely buildings they financed were almost all muchmore expensive than planned. But the money came in: the $30 million giftand the $50 donation tacked onto a subscription renewal. It was anothertransforming experience. Arts fundraising in Toronto had depended on afew reliable sources and an attitude of "aw shucks shuck?n.1. a. A husk, pod, or shell, as of a pea, hickory nut, or ear of corn.b. The shell of an oyster or clam.2. Informal Something worthless. , if you reallywant to give us something that would be great." A friend who workedin the arts told me of joining a large organization in the 1990s to findthat only four of the 30 board members had ever made a donation. Welaughed at the thought. Now arts administrators hire directors ofdevelopment who are professional, assertive and resilient. They knowthat the funding campaigns gave Toronto a new, satisfied base of manythousands of donors who have experienced the pleasure and significanceof contributing. They will be called on again. And asked to bring theirfriends. GOVERNMENT SUPPORT First, there is no such thing as enough government support for thearts. Every need that is met produces another need. Second, there is nosuch thing as too little arts funding for some taxpayers. In the middleof these competing views, Ontario, Toronto and the Canada Council forthe Arts are seen today as providing reasonable support, and that ishigh praise. Ontario's Dalton McGuinty Liberals actually have athought-out cultural platform. Their government fundingorganizations--the Ontario Arts Council The Ontario Arts Council (OAC) is a Canadian organization in the province of Ontario whose purpose is to fund professional arts activity. Founded in 1963 by Levi Pettler, OAC has played a vital role in promoting and assisting the development of the arts and artists for the , the Ontario Media DevelopmentCorporation and the Trillium Foundation--get good marks as institutionswith people who get it and provide real help. Ontario has smartlyincluded other ministries, such as finance, immigration immigration,entrance of a person (an alien) into a new country for the purpose of establishing permanent residence. Motives for immigration, like those for migration generally, are often economic, although religious or political factors may be very important. , economicdevelopment, and training colleges and universities in creativeinitiatives. Toronto has been thinking about the creative city conceptlonger than any other jurisdiction. Its programs are often original andcutting edge. As for the feds, Joyce Zemans writes: "Due largely tothe Canadian commitment to the arm's length tradition and thecentral role that artists have played in the development of [Canada]Council policies ... Canada has been more successful than almost anyother English-speaking nation in supporting individual artists andproviding access to the professional arts." What does this new cultural city mean to The Rest of Ontario? Noapplause can be expected. There will be suspicion that resources will besiphoned off and tax dollars unfairly distributed. Local artists andaudiences will fear marginalization mar��gin��al��ize?tr.v. mar��gin��al��ized, mar��gin��al��iz��ing, mar��gin��al��iz��esTo relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing. and deprivation. The facts, however, are that nearly half the population of theprovince lives in Toronto's metropolitan area. And as DimitryAnastakis points out elsewhere in this issue, Toronto's prosperityhelps all of Canada. These facts will not satisfy anyone in TROO. But our politicalsystem has only a shaky grasp of representation by population; and therural ridings will continue to be served, as they are now. Ontariorequires the major Toronto cultural organizations to do outreach, whichis often code for passing on some of the grant money to assist smallercentres. The Trillium Foundation is an advocate for arts in the townsand villages, with funding and prizes. Ontario funds municipal artscouncils to work at meeting the five conditions in their own areas. Infact, as the arts prosper in Toronto, some residents of TROO may getmore culture than they actually want. The five conditions for a creative city are falling into place, butthere are more overarching changes going on in the cultural landscape,changes that could rearrange everything we have thought and done aboutCanadian culture. Almost from the beginning, Canadian cultural policyhas had one goal: defence against the United States. Our concern aboutthe overwhelming influence of American culture led to the creation ofthe CBC (1) (Cell Broadcast Center) See cell broadcast.(2) (Cipher Block Chaining) In cryptography, a mode of operation that combines the ciphertext of one block with the plaintext of the next block. and the National Film Board. Especially in the media, itproduced a complete "tool kit" of cultural protection, fromsubsidies to content quotas to simultaneous substitution. It alsoproduced hilarious debates about what Canadian content is and endlessspeeches in which the phrase "telling our own stories" wasrequired by CRTC CRTC Canadian Radio-Television & Telecommunications CommissionCRTC Combat Readiness Training CenterCRTC Cathode Ray Tube ControllerCRTC China Railway Telecommunications CenterCRTC Cold Region Test CenterCRTC Continuously Regenerated Trap Column regulation. But the tool kit worked. Canada has nowproduced a large, confident, qualified group of artists. However, manyof them think differently about Canadian culture. They play offence, notdefence. They work every day with globalizing technologies. They are notworried about Buffalo anymore. They are competing with Barcelona andBerlin; and they see Canada not as a survivor, but as a winner. In theCity of Toronto 2003 Creative City plan, the writers express it thisway: We used to think of London, New York, Paris, Rome and San Francisco as places that existed in another realm from Toronto. But now Toronto is very much like these cities we once envied. These cities work with their minds. Their populations display a potent mix of high education and cultural diversity. But none of them can claim the combination of the high educational and diversity levels of Torontonians. These globalized artists are not in the majority yet, but theirvoices will be heard and their policy demands will be very different.They could lead a revolution in cultural policy: a shift from theAtwoodian notion of survival to a brasher "Own the Podium"strategy. This does not mean government can abandon the arts: thereverse should be true. But the weight of comforting regulations withtheir intricate balancing of regional sensibilities, genre protection,huge companies, individual artists, copyright and content rules is beingincreasingly defeated by nimble artists and borderless technology.Ownership will probably continue as a bedrock: our companies will be asCanadian as possible under the circumstances. Most other regulation isin the furrowed brow stage of change. A second truly radical change is the position of culture in oureconomic and political thinking. Culture has always been a politicalside issue. Now, it has moved to the forefront. Investment bankers talkabout the Bohemian Index, MBA schools put creativity on the curriculumand arts executives are asked to sit on economic panels. Barbara Jenkins saw this shift in the role of culture in 2005, whenshe noted that cultural events drew more visits to cities than sportingevents and that retail sales per square metre are higher in NewYork's Museum of Modern Art store than at Wal-Mart. She writes: Toronto's Cultural Renaissance must be understood as a complex, global phenomenon ... Economically, cultural institutions are seen as a way to revitalize flagging depressed industrial-based economies through cultural tourism and increased spending on leisure and entertainment. Culture and cultural diversity are also seen as attractions that will draw "Creative Class" workers to a city, accompanied by the kinds of high value-added industries that employ such workers. Can Toronto win in this global economic competition? It has manyadvantages: a hundred languages are spoken here; the city'spolicies and values accept and encourage diversity far more than many ofits rivals; and the five conditions for culture are met. While the greatcities of Europe struggle with terrible unemployment and debt, Torontocan forge ahead. The city is a new competitor, with a fresh look. Thereis a sense that history is calling. Globe and Mail reporter DougSaunders, based in London, told Toronto Life: "In Toronto, it feelslike everyone is building the city. The most dramatic parts ofLondon's history are in the past, but in Toronto, the next 100years will be the most exciting." A dynamic cultural sector, says the Conference Board of Canada The Conference Board of Canada is a not-for-profit Canadian organization dedicated to researching and analyzing economic trends, as well as organizational performance and public policy issues. , isa magnet for talent and a catalyst for economic prosperity: Our estimate, taking into account direct, indirect and induced contributions is that the economic footprint of the culture sector was approximately 84.6 billion, or 7.4 per cent of Canada's total real GDP, and that the culture sector contributed 1.1 million jobs to the economy. Culture, dreamy, prettily dressed and used to sitting in the backrow, is now being pushed forward and loaded with our heaviest hopes forprosperity and growth. Is she tough enough to do the job? I think so.Northrop Frye said that the Canadian existential question was"Where is Here?" Now we know that Here is a place we imagineand create every day, alone and together. Our lives, good or bad, dependon how well we are allowed and inspired to imagine. A creative, culturalcity that values imagination and all its freedoms is an opportunity weshouldn't miss. Even if Toronto never wins another Stanley Cup. Trina McQueen, a broadcaster and journalist, sits on the boards ofthe Canadian Opera Company, McClelland and Stewart and the Banff Centrefor the Arts. She has served on numerous other cultural boards,including Canadian Stage, the CBC and the Governor General'sPerforming Arts Awards.