Podcast Episode Details

e194 owais lightwala and sgs - manifesting for now

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Season 5 Episode 194

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• The majority of individuals who work in this sector are deeply concerned about climate change and deeply motivated and often doing a lot about it in their personal lives but as a sector, we don't really have a vision of what our relationship is to it.  So the kinds of responses range from a kind of silence on it and trying not to look at it directly in the eye to a superficial level of conversation, saying things like touring requires flying : flying bad, therefore, we should stop touring. (Owais Lightwala)
• When we're living in moments of deep confusion and cultural fragmentation, to be able to offer something that has a simplicity to it or something that allows an audience to just breathe together, I think is the greatest gift that artists can offer audiences. And then when the world becomes less fractured, less fragmented, then the work needs to become more complex because the audience will start demanding, like, help me understand what we need to do differently or how we can live more cohesively or whatever but in this moment, in this country, and certainly I'd say in this city, Calgary, where I'm sitting right now, to be able to offer experiences where people can breathe and feel held and feel respected, even admired for their human experiences, seems to me the primary role of the performing arts (SGS)

When I first read the header for the Manifesto for Now project I was immediately drawn in because it said: 

• We are concerned. We should be. It’s a crisis. Here are some ideas for how we got here. And where we go next.

I'm concerned too. The Manifesto also questions:

• In this moment of multiple seismic shifts: ecological, technological and social, maybe the performing arts can serve as facilitators for the transformation of humanity.  How? 

One could argue that all the arts need to undertake this seismic shift and transformation and how is a good question. 

So I contacted the manifesto’s co-authors Owais Lightwala and Sarah Garton Stanley (also known as SGS) and we chatted on July 11th, 2024 about the origins of this rather radical project and its impact so far. 

Owais is Assistant Professor in the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, he’s a producer and entrepreneur in the arts and culture worlds who likes to think about big ideas, solve interesting problems, and build better ways of doing things. Among other things he is the founding Director of Chrysalis at the Creative School, a new multidisciplinary performance hub at TMU.

SGS self-defines as someone who is into Culture, what it means, how we do it and why we need it. SGS is currently VP of Programming at Arts Commons in Calgary, Alberta, a member of the National Advisory Committee National Creation Fund (NAC), a Board Member Theatre Alberta,  a co-steward at Birchdale and among many things in the past SGS was Creator and lead The Cycle(s) in collaboration with Chantal BIlodeau, about theatre and climate change at the NAC in 2019, which I had the pleasure of working on while I was at Canada Council. 

You’ll hear in our conversation about why the original manifesto was created in April 2023 on the Canvas platform and that they have published 6 of 10 essays so far.

The essays are provocative and at times funny. For example, in the first essay, Published on 1 year, 4 months ago