B.C. arts groups grapple with uncertainty after being turned down for Canada Council tour funding
Kidd Pivot’s funding crunch illustrates “perfect storm” of rising submissions and skyrocketing costs to take shows across the country and the world
“NEVER MIND MAPLE SYRUP—this dance ensemble is now Canada’s greatest export.”
When Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall had its British premiere at Sadler’s Wells in London this past March, that was the headline in the Telegraph. Critic Mark Monahan was nothing less than ecstatic about the show, calling it “the cutting-edge of dance theatre”.
While it is one of Canada’s most internationally famous dance troupes, Kidd Pivot now has something in common with other companies, big and small, across Vancouver and the country: it did not receive the backing of the Arts Abroad funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. It only met the demand for its tour to London by emptying out its contingency reserve.
Kidd Pivot, which sold out all of its DanceHouse presentations here last season, is in high demand not just on the West Coast, but abroad. Still, despite two rounds of attempts last year, its touring application was unsuccessful with the national peer-jury allocations at the Canada Council. For the first time in its history, Crystal Pite’s renowned Vancouver company had been denied international Circulation and Touring support. Past shows like Revisor and Betroffenheit (the latter coproduced with Electric Company Theatre) have been some of the largest-scale, globe-touring danceworks to ever come out of Canada—let alone Vancouver.
Kidd Pivot’s funding crunch illustrates a larger problem that is creating a damaging climate of uncertainty around touring—at a time when costs for taking shows abroad are steeply rising.
Canada Council representatives acknowledge challenges, citing a “perfect storm” of funding shortfalls. There’s been a steep rise in submissions for touring funding since the extended travel pause of the pandemic, as well as higher requested amounts for those tours.
For its Arts Across Canada national touring funding (which awarded $29.4 million in 2023-24), Canada Council reports only 35 percent of applications from across the country in 2023 were successful, versus 65 percent in 2020. For its Arts Abroad international touring (an approximately $16.6-million budget), 36 percent were successful in 2023, versus 51 percent in 2020. Lise Ann Johnson, acting director general of Arts Granting Programs at the Canada Council, said those figures actually compare well when you consider the failure rate for other programs, such as the oversubscribed Explore and Create competition last fall. Of the more than 6,700 applications, just over 83 percent of applications were denied.
“There’s a disruption to the whole arts ecosystem. But the answer is fairly simple, to be honest,” Johnson told Stir in a video interview with Maude Laflamme, director of Arts Across Canada and Arts Abroad programs. “It’s really about the context of high demand and less money to give out. So it comes down to success rates. It is our reality now, but it’s quite particular to the last couple of years—and it was most marked last year.”
Some members of Vancouver’s arts community say the effects have been profound and may be long-lasting.
“You end up with a system that doesn’t work,” said Heather Redfern, the executive director of The Cultch who has sat on recent Canada Council touring juries and worked with groups coming to her venue to apply for touring funding. “There are some people who can’t take any risks, so they just have to drop the tour because they don’t know about their funding.
“You end up with a system where people can’t plan because they don’t know if the money is going to come in,” she added. “And of course you have a much lower success rate for applications. So it’s kind of a perfect storm.”
Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall. Photo by Michael Slobodian
AGAIN, KIDD PIVOT is not the only company facing that “storm”.
Stir talked to several critically acclaimed contemporary-dance talents from other troupes with deep B.C. connections. They asked to go on the record anonymously—in a few cases due to a fear it would affect further chances at funding and worsen a bad situation—but confirmed they had not received Canada Council national or international touring funding for their companies this year.
“It’s very unsustainable. And we’re being asked to create sustainable organizations. But how can we if we can’t plan?” one artist said to Stir. “Let’s say we have a tour in the works, which an agent has spent years putting together, because those relationships take a long time. We’re trying to plan, we put in our application, we have dancers on hold; we can’t go out on that tour without a 100-percent confirmation that we have the money, because we can’t afford to take people on the road and take that risk not knowing whether we have funding or not.
“So it’s really an impossible situation. It was already hard enough. But now it just feels like the challenges are almost insurmountable.”
Dance artists emphasized the importance of touring work for the ecology of contemporary dance here.
“These are cultural exports,” one artist stressed. “It’s cultural capital. And in the past it has been highly valued. We don’t want to just be performing to the same hometown audience over and over again. Eventually everything just gets diminished. You want to be in a community where you’re surrounded by artists that are going out into the world. It makes what we do bigger for everyone. So if that stops then the question is really, What are we doing if there is no export?”
Even for a company as senior as Kidd Pivot, the effects are devastating. Because Kidd Pivot had to empty its contingency fund to meet its contractual tour dates for 2024, it has had to scale back its touring for next year, said the company’s producer Jim Smith. That’s resulted in four weeks on the road instead of the usual several months. The lack of federal funding is also coming at a time when touring has never been more expensive.
“The reserve will basically be burnt down to the ground,” said Smith, whose Eponymous arts-management and production agency also manages several other B.C. dance troupes. “So the company is now staring down a future where it no longer has a cushion; it doesn’t have a contingency to be able to take large risks. As a consequence, the company has built a very small tour in 2025, because we don’t know that we can feel confident that the Canada Council is going to fund the next tour internationally.
“And if it doesn’t, we will have to cancel it,” he added. “Make no mistake.”
Smith fears the uncertainty is already hurting Canada’s reputation for touring abroad, “in terms of not being relied upon to actually be able to deliver the work to the stage”.
“We understood, based on the history of funding from the Canada Council, that we had actually come up with a business model that seemed to align with funding objectives of the Canada Council: having international investments in the work of Canadian artists and then having the work of Canadian artists seen on international stages,” he said.
In Kidd Pivot’s case, he added, “getting the news that we’re not being funded to undertake these tours internationally, the company now faces an existential question: Do we need a new business model? Should we no longer be building works that are made to tour internationally?”
And yet that’s what the Canada Council’s own strategic plan says the company—and others like it—should be doing. It emphasizes the need to “strengthen and expand the international presence of artists, arts groups, and organizations from Canada”.
Johnson said the number of companies turned away from touring funding by juries this year “is a blip, an anomaly”.
“I think it’s the exception, not the rule,” she said.
Canada Council for the Arts in Ottawa.
ARTISTS, TOUR MANAGERS, and producers that Stir spoke to are pointing to wider systemic changes at Canada Council as another cause for companies suddenly getting turned down for touring funding. Right before the pandemic, the Canada Council, under former CEO Simon Brault, switched to using multidisciplinary juries to assess applications. Previously they had used genre-specialist juries. Brault also set a priority for 20 percent of funding to go to new applicants, in an attempt to widen the pool of recipients.
At the same time, the Council’s program staff have stopped giving any individual feedback to unsuccessful applicants. On its website, it says that change is part of an “effort to continue to meet its service standards for the processing and assessment of applications, and to focus on helping applicants with their future applications”.
More on all that later. Let’s circle back to the main question: If companies of the calibre of Kidd Pivot aren’t getting funding, who is? Those decisions aren’t published until at least six months after funding is allocated. So how do you define excellence if Assembly Hall—a bold and epic journey through art, mythology, and the power of community—doesn’t pass muster? And what are the broader implications for Vancouver’s world-class contemporary-dance scene?
To put it in more simplified terms: are we investing in exporting the best maple syrup, and who’s deciding what the best maple syrup is?
Artists are cultural ambassadors, but in many ways they are also like other exports—employing Canadians and attracting international investment. Any disruption to that system has ripple effects that threaten an industry already crawling out of an epidemic. The international Arts Abroad: Circulation and Touring grants pay up to 50 percent of costs, to a maximum $200,000; the groups have to attract other financing for at least half of the tour, securing partnerships with presenters across Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. In fact, producers say companies often take that initial investment and multiply it by four or five times to pay their artists and cover expenses and fees.
With the resources of the Canada Council now overwhelmed with demand and new applications, uncertain funding makes it harder to secure partnerships with the venues presenting abroad. Just ask some of the people tasked with organizing tours and the intricate national and international networks that involves.
“In the past, you would feel confident that the tour would be supported and you could negotiate accordingly,” explained Montreal-based producer Sarah Rogers, who manages tours for dance companies and artists across the country, “and now it does feel a lot more like a lottery. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
In the case of one of Vancouver’s, and Canada’s, most celebrated dance companies, the situation is undermining the ability to invest in multiyear projects that will take on prolonged life in the international sphere.
Asked Smith: “Are they [the Canada Council] confident that the systems that they’re now using in terms of assessing applications are actually producing the correct results?”
London’s Sadler’s Wells.
QUESTIONS AROUND THE CANADA COUNCIL FUNDING system have been circulating a lot over the past year.
Most of the people Stir talked to for this story agreed one of the main challenges remains a lack of increases to Canada Council funding from the federal government. In fact, the organization is under an edict to cut back on overall spending by the federal government’s new “Refocusing Government Spending to Deliver for Canadians” postpandemic restraint initiative. It means, essentially, that Canada Council has to cut its budget by $3.63 million in 2024-25, $7.33 million in 2025-26, and $9.88 million in 2026-27.
At the same time, in an initiative launched by Brault, it’s encouraging first-time applicants across the board.
After many groups were turned down for creation funding last year, more than 1,000 artists from across the country signed an open letter to the Canada Council. Among other things, it criticized the “lamentable” multidisciplinary juries, in which, the petition argued, everyone is “treated like an amateur”. “Cutting-edge artists potentially make outsized contributions to the development of their disciplines, yet are less likely to be adequately assessed by artists from other disciplines,” the letter read, calling for “those best qualified to bring deep professional knowledge” to make funding decisions.
Vancouver-based touring producer Brent Belsher, who has worked with Kidd Pivot and other dance troupes, and who has sat on recent touring juries, said the multidisciplinary juries, which now meet online instead of in-person, have compromised the process.
In the past, he related, “It was always a jury of peers. I was on a number of these and they were some of the most rewarding professional experiences that I’ve had.
“I would go to Ottawa and I would sit around a table with seven colleagues, and these were people in the dance milieu—artists and managers and agents and different ethnic groups and provinces,” he recalled. “We really did represent dance in Canada. And we would sit there together in a room physically, and we would be taking this so seriously. Now it’s down to the weight of maybe one person [from dance] on the jury.”
That reflects Redfern’s experience sitting on a recent touring jury, where she was glad to be able to speak to forms like dance or theatre that she knew well, but less confident in realms of music and visual art. For her part, she has found the new multidisciplinary juries, which now consider applicants from a wide range of art forms, to be “bewildering”.
“Council really tried to open up who could apply for grants and we were seeing applications that we’ve never seen previously,” she added. “Just more people are now eligible to apply so you’re seeing all kinds of files, everything from great international tours to people touring small towns and an array of disciplines—TYA [theatre for young audiences], music, visual arts… It’s a massive range of files.”
Contemporary dance, with its special touring needs, is an art form that may fall through the cracks of a generalized jury, most agree. While Johnson said dance is still strongly represented amid tour-funding recipients, some argue the art form demands expertise when it comes to divvying up resources.
“I would say you do need to know what you’re talking about when it comes to contemporary dance—it is a specialty,” Redfern concurred. “It has its own vocabulary, it has its own aesthetic, and you need to have seen a lot of dance to say, ‘Okay, that’s really just somebody covering what so-and-so did, or to say, ‘My god, that’s so original, I’ve never seen anything like that before. Let’s fund this one and see what they can do with it.’”
For its part, Canada Council acknowledges challenges around the new multidisciplinary jury system; last month it sent out a survey to Canadian artists and is reviewing its system for assessing grants, with results expected this fall.
“There are lots of reasons why we moved in this direction, and there are absolutely benefits, particularly for applicants who fall between the clean and neat disciplinary lines,” said Johnson, stressing: “But I honestly think we could have had completely disciplinary juries, and people would still be getting the same results….We would still have long-standing, highly assessed icons of dance, theatre, or circus experiencing an unsuccessful result for the first time because that was just the mathematical reality.”
Still, Johnson allows it’s important for people to trust in the process in a realm where the assessment of arts and culture is anything but formulaic or quantitative. “It does rely on the collective wisdom around the table. And so there are lots of different ways to do it. And we’re totally open to rethinking it,” she said.
Tour producer Rogers emphasized the Canada Council’s need for more federal funding; she supports the council’s transparency around a changing terrain. But she pointed to another shift that has affected outcomes: the removal of a dedicated program officer who would guide companies through projects, including pursuing touring funding.
“You would be in an ongoing dialogue with somebody over a long period of time, with somebody who knew the medium and knew your place within it, and understood what it meant when you were invited to different places—the impact that that could have on the artist or the company, and the extensive collaborators involved,” she explained. “That was cut off in the new way of working, the new model.”
THE TERM “IMPOSSIBLE situation” was repeated over and over again when Stir spoke to artists, beyond Kidd Pivot, who are grappling with that “new model”—and being turned down for touring funding this year.
One source pointed out that West Coast dance artists are at a greater disadvantage because BC Arts Council funding trails behind other provinces’. Arts Council funding here has been stagnant outside of emergency pandemic infusions. The B.C. Liberals had frozen the BC Arts Council’s budget at $24 million annually since 2013-14; in 2017, the B.C. NDP promised to double it to $48 million annually. The 2024-25 B.C. budget, however, proposes to raise the BC Arts Council budget from the previous year’s $38.56 million to $38.97 million. By comparison, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec is due to receive $160 million for 2024-25—with artists there protesting for $260 million.
Without firm grounding, B.C. artists have even less to fall back on if they’re turned down at the national level.
“We’re already on an uneven playing field,” said a B.C. dance artist who regularly tours and packs houses internationally and nationally. They were unsuccessful in both their company’s bid to receive a Canada Council national-tour grant this year and a backup touring grant, and have never received BC Arts Council tour funding over close to a decade.
“Another problem right now is the funding windows,” the artist added of the Canada Council’s Circulation and Touring application process.
Several artists and producers recounted experiences of companies learning they had not received tour money until the tour had begun or was supposed to be well under way. “You’ve got to front all the money for the tour, which most independent companies can’t do,” explained one dance artist. “I mean, just the level of private funding that you would have to find is substantial, especially when you’re doing larger-scale ensemble work. If you have, like, 10 artists on the road, your average expenses are probably—I’ll just put a ballpark here—around $20,000 or $25,000 dollars a week, for fees and accommodation.”
The Canada Council, for its part, expressed empathy. “Especially with the touring grants, these are people’s contracts—these are grants that employ artists, and it is not easy to be an artist, and it’s never been easy to be an artist,” said Johnson. “The financial precarity of being an artist has never been worse. And it is heartbreaking because we know every time somebody doesn’t get a grant for a project that was planned, where they had investment, we understand what that means, not just for the applicant, but for the people they’re hiring.”
The question that remains unanswered comes down to: How does a company like Kidd Pivot not make the cut? And what does that mean for the form-pushing, innovative spectacles we see on stage in Vancouver—and that we send out into the world?
Rogers put it this way: “On a morale level, for the community, it’s really harsh—it doesn’t give a lot of hope for anybody doing this job to think that we should continue doing it if an artist who’s working at that level is not getting the support that she needs to deliver.”
Across the country, arts advocates are organizing to fight for federal increases to Canada Council funding. This week, the Canadian Arts Coalition called for a $140-million hike to the council in its recommendations for Budget 2025. “The Government of Canada should spend at least 1% of its overall expenditure on arts, culture and heritage in a permanent way,” it wrote to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance.
In response to pressures across the whole system, the Canada Council is continuing to survey artists and arts groups about what they think are the best solutions amid growing demand and tightening funding, as well as where they think council’s priorities should lie, and which systems might work best to select who receives money. Results are expected through the fall. Director and CEO Michelle Chawla, a year into her role, has also promised more transparency and “committed to working more collaboratively” in a letter to the community in June.
“We’re trying to gather intelligence from the sector itself, to be able to understand, ‘How does the Council invest its limited resources in a way that is going to support the ecosystem as a whole?’” Johnson explained, before adding optimistically: “I don’t think this is an indication that there is anything broken with the Council’s processes, or with the Council’s funding components. I think we had a lot of things colliding in a period of 18 months to two years, and that culminated with the pandemic funding being removed—and a bit of a car crash.” 
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