On Wednesday, May 6, at the Rialto Theater in Montreal, the English-Language Arts Network (ELAN) unveiled their most recent initiative: Arts Alive! Quebec. ELAN granted six regions creative leeway to each develop an event showcasing art in their communities. The goal of the project, as Production Coordinator of the project, Anne Clark, explains is “to raise the awareness of local people to the local artists that they have living in their community.” The project also aims at strengthening the resources for the various regions through help from ELAN, but also by collaborating with each other and sharing ideas.
The Arts Alive! Quebec project was made possible thanks to funding from the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage. ELAN has cultivated the project and nurtured it in anticipation until its grand launch at the Rialto Hotel press conference. They have also partnered up with the CBC, who will be providing coverage of the six Arts Alive! Quebec events, which in honour of the initiative will be launching a social media project which invites people to send in photos and videos of how they see arts alive in their communities. Jeanette Kelly, who was on hand at the press conference representing the CBC said: “We will collect them and put them on an interactive website where people from across the province and around the world will be able to see how arts is alive where you live.”
Since their inception, Executive Directors of Grove Hall, Mark and Tina Bye, have been working tirelessly to build a venue for the performing arts in the Chateauguay Valley. They garnered support from ELAN early on and eventually that support through various projects led to their inclusion in Arts Alive! Quebec. Some of the regions have longstanding traditions of artistic activity, whereas others like Huntingdon are more recent in their efforts to develop it. It may be a more recent endeavor, however that by no means belittles its importance to ELAN: “We think that what is happening in Huntingdon is tremendous and we’re really happy to support that,” says Guy Rogers, Executive Director of ELAN.
Grove Hall also invited the MRC of the Haut-Saint-Laurent to be a part of Arts Alive! Quebec with them. Luc De Tremmerie was on hand at the press conference to present the MRC’s role, while Tina Bye presented Grove Hall’s part. De Tremmerie said of the partnership “it was a natural fit given our mandate in promoting arts and culture in the region and so we jumped at the opportunity to be a part of it.”
The MRC’s portion will kick-start the Huntingdon edition of Arts Alive! and will take place on Saturday, August 9 and Sunday, August 10. They will be hosting an Arts festival which will showcase artists and artisans from around the Valley. Saturday night they will hand the stage over to the youth Punk-Rock bands of the area for a concert while Sunday in addition to the arts festival, an old-fashioned outdoor gospel service will take place on the banks of the Chateauguay River with local band the Durham County Poets playing.
While the other five regions involved in Arts Alive! Quebec opted to focus on visual arts and performing arts, Mark and Tina Bye of Grove Hall decided to take a risk by focusing their attention on dance. The logic behind it being that they already devote a significant amount of effort towards theatre and the arts, so they wanted to reach out to a relatively untapped facet of dance in the area: choreography. Mark explains that with the École de Danse de Neva Shelton having been around for so many years, there are a host of trained dancers who have years of training under their belts, but who have drifted away from dance since there is so little opportunity to pursue a path in it, especially out in the Valley. Tina also recalls from her years of teaching at CVR, many students who were passionate about pursuing a path in dance had few opportunities open to them at the post secondary level. She explains that with their two-week summer Resi-Dance program they’re “trying to create a microcosm that is dedicated to dance and furthering their dance knowledge so that they have the skills to take their art elsewhere and continue.” They are currently seeking dancers interested in participating in the program which will have them working with some top contemporary choreographers from the Montreal area: Sasha Kleinplatz, Emily Gualtieri and David Albert-Toth. The two week long session will culminate in two showcase performances for Arts Alive! Quebec: Due to the collaborative nature of the Arts Alive! Initiative, they are also slated to perform at the Wakefield edition of Arts Alive! Which will take place from October 1 to 4. Looking ahead to the future, Tina and Mark have some musicals in mind that they would like to take on at Grove Hall, so they are hoping that the Resi-Dance program will turn out potential candidates for compiling the choreography for them.
