Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0
Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0: Imagining Inclusive Performing Arts
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
May 21-24, 2024
In this post you’ll discover:
What Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0 (PME 2.0) was and where it came from
A variety of my perspectives on relationality, working styles, and self-awareness
DISCLAIMER
This text is from my perspective, about me. I understand the limited value of names like “marginalized” and “mainstream”, appreciate the simplification I apply to some complex issues, and fully accept that someone will disagree with some of the assessments and descriptions. I speak from a situated perspective, with no claim to universality. Just like you, who are reading from a situated perspective.
Postmarginal Edmonton 2021
The circle of artists at Postmarginal Edmonton 2021, the writer's bald head prominent in the centre. (Photo credit: Brianne Jang)
Background
Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0 was four days of intensive workshops, presentations, and experiences held at the University of Alberta and MacEwan University, and the second major workshop held in Edmonton with the participation of the national Postmarginal co-ordinator, Peter Farbridge. Postmarginal is “A collective movement in the performing arts that seeks to research, develop, and talk about creative works that are inspired by a plurality of relationships” https://postmarginal.ca/ .
The first major Edmonton workshop was held in September of 2021. Primarily a partnership between Postmarginal and Walterdale Theatre in Edmonton through their Equity Committee, it was supported through its development by the Citadel Theatre, Theatre Alberta, and a range of stakeholders in the Edmonton theatre community. You can read more about Postmarginal Edmonton 2021 here – https://postmarginal.ca/postmarginal-edmonton-activating-the-beauty-and-value-of-difference/
Many people who attended the 2021 workshop deepened their working relationships with other artists or started new ones. The event also spurred interest from several attendees to bring another workshop to Edmonton.
In the spring of 2023, Peter Farbridge, the national co-ordinator, approached several of the attendees, and asked for their support for a grant application to the Canada Council for another such workshop. Building on that interest, I worked with Peter over the summer of 2023 to recruit leads for the Edmonton project, prepare a grant application to the Edmonton Arts Council, and organize a steering committee meeting. That meeting was held in Edmonton on September 24, 2023, and was attended by approximately twenty members of the Edmonton theatre community.
Why PME 2.0?
After the 2021 event, I was keen on doing more. I wanted to see if we could produce another such event, and I wanted to do it in a way that gave the diverse and marginalized artists that the event was for a chance to play substantive and guiding roles. Peter Farbridge agreed with this approach, so at the steering meeting held in September we asked people who attended how they wanted to be involved, as part of a collective, or as collaborators. Members of the collective would share responsibility and the work of putting the event together, while collaborators would give input, feedback, and support where asked and when necessary.
After the September 24 meeting we’d built a collective of five members, and Peter as a consultant/co-ordinator. One collective member was managing research, another production, and two more handling content and attendees. I took on the role of administration. Venues were booked and dates set in May of 2024. We had seven months to plan and prepare a four-day event.
Positionality
I’m a straight, white, cisgender, Anglophone male, raised in Alberta from a farming household, so without my knowledge or consent I’ve taken part willy-nilly in various intersections of privilege throughout my 60+ years. Later in life, after a career in theatre and educational television and still largely blind to this privilege, I married a theatre artist who had never, in her thirty years in Edmonton, seen a play about her or her country on Edmonton stages. Vicariously sharing her experience of marginalization deepened my understanding of social inequity. I’ve tried to make up for my privilege through creative projects like Postmarginal.
The Process
(Photo credit: March Chalifoux) Peter Farbridge and I wanted to step back from active planning and give space to the collective members to lead. As of early December 2023, each collective member had chosen their areas of responsibility. We had funding, we had partners, we had venues, we had a timeline…we thought we had everything! It was a stew of intentionalities, and we thought it would turn out beautifully. After that last sentence you’re possibly anticipating a trite contrast, like “instead of a delight it was a disaster!” but that’s not the case. The final four-day event was successful on many levels. However, the journey to those four days bounced over some potholes (since this is Edmonton) and deepened my appreciation for some aspects of collective work.
Theatre artists are busy trying to make a living in an industry that doesn’t pay a lot, and where work is never steady. Artists on the margins of mainstream theatre can be even busier, holding many part-time gigs just to survive. The collective and collaborating artists were certainly busy, and sometimes it was hard to see where space was being held for the project.
Another challenge was appreciating the power dynamics of knowledge. Peter and I had done this before, we understood what had to be done for the event to happen successfully and had worked together over a two-year span to bring the first Postmarginal workshop to Edmonton. We were at a point of mutual understanding where we could hold each other to account consistently and confidently. What we didn’t see was that we were on a different level of understanding than the rest of the collective, who hadn’t worked together on a major project such as this. They hadn’t had the same opportunity for experience.
Self-awareness is a tricky thing in project management. When you:
- Know what needs to be done
- Know when it needs to be done
- Know how to do it
- And then consciously step back from doing it because you want to give space to someone else to figure out how to do it and do it, you might think you’re being a good ally, but…
- …what you’re really doing is making fundamental assumptions about the way the work should be done, and then judging other people for not doing it the way you think it should be done, even though you’re not telling them what you think.
For example, I valued email as an asynchronous but efficient record of discussions and decisions. In my previous work life timely email responses were a must. I assumed everyone viewed communication the same way. That was an incorrect assumption.
I panicked two months into the process and started to take over scheduling of meetings because I didn’t think they were happening quickly enough. Was my panic justified? I don’t know, and now we never will. A lost opportunity for learning, perhaps.
Other project elements suffered the same perceptual fate – I was worried that they weren’t happening (or happening fast enough), and so pushed for activity where I could perhaps have stayed calm and let things (remember that stew we talked about in the beginning?) bubble.
Outcomes
(Photo credit: Marc Chalifoux) After seven months of intense work and planning on the part of everyone involved, despite my personal anxiety, Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0 was a beautiful, impactful event. Here's what some of the attendees offered as feedback... “The work of Postmarginal is beyond important”… “This is one of the most valuable community building activities I have ever attended”… “Postmarginal is the most humbling and inspiring workshop I have ever had the privilege of taking” There’s more on the project’s web page here - https://edmonton.postmarginal.ca/
I, however, was about as emotionally closed as a primitive robot, so focused on administrative details (cookies, coffee, attendance sheets) that much of the beautiful emotional work that took place bounced off my cast iron breastplate like so many miniature marshmallows.
The point is that sometimes we allies get into projects promoting diversity for all the right reasons and end up with only questions.
But maybe, just maybe, questioning ourselves, our motives, our preconceptions, and our expectations of others is an important step for those of us trying to shed the sticky skin of white privilege. For now, it all goes back into my personal stew, and bubbles. Maybe something nourishing will come from it, without rushing, in its own time, with its own unique flavour. Who knows? I don’t, and that’s okay. I was glad to be part of it.