Art-trepreneurs
Halifax is a city of artistic entrepreneurs, creative people who have gathered in our seaside city to chase their dreams around the world, but can you make it as an artist in Halifax? Halifax Magazine talked to a scientist/dancer who returned home, a superstar sculptor who chose the city and an Olympic athlete with a golden idea for keeping artists here to find out.
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Dancer Lisa Phinney grew up Halifax but moved to Toronto in 1999 to make a living as an artist. “In Halifax, there isn’t a large example of how you can be a professional dancer,” she says. Toronto has enough dance companies to keep someone like Phinney in work. After a few years of hard slog, she landed a great dance job. It was exactly what she wanted, but it wasn’t Halifax.
“[Dance] is difficult—it’s hard work and you have to maintain the love to really do it,” Phinney says. “I thought, ‘If I’m going to bust my ass, I’m going to do it for Halifax. There was nothing stable about my time in Toronto: professionally, financially, relationship-wise. I wanted that to end. I still wasn’t sure if I really wanted to dance. The lifestyle just didn’t appeal to me. Turns out, it was the lifestyle in Toronto that didn’t appeal to me.”
She returned to Nova Scotia at the same time as other dancer friends, who were scattered around the country. “Here, there is such a vacancy that if you want to start your own thing, the world is your oyster,” she says. “If you’re in a big city, you can get a company, you can get solid work … if you’re here, that’s extremely difficult. It was a lot of excitement, because a lot of people had gone away and were coming back.”
Phinney became one of the founders of Mocean Dance, an innovative dance troupe formed by five young women in Halifax in 2001. The critical, early grants it received came because it was pretty much the only dance company in the city applying for funding.
Mocean established itself as a major artistic presence in the city and once again, Phinney seemed to have landed her dream job. But still, a voice drove her to go deeper into her creative vision, merging her twin careers of art and science. She left Mocean in 2005 to go it alone. “The only thing you can do in Halifax is start your own thing,” she says. “You can’t come here and say, ‘There’s nothing here.’ This is exactly the place you want to be if you want to start your own thing. That’s what we did with Mocean, and that’s what I’m doing now.”
She put on her own show, Point, Counter-point: Homeostasis, which was Phinney’s version of Dance your PhD, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual competition of scientists who have turned their research into art. Homeostasis used movement to explore her master’s thesis on the feedback cycle in nature between phytoplankton in the ocean and climate. “I was investigating it in a scientific way, but I was also very interested in it artistically,” she explains. “I always saw it in a colourful way,” she explains. In science, the key is intellectual openness; in art, it’s emotional openness. “The web of those two processes looked the same to me.”
Life as a solo dancer is tough. Bills overtook pay cheques and Phinney opted to take a job with Environment Canada as an atmospheric scientist. She started digging out of debt and getting her life together. “It’s a full-time job, for not-full-time pay,” she says of being an artist. “I was spending all of my free time dancing.”
She’s down to a part-time position so she can finally dance on her own. She’s working on her most ambitious work: a 45-minute show with nine dancers. “I like the pure work,” she says. “I’m not a fan of mixed programs—I like to really get into the idea,” she says.
The dance was born on an early morning at Kejimkujik National Park. It was 5 a.m. and Phinney was checking on a lakeside generator. “It was the most beautiful experience,” she recalls. “It was completely still and quiet. The mist was coming up off the lake, the sky was purple-blue.”
Nine loons were calling to each other in what she later learned was a singles’ club. The birds mate for life, but these lonely souls were looking for love. “We’ve been exploring that in human context, in terms of like a singles bar,” Phinney laughs. Analogy for Solid Bones will debut with Live Art Dance Productions in October. Asked if she’s going to use a company name, she pauses: “No, it’s me, Lisa Phinney, for now.”
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Ilan Sandler was already a world-class success when he moved to Halifax five years ago. The South African-born sculptor’s work has shown in Toronto, Philadelphia, New York and South Korea. “There seemed to be enough of an arts community here for me to build my career,” he says. “It’s much smaller and the pace is slower. It’s a city where one needs to make opportunities for themselves, but it’s a fairly galvanized arts community.”
The executive director of the Centre for Art Tapes teaches at NSCAD and runs his own studio. He’s well aware of the city’s limits. “It’s isolated, so one has to spend most of his time working on projects, rather than promoting them. It’s a base for making work,” he explains, but not a place to sell. “A significant number [of artists] try to stay, at least for a few years, trying to cobble things together. It’s difficult.”
Julia Rivard is trying to make it easier. The Ontario woman moved to Halifax to pursue her career in kayaking, but switched to a fine arts degree at NSCAD. Rivard, who represented Canada at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, found Halifax a great place to be an arts student, but a bad place to be an artist. The community she had loved at NSCAD vanished after graduation so she opened Dartmouth’s Queen Street Studios, a home-away-from-home for artists to work and to display their work, as a way to rebuild that lost community. “We have just unbelievable skills in Halifax, people who do work that can be the best in the world,” she says. “We’re lacking at promoting these people.”
In bigger cities, artists end up competing against each other but here, they have to work together. Rivard cites a recent project she did for the Downtown Dartmouth Business Commission. She had never met the celebrated painter Tom Forrestall but thought he would be a great contributor. “I knocked on his door and asked him if he would do a painting for the piece,” she recalls. “He offered to do it for free and brought me to his studio. I sat for the afternoon and watched him paint and chatted to him about his art,” Rivard remembers. “You wouldn’t get those opportunities in Toronto.”
Fusing that Maritimes openness with big-city culture will be critical if Halifax is to incubate a larger arts scene. Rivard is developing a mentoring system to link up-and-coming artists with established peers: “Success isn’t going to happen unless you start connecting yourself with some influential people in the community.”
Halifax Magazine, June 2009