INTRO
LATHAM
Welcome to Artful Conversations, a podcast about arts and cultural management. I’m Annetta Latham.
INGRAM
And I'm Katrina Ingram. We interview leaders who help shape the world of arts and culture, sharing their stories, insights, and observations.
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INGRAM
Welcome to Artful Conversations, I'm your host Katrina Ingram. Today I'm speaking with the executive director of Citie Ballet, Sheri Somerville. Welcome Sheri.
SOMERVILLE
Thanks, nice to be here.
INGRAM
Great to have you here. Sheri, you've been contributing to and advocating for the arts in Edmonton for a very long time, nearly three decades, prior to coming to Citie Ballet in 2015 as the executive director. You had a successful career as an international and local performer, owned and operated the Wine Bar and Bistro and the Somerville Wine Room, and served as the president of the Barcelona Theater. That's quite a resume.
SOMERVILLE
Yeah, I've been busy.
INGRAM
So before we talk about Citie Ballet, could you talk about your choice as an artist to make Edmonton your home? What led you to that decision, and how did that impact you as an artist?
SOMERVILLE
I was born in Grand Prairie, Alberta. So I'm a northern Alberta girl. And when I was 17 I wiggled my way into the voice opera program at the Banff Centre and then was invited to go to the Canadian Opera School, which I did in Toronto. I had a great career there, and then had a baby, and decided that it was going to be a pretty big challenge to have a student husband, a brand new baby, and be a touring musician and actor and not have any family support. So I thought we'd come back and try Alberta for a short period and ended up staying. I absolutely was shocked by how much the community had evolved, and grown, and I was very warmly embraced by it when I came back and decided never to leave. So it has not impacted my career negatively at all, in fact I did as much international touring being based out of Edmonton as I did being based out of Toronto.
INGRAM
I think that's really encouraging for Edmonton-based artists. Well, let's jump in. Tell us a little bit about Citie Ballet.
SOMERVILLE
Citie Ballet. So we are Edmonton's resident contemporary ballet company. When you think of ballet, you think of big ballet. Royal Winnipeg, Alberta Ballet, National Ballet, those are big companies that do beautiful, traditional, classic pieces like The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Peter Pan. Citie Ballet is a contemporary company, so we have between 8 and 10 dancers any given year. We do original work, and we try to do work that reflects the community and try to be highly collaborative with other artistic partners.
INGRAM
Citie Ballet is also known for pushing the conventional artistic boundaries of ballet. Can you help us to better understand what that means, and how it relates to the mandate of the company?
SOMERVILLE
For sure. So, when you think of a traditional ballet you think of maybe a couple of principals and a chord ballet. You know, the chorus in the background, obviously lots of pointe work but also tutus and what they call bunheads - hair up - and tiaras. Very very classical. And a contemporary ballet company, in our case, we still hire classically trained dancers, and they wear pointe shoes for at least 50% of the time on stage, because we find that pointe work is something that a lot of dancers really want to maintain when they come to us. But the repertoire and the costuming and the themes are all completely different, so we use jazz music or contemporary music or drumming. We’ll use conceptual lighting instead of a set, hair can be down, costumes can look like street clothes or just workout wear, and of course the storyline.
The messages that we're talking about, we really try to mine what's happening from a social purpose angle or from a community angle and we'll talk about that. We just finished a piece on mental health. We did a piece last year on the group think, the abdication of responsibility when you're succumbing to some peer pressure and how you react or act with each other. We've done a piece on the environment, melting glaciers with beautiful pieces from a film used as a backdrop of ice glaciers falling into the ocean. We try to draw people in so that they can see the beauty and the majesty of what ballet is. All that strength, all that elite power that these dancers have, but telling stories with their bodies and with a soundtrack that more people can relate to. We don't want to lose the art form because people feel disconnected from the more fairytale-based pieces.
INGRAM
And that's a perfect description of an original work, contrasting that with the tradition of ballet and the very traditional work. I'm wondering if you can speak to the importance of producing original work. Do you think that's important, and why do you think that's important?
SOMERVILLE
Oh, it's always important. I want to say that the traditional pieces are also important, because they're the legacy of ballet. That’s often how you hook the next generation, you get little kids and they want to see that fanciful fantasy ballet. And that's how they they become intrigued about it. “Maybe that's what I want to do.” And I think, however, that we want the art form to move forward as people's sensibilities move forward, people's artistic sensibilities. I think showing people that dance as a form of expression, especially non-verbal expression, is an incredibly powerful art form. So the only way to do that is to get contemporary work happening, because you can't speak to what's happening right now if you're not creating it right now.
We also want to give voice to young choreographers and female choreographers. Ballet is historically dominated by male creators, even though it's dominated by women onstage. Go figure.
INGRAM
[Laughing] I think there are a few industries like that.
SOMERVILLE
Times are changing, and we really want to find out what women who have often spent their life onstage as a female ballerina have to say. With the way they move their bodies, have to say with their stories. I have to say, with their collaborative choices, when you collaborate and you create a new ballet, you can bring new partners and so you can do a spoken word partner or you could do as I said percussive partner, you could do a jazz partner. You can invite a young composer to build you a soundtrack, and then create the movement around that. So I think it's really important that we hook the next generation of ballet lovers, and that generation has very distinct tastes for what they want to see when they go out.
INGRAM
And that's a perfect segue into my next question, which is about the recent media coverage around the production of Intersect. It really highlights the choreographer’s artistic process, and how their life experiences inform their work. How does promoting their stories build a stronger repertoire for the ballet?
SOMERVILLE
I think in a multitude of ways. First of all, it's really informative for the dancers to be working with a choreographer who's so honest about, in this case, her own struggles with mental health and mental wellness. When she is moving dancers around the room, they're not just creating random architecture with their bodies, they're actually being driven by intent. So it speaks a little bit more to the idea of how an actor would come into a scene, “what am I trying to achieve, what's my purpose, what's my motivation?” I think when we're trying to grow artists, not just obedient dancers, having brand new work that they feel… well, they are the first people to produce it, and move it, and build it, hopefully for these dancers that is an empowering experience, because they are bringing to life this intention, this non-verbal narrative of this wonderful new creator. We think that'll build stronger dance artists.
INGRAM
You just mentioned building stronger dance artists, and that leads nicely into a question I have about succession planning for the company. I know that's one of your goals. Why is this important to you, and what did you need to put in place in order to accomplish that as an objective?
SOMERVILLE
That's still a work in progress. But when I, you know I've been in the arts for 40 years. Taking over a ballet company, although there are many similarities with music and theater and everything else I've always done, what I came to understand about ballet dancers is that there is a really finite point for them in terms of their 30s. At the latest, maybe 40s but generally in their 30s, their career is over. There's been a lot of talk for many years about “what do you do with a ballerina who's young but can't dance professionally anymore?” They go off and they teach. Well maybe they don't all want to just teach, maybe they want to evolve as senior artists. They generally come into dance two or three or four in a studio and they dance all the way through their professional life. That takes up all their free time. It is an elite sport, like an Olympic athlete. So they often don't know anything else, and then you just suddenly have them retire at 30, 28, 32. It didn't make sense to me, so I thought, “how can we evolve them all the way through their careers?” We get them in their early 20s. How do we encourage them to broaden their skills, be more aware of what else is going out in the community?
One of the things we can do is offer them some administrative support. If they want a course on learning how to do that side of the arts while they're dancing with us, we'll support that and sometimes we'll pay for it. The other thing that they can do is, we want to move them into community-based learning. So we have a new program called Art Connects that deals with seniors, at-risk youth, socially vulnerable kids, people in trauma, some military families - we’re trying to get involved with them. We want to move our dancers into that segment of the population so that they can see the rewards at taking movement - not just dance, but movement - into the mainstream. Movement into the community, movement as a healing force, movement as a rehabilitative force, movement as a fitness force, movement with community-building and relationship-building, to deescalate stress and anxiety. I think there's a whole other place that they could go for forever, for decades. So we’re just beginning that. But that's the vision.
INGRAM
That sounds amazing, and it's so hard to conceive of someone having their career end at the age of 30, when people are working well into their 60s and 70s.
SOMERVILLE
Exactly.
INGRAM
I want to ask about a collaboration that you did recently with Scott Berry from the Nina Haggerty Center for the Arts, which is stated to be the first of its kind. What was that collaboration about and why was it so important?
SOMERVILLE
It's important to me on a personal level, because about nine years ago I was asked to host a fundraiser for the Nina Haggerty and I didn't know who they were. They are an artist collective in Edmonton, they have a beautiful facility, and they take people with disabilities - sometimes quite severe disabilities - and they give them space to create art. They mentor them, and they bring in the visual arts community. It is a shockingly beautiful, moving place where creation happens.
When I took over Citie Ballet, one of the first things that occurred to me when I was thinking of all the partnerships was “how do I get the Nina Haggerty involved?” So I threw the idea out at Keira Keglowitsch - the last choreographer who did her piece See Me - that since she was doing a piece on her own struggles with her own stigma around being labeled somebody who has some mental wellness issues, I said “well I know another group of people in town who have a lot of stigma attached to them, but they're very proud artists. What if you invited them to create with you? What if they created the set?” So I invited her to come with me, and meet the people at the Nina. And she started looking at different artists, and fell in love with Scott's work and approached them and him to see if he was interested. Of course he was, because he's quite passionate about his artistic pursuits. We came up with an idea that Scott would create these five beautiful 17-foot canvases to be used as our set, and then Keira and I got talking and decided that…why wouldn't we also start to do some silk screening on some of the black costuming, so that he could have a hand in the costumes as well? And off it went.
INGRAM
That's a lovely example of collaboration. Do you have future collaborations planned either with the Nina or other organizations?
SOMERVILLE
I can for sure see the collaboration with the Nina happening again. You bet. We absolutely have lots of collaboration happening. We are talking to musicians, Chris Andrew, and even the dean over at MacEwan, Alan Gililand and about using some of their music. We're working with, or we're in conversation with, the deaf community. I'd really like to do a ballet with the deaf community. Having some signing, and taking sound away from the audience for a while. Still having the dancers move and tell stories with voice, and without voice but with sign. So that there's an exchange where the deaf community knows what's going on, and the hearing community experiences what it's like to only know part of what's going on.
We of course are always talking to our Indigenous community about coming to us with an idea where they feel we would be relevant to their story. There are a lot of amazing Indigenous stories - not all to do with truth and reconciliation. Just beautiful stories that Indigenous people want to tell, and we want to figure out how we can take what's been long considered a colonial art form, ballet, and modernize it and have it be relevant to their their story. So we had some Indigenous artists come to the last play, See Me, and they were really excited. We're going to have some conversations this summer. We want to go back to doing some percussive work with drummers. There's a couple of spoken word artists and poets that we want to work with. So it's endless.
INGRAM
It sounds endless, absolutely. I want to talk about audience development. It's an important topic for any organization in the arts. Not only do you need to engage your current audience, but you need find opportunities to engage with new ones. How would you define the audience of Citie Ballet?
SOMERVILLE
We have a surprisingly young audience. I mean, we certainly have those traditional ballet-goers of every age, and we have some older ballet-goers who really know… they're not just ballet-goers, actually, they see art in the city and we're one of them. But if you look around our lobby, it's really heavy in the 25-40 range. Which is awesome because that's what we’re pursuing. Because we do want the next generation, we get our young dance students to come and see us. But we want those people who see jazz concerts, go to Symphony, go to theatre, and go everywhere to come and see us.
We want to break down the notion that ballet is this elitist thing, that you have to understand or you have to have some insight in order to get. And say that you can come and see us knowing nothing about ballet. You'll just sit there in the dark and be bathed by music and amazing movement and you'll connect with it. You just will. We work really hard at making sure that it's not a confusing experience for people, so we try and do fun things like pair or collaborate with… Last year we did Moonshine Donuts, we gave free donuts out after Friday performances. We did a beer and donuts thing. Trying to sort of say to the millennials, “come on and hang out with us. It's not a long commitment, you can go out for drinks afterwards or carry on with your night. But make a stop at Citie Ballet and see what we're all about.”
We also definitely want the people who do go and see traditional ballet to know that there's contemporary ballet happening in Edmonton, and know that it's the same. Those are the same dancers from the same wonderful ballet institutions, they've just made different choices about how they want to use their bodies to express their art form. So it's a big job trying to get everybody to understand who we are and what we do, but we're we're up for it.
INGRAM
That sounds great. I especially like the donuts, that sounds like a very good engagement strategy. Are there other things that you might want to highlight around audience engagement?
SOMERVILLE
Yes, we don't want anybody to ever feel that they can't come. We make student pricing accessible. We invite seniors to come for free. We do a lot of free tickets for vulnerable groups. That's the Military Family Resource Center, families often in the trauma center who are undergoing some rehabilitative work after coming back from tours. We have socially vulnerable kids and teens, we invite kids from iHuman. So we're trying to make sure that ballet is accessible for everybody, and affordable for everybody, and that's a model that will keep evolving. We might move to a pay-what-you-can performance, so that all Edmontonians know ultimately we perform for them. We don't perform in a vacuum, we don't perform in an artistic silo where it's just meaningful for us. It's really important that it's meaningful for the community.
INGRAM
That's great. It's like you're reading my mind with these questions, because my next question is actually focused on Edmontonians. I know throughout your career, you've been a strong supporter of Edmonton and Edmontonians. How has that local influence informed how you approach your work at Citie Ballet?
SOMERVILLE
People ask me that all the time, because I started out as a performer, you know. “Don't you miss performing?” Or “do you perform very much anymore?” Or “how is it moving into admin?” My answer really is that being an administrator, and facilitating the next generation of young artists to go onstage for the majority of my time is my way of saying thank you Edmonton.
First of all, I was raised in Alberta, and I was in Edmonton by the time I was 12. I was embraced by every arts community I ever came near, either when I was a young performer and they fostered my career moving forward, and they helped me overcome my shyness, and they helped me find scholarships. They directed me towards better teachers, and better experiences. Then when I was a professional performer, and I did come back from Toronto, I had all these women in my neighborhood who took my kids, picked them up after school, picked them up at lunch when I was either in rehearsal or on tour.
And then there's the Edmonton audience, which has been so incredibly warm, and loving, and loyal to me, and followed me around as I crisscrossed from jazz to theater to contemporary dance to wherever. Symphony, the Opera, wherever I was, they seemed to follow me. I have felt so loved, and so supported, and so valued by my city. My efforts as an administrator are a way of saying thank you, and trying to give back, to make sure that those those people still have something to fall in love with, that audience has a next generation, a next artistic experience that they feel committed to and that their kids can feel committed to.
INGRAM
That's an amazing story. Really speaks highly, I think, to the Edmonton community. Are there specific things that Citie Ballet is doing to advocate for local artists to aid in their professional development?
SOMERVILLE
Absolutely. We have a really strong local draw on our collaborators. That’s where we'll always go first. Our musicians will come from here. There wouldn't be enough shows in my lifetime for me to use all the people in Edmonton that I want to use. We are definitely going to tap into the visual arts community, the music community, the choreographic community, the sound design community, the lighting design community. We use as many Edmonton artists as we can. The people that we bring in… generally, when we have to bring choreographers in it's because there aren't as many. There’s not a very big pool of ballet contemporary choreographers in the city for me to draw on, or we would be drawing on them almost exclusively. So it's kind of fun! We're drawing from around the rest of Canada. Which is neat too, because you want to bring fresh voices to Edmonton. But definitely we will be chewing through those artistic reserves. We’re coming for you, Edmonton artists.
INGRAM
So if we look at the two realms, there's the audience support and there's local talent. What do you see is a value for the consumer or audience to support emerging local artists?
SOMERVILLE
You had a hand in moving them forward. That you were there, they’re yours. That your support and your ticket fees, your small donations or big donations is because these artists choose to live here to give to you. So accept their gift, accept their art, and feed it back to them by buying a ticket. It's this sort of reciprocal, wonderful relationship. Often what the consumer needs to know is when you develop an Edmonton artist, inevitably somebody from outside Edmonton is going to take them and ask them to come somewhere else like they did with me. They asked me to sing in Hong Kong, and Paris. I've toured all over the world, but I kept coming home to Edmonton because I also felt so loved and so supported and so cherished here. I like that feeling. This is my home base. I think when consumers nurture that, they'll feel that back from the artist. The artist will create with them in mind. Artists love to look around them and be inspired. Artists don't need to travel outside Edmonton to be inspired, so when you see work that is coming out of Edmonton, it's usually because something here has made them think about their project. So they're really actually reflecting you the consumer.
I think also, in terms of growing the city overall… I said this to a builder who gives us some money: I said, “thank you for seeing that… when you built those magnificent towers on 104 Street, you knew that all of those people had to walk out the front door and go somewhere and do something else. So you're creating another beautiful opportunity for them by giving to the Art Gallery or by giving to us. When they walk back in your building, happy from a night in downtown Edmonton, you facilitated that whole circle. You created more than just a building, you created an experience.”
We talk a lot about that with the business community. You’re drawing resources from people by them buying your product, or banking with you, or whatever they're doing. Then you take a portion of that and give it back to us, and we give it back to them. So the circle is complete.
INGRAM
It's a lovely image, the complete circle. I do want to talk a bit about fundraising. I know beyond the regular season of three performances at the Timm’s Centre in Edmonton, there are a number of other programs and events that the company organizes. One is the unique annual fundraising campaign called Art and Sole - and that’s sole spelt S-O-L-E, which has a nice clever reference to dance. Tell us more about this event.
SOMERVILLE
Ah yes, fundraising. 80% of my budget comes from me holding my hand out in one form or another, and fundraisers are a big part of it. We have a big annual fundraiser called Citie Home Tour, where we get five or six people with beautiful homes to…we kick them out of their homes for two days, and we staff their homes and we sell tickets. But we needed another one, and one of our big expenses is pointe shoes. Our lady dancers go through a pair of pointe shoes per week, and those pointe shoes are $125 a pair. We chew through them pretty quick, so we have a fairly big pointe shoe bill every year. I thought, “we need a fundraiser dedicated to try and fill that G/L or that part of my ledger.” And I thought, well, “let's do a fundraiser connected to feet. We all wear shoes, so we're going to do a fashion show all about footwear. It's not going to be about the clothes, it's really going to be about the shoes.” We partnered with three local vendors. This year it'll be Gravity Pope, Poppy Barley, and Kunitz. They give us shoes for the day, and my dancers and some other local models and celebrities will walk down the runway. We have a Global host, Global TV’s Jennifer Crosby is a charming host. We have fun, and talk about the shoes, and my dancers do a bit of pointe work on the runway. Then we have a beautiful party with a whole bunch of wonderful silent auction gifts from local vendors, and that's how we refurbish our pointe fund.
INGRAM
That sounds amazing. I'm also thinking if my husband is listening to this podcast, he has no complaints about my shoe budget. [Laughing] That sounds really wonderful, I love the opportunity to partner with different businesses that you mentioned as well. You also mentioned earlier the Art Connects program, where you use dance and movement to serve different communities such as seniors and at-risk youth. We'd love to hear more about how that program came about, and how it fits into your overall community engagement strategy.
SOMERVILLE
Community engagement is an interesting thing, because whenever you go out, again, looking for money, people would say “that's awesome, you're a ballet company what else do you do?” And I thought, “oh gee, well okay, we dance five days a week. But what else do we do?” We know that my dancers teach mainstream ballet classes, and that got me thinking about what else could we do? Because there seemed to be this push - and that's a good push - to be more mindful of how you give back. So the first thing I did was I thought, “well we're going to make ballet more accessible. I'm going to reach out to a bunch of organizations, and make sure they can come to the ballet.” That was seniors, the kids at iHuman, all of those organizations I mentioned earlier. Vulnerable kids.
So we got a lot of those people coming, and we were really happy at the uptake. Then we started getting some letters or phone calls of thanks back, and a couple of meaningful letters came from military families talking about what it meant to have a stress-free day as a family, going through what they're going through right now. With perhaps a parent being injured, or having some trauma, head trauma, loss of limb, loss of mobility, and how this stress-free experience at no cost was so meaningful.
Then we got letters from little kids at Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Or their Bigs, they call them. Talking about having never been to a professional arts performance before, and how much the Littles talked about it. That made me really happy for a year. And then I realized wait a minute, the missing component is that those little ones would never be able to dream of being a dancer. Because of course if he can't even afford to go to a production, I'll bet you he can't afford classes, and shoes, and leotards. So Art Connects was born out of that.
At first I called it Art Heals, and then I thought “we're going to expand it. We're going to connect these kids to classes, and we're going to have to give the classes.” I went back out in the community and I found a partner. ATB stepped up to the plate, and I said “just try it for a year, give me money to give these kids free classes. All I need to do is pay the teachers, and buy the shoes, and buy the portable bars, and whatever materials I needed.” They leapt all over it, and we were so grateful for their support. So we went to Big Brothers and Big Sisters. They have a beautiful facility in McCauley, and I said I can teach here. Your kids are already here, so I'll come here. And we do that. It is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Those kids are so fun and so happy. And it's a really beautiful diverse group of kids. There are Indigenous kids, and refugees from everywhere around the world, and kids who absolutely could never dream of taking classes.
And then with the seniors, I thought “okay, well what about them?” I actually moved my mom into a facility, and it happened to be a facility that we had given free tickets to. They asked me if we did anything for seniors. I looked around to see who else in the country was doing work with seniors, and I saw that the National Ballet in Toronto was doing some work. I had a series of meetings with them, and they actually flew out here. I said “I want to partner with you, and I want to learn what you're doing.” They were incredibly generous. We developed that seniors’ program, and we're getting some more training to deal with seniors with Alzheimer's, dementia, and with Parkinson's disease to learn how to do some specialized work with them. Right now we're running a program for seniors and facilities where they do adapted dance. So they sit, and we can do upper body stuff and lower body stuff. And they're safe, because they're not going to topple over. We even have some seniors in wheelchairs, and again it’s really rewarding to connect with these people and bring them the music of their time. A lot of war time music, and then some fun movement stuff for their health, for their engagement with each other. They tend to do better cognitively when they're stimulated by the music that they remember. So for a while, it doesn't matter if they know what day it is, or even where they are. They're having fun. And that's really rewarding for us, that again has endless possibilities. I could talk all day about that.
INGRAM
That's wonderful. I love how you're working with people of all ages, and that you're thinking about the future. I'm wondering when you project 5 or 10 years into the future, what do you hope for the long term impacts of this program?
SOMERVILLE
I actually hope that I can - and I'm already having small conversations about it - I hope that arts is integrated into the healthcare system. I hope that eventually we have a health and wellness center as part of the University Hospital and the Royal Alex, and that we are integrating artists and art practices into mainstream health. We all know that drugs are coming up short. They are not the magic bullet that they were touted to be, that people need more holistic treatments or practices to bring them back to themselves. I want to see in five years that movement, and music, and art has a big place in the mental health field and in working with seniors. I want it to be normalized, and that all kids, new Canadians, Indigenous Canadians, kids with no money, kids under stress, kids doing badly at school, have access to arts. Arts has been cut from the school system. It needs to come back, and the arts community needs to drive that. We need to be innovative, and we need the business community to see the value in that, and that we're taking care of these kids by giving them another way to feel successful, and to talk about their feelings, and to work through their frustrations.
INGRAM
It's a great vision. I'm wondering if there are any other aspects of your community engagement strategy that you want to highlight, or even things that you tried and they didn't go with plan? Because sometimes we learn a lot from the things that don't go as planned.
SOMERVILLE
Oh, for sure. I mean the seniors’ programming, we know we have to be careful about the language we use, because some of the men are intimidated by it. The older gentleman. So we've got to take the word ballet out of it. We have to just use the word movement, or dance. We're learning those things; we're learning that the way that we speak about something is very important in getting people engaged.
We don't have a lot of absolute failures, but one of the things that we struggle with - and not just Citie Ballet, but all companies - is that those partnerships with the business community, and the philanthropic community, and the donor community, having people really see the arts and arts programming as being economic drivers. That they employ people, that they engage people in their community.
When you go out to see any performance and you have a really good experience, you want to see another one. Not just with that company, but you want to engage people to see other performances. It is a national, an international crisis of epic proportions where people are disconnected from each other more now than they have ever been, through cell phones and computers. It is not what it was purported to be. Facebook is talking about that all the time, they've created a monster. We need to get people back together in their communities with their real friends and their virtual friends. We need to get people having dialogues, being stimulated by really good artistic experiences.
The arts exists to take the normal and flip it upside-down, or expose its underbelly. The arts exists to drive conversation forwards. The arts exists to motivate people, to empower them to come together. Things like #MeToo can be really powerful, artists had a big voice in #MeToo. We need also to continue to tell other stories using the artistic voice. But we need the whole community engaged, we need it to be a lifestyle. I am failing when I'm not selling every show out. Right? Success for me is a line up, when I have to add more shows.
INGRAM
That sounds like success, that sounds like a good measurement. We're coming to the end of our time here. This has been an amazing conversation. I'm wondering what does the future hold for Sheri Somerville and for Citie Ballet?
SOMERVILLE
Well for Sheri Somerville, who knows, because I have a lot of things I'm interested in. I will always be involved in the arts in some way. I certainly hope with Citie Ballet that I can grow the impact we have on Edmonton and Alberta. We'd like to tour more. I'd like to have some more staff. I'd like to do more mentorship.
I hope that we can influence dance in Edmonton, and that we can be a cultural hub for contemporary ballet and contemporary dance. That we have more people coming here to study dance, and to think of Edmonton as what it is, which is a really leading voice in Canadian culture. And that we can let the rest of Canada know how important and how powerful arts in Alberta is in Edmonton and Calgary, and in the rural provinces. That's a big mandate of mine, to let the rest of Canada know how proud I am of Edmonton, and drag Edmonton around the country to let them see firsthand.
INGRAM
Fabulous. And Sheri, is there anything else you want to share with our audience that we haven't had a chance to cover yet?
SOMERVILLE
Yeah, I'm just really excited for MacEwan University. I think this new facility that I'm sitting in, talking to you, is stunning. I think these young artists have no idea how lucky they are. I think the Edmonton community has no idea what is going to come out of this building in the next few years, and Edmonton is a rich community. We have the arts department at the University of Alberta. We have MacEwan University. We have all of these independent studios, and teachers, and I think we're all going to come together more because of facilities like this. It's a real magnet for creative collaborations. Even by having me here is proof of that, and I think: watch out Edmonton.
INGRAM
That's wonderful. Sheri, I just want to say thank you so much for coming and being on our podcast today. I've really enjoyed the conversation, and I have to ask you this because I feel I would be remiss with your background if I didn't ask you to sing us out. Would you be willing to do that for us?
SOMERVILLE
Oh sure. [Singing]: Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars, / Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars…
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LATHAM
Hi, it’s Annetta and Katrina in the studio. That was an amazing interview. I liked the singing at the end.
INGRAM
That was so fun.
LATHAM
I think we should get all of our guests to exit like that. One of the things that I think really impresses me about Sherri is the fact that she's an incredibly passionate business person, and she takes that passion with her wherever she goes. And I really like that, because she doesn't kind of shut that down because she's now in the arts. She keeps it really alive. And also, when she talks about the ballet dancers and their careers, and how that can nearly be over when they're 30… she's passionate about that just being the beginning of a career. And having that real legacy, and really seeing it as part of her role. Almost as a mentor, that she helps them develop their career into arts management or wherever they want to go with it. And I thought that was a great business model of a wonderful mentor, really, but also as a very wise businesswoman.
INGRAM
Yeah, it makes so much sense, right. She really does infuse her skillset as a business person with her life as a performer. It's very seamless, and she talked about this idea of giving back as an arts administrator. I thought that was just a really interesting concept, and she's gotten herself from being a performer to this new role of fostering a new generation of artists. She's really loving how she's able to do that. It's come full circle for her.
LATHAM
Yeah, very much so. I think one of the interesting things that she mentioned is that as a challenge for the ballet, but also as a challenge for a lot of our traditional arts, is that gender thing of things created by males performed by females. It's pretty prominent in the ballet, but when you think about taking it into theater, and taking it into the fine arts world, and all of those kind of things. I thought it was really interesting. You and I have talked about this offline, and gone “you know, I hadn’t thought about that before,” and it's really interesting. I love the way that she is thinking about how to do that differently now, and how to move that around. I certainly know in the series they’ve done this year, they've actually had a female choreographer. She was fantastic, the work was incredible.
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This show was created by:
Executive Producer - Annetta Latham
Producer - Katrina Ingram
Technical Producer - Paul Johnston
Research Assistant - Rael Lockwood
Theme Music - Emily Darfur
Cover Art - Constanza Pacher
Latham, A. (Executive Producer). Regan-Ingram, K (Host). (2018, May 21). Artful Conversations [Season 1: Episode 8]. Sheri Somerville. Podcast retrieved from https://www.artfulconversations.com/transcriptions/2019/1/4/ep-8-sheri-somerville
Artful Conversations is a production of Annetta Latham in partnership with MacEwan University. All rights reserved.