Curtains Up Winnipeg

By Daphne Finlayson

Every October, dozens of artists, directors, and curators of new theatre from around the continent gather in New York City for the Festival of New Musicals. A colleague of mine had the chance to attend last year’s festival, marveling at how packed it was. “Everyone wanted to be a part of the next big thing,” he said. He spoke of a culture where everyone wanted that first look at the next Hamilton, the next Six, the next cultural phenomenon just waiting to hit the big time. Remember those memes in the 2010s about hipsters, scoffing at people who liked things that were too mainstream? It was that kind of energy – everyone wanting to be at the ground floor of something new so they could say they liked it before anyone else.

Cut back to Winnipeg. This past July, The Winnipeg Fringe Festival played host to over one hundred and sixty shows from around the world. Many of these shows were new scripts, making their debut at our festival. New plays seeing their very first audiences. New artists getting on stage for the first time. This festival could be the first and only time anyone gets to see this piece of theatre! You could have a unique experience, shared only by you and whoever can fit into the Rachel Browne Theatre for six shows! That’s a pretty exclusive club.

And yet, unlike in New York, there is a cultural hesitation at play – Winnipeg audiences are wary of the ‘new’. I see it in the box office returns, and in who is or isn’t sitting next to me in that theatre – if it didn’t get five stars, feature a friend or family member, or get favorably compared to something they already knew, audiences are less likely to take a chance on a new play. New theatre is untested. It’s a risk, both with one’s time and money. It’s like online shopping and seeing the new piece of gear you have your eye on with zero customer reviews. It could be a diamond in the rough, or it could break after three uses. Are you going to be the chump that wasted an hour of your life on someone’s misguided attempt at comedy? No way, Jose! 

But without brave audience members taking a chance on the ‘new’, theatre can’t move forward. Tomorrow’s stars are taking their first steps at places like Fringe, and can’t become the ‘next big thing’ without people in the audience to watch. We’ll just see the same artists performing the same shows, saying things we already know.

This is not to cast aspersions on the known quantities of theatre. Those artists are good at what they do, and they’ve been doing it long enough to have left most of their misfires in the rearview mirror. But how quickly we forget that those misfires did exist at one point in time. The surefire sellouts of today had to fall flat on their faces a number of times before they got to where they are. Like the first few weeks of learning to play guitar, an artist needs to build up their calluses with pain, with mistakes, with lessons learned. And they can’t do that in an empty theatre.

My guiding light as an artist comes from this post’s titular quote, courtesy of the film Ratatouille. It is one of my favourite films about creation because of its egalitarian approach to art – not that “anyone can cook,” but that a great artist can come from anywhere. They don’t need a fancy degree, or the right accolades, or the latest in lighting equipment; they just need a story to tell and the tools to tell it well. But most crucially of all, they need an audience.

The quote goes on to say that “the world is often unkind to new talent, new creations.” This unkindness takes many forms, but its most prevalent one is in that hesitation. That fear of “what if this is bad?” And to that I say… “well, what if it is?” What if at the end of the day you spent your hard-earned money on something that kind of sucked? 

Would that actually be so bad?

This hesitation isn’t exclusive to Fringe, or even to theatre. In a media landscape increasingly pushing for more sequels, for nostalgia-bait, for reboots and remakes and more of what we’ve already seen, we need the ‘new’ now more than ever. We need artists who try, and more than that, we need artists who fail. Artists who take big swings and miss spectacularly. Who challenge the status quo. Who, worst case scenario, get on that stage and make absolute fools of themselves. The best way for any art form to move forward is in those failures. For every one-time performer taking a gamble on something they’ll never try again, is the next chance to say “you knew them when.” Once they keep chipping away at what doesn’t work, they will slowly, inch by inch, find out what does. It’s in that act of trying that artists find the tools they need to get better, one beautiful failure at a time.

BIO

Daphne (she/her) is a director and creator based in Winnipeg. She is a graduate of the University of Manitoba with a BA in Theatre and Film Studies. In 2022, she graduated with honours from the inaugural Red River College Digital Film and Media Production program. She has worked with companies like Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, The Village Conservatory for Music Theatre, The Keep Theatre, Theatre Projects Manitoba, and Rainbow Stage, in addition to running her own company, Hypothetical Projects. Daphne was the recipient of the inaugural Dan Augusta Promise Prize from Sick + Twisted Theatre and received the Gladys Cameron Watt Award in the 84th National One-Act Playwriting Competition.