A Culture of Possibility Podcast #35, Judith Marcuse on Art for Social Change
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 35th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 15 December 2023. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net’s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
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I was glad that Judith Marcuse remembered how and when we met, as I couldn’t. When you tune into this podcast interview with the dancer, choreographer, organizational leader, activist, researcher, and founder of the International Centre of Art for Social Change (ICASC), you’ll learn that with transnational high hopes, we sat together in British Columbia in 2008, watching Barack Obama be elected President of the United States. Nearly 18 years later, things have changed. It’s a very different moment for Judith Marcuse Projects and ICASC. The occasion for our conversation is that after forty-plus years, they are going into hibernation.
“It’s been a long and joyful and extremely challenging initiative — battle — to promote and survive in Canada doing the ASC work (art for social change),” Judith told me. “The sector has been under the radar in terms of the whole ecology of the arts in the country, and for quite a while was considered beneath the kind regard of the policymakers and the funders. So a lot of my work has been to proselytize and explain endlessly what this work entails, not only to the people in control of the money, but also to people in other sectors, because part of what I’ve tried to do is to encourage partnerships between changemakers across all sectors.
“In the last 11 years or so, the situation for ASC has become more problematic in many ways, inasmuch as there has been a kind of denial of the importance of the field amongst some of the leaders, amongst funders. And so we were kind of disappeared for quite a while. And now there’s been a sea change with changes in leadership, so we’re looking at a potential opening up of admittance to the holy circle. But it’s at a time when the resources available to folks are limited, haven’t increased. We had a moment during COVID when the Canadian government provided funding to artists across the country, quite remarkable. People actually earned more from those subsidies than they normally do and were less worried about their financial survival. But now we’re in a period of contraction, so it’s been difficult for a lot of people. I’m also a researcher, and have done done fair amount of academic work. In the last few years, we’ve seen the disappearance of over 35% of some 400 organizations that we have records of in our database. So it’s a particularly difficult moment for the sector.”
We riffed a little on the seemingly evergreen truth that when cultural funders discover new priorities or opportunities, they seldom enlarge the funding pie. They just reslice it. Then I asked Judith to give us a glimpse of the sector in Canada — community-based arts, co-creation, art for social change, whatever one wishes to call it.
“It’s a wonderful landscape. The work up here is deep and very diverse. We’re a small country in population, but we’re a very large landscape. The methods that are being used and the communities that are being worked with are extraordinarily diverse. When you look at the work in the north, for example, in the Northwest Territories, in the Yukon, in very small communities — often First Nations Indigenous communities — that work takes a very different shape in some ways from work further south. We see a big divide between urban and rural practices. And we also see some common threads in the work, principles that dictate how the work is done, including — as probably listeners all know — equal voice in these processes. No statement, no question is inappropriate. The notion of listening. The need for really skilled facilitators to to guide people through the processes of collective art-making. Trying to bridge gaps across communities, often where people may have the opportunity to hear each other’s voices where they normally would not. It’s all about what matters to people. So the facilitator becomes the guide rather than the leader in these conversations and dialogue becomes possible, and out of that comes perhaps hope, or at least more insight into what people are facing, whether it’s loss of jobs or climate change, or whatever it is.
“We have very large immigrant populations in Canada, so many of the organizations are working with newcomers. Disability arts, as they’re called up here, people with cognitive or physical challenges, a lot of work with youth. Now, more health agencies are bringing ASC work into their agendas. And more recently — in part because of the large mentorship program we’ve been running for the last three years, partnering environmental NGOs with mentors and mentees to do six-month projects in communities, to co-create these these projects — there’s more buy-in from environmental organizations, which are also fighting for survival up here. So while there isn’t a lot of money, there is a rich diversity of work happening here.
“One of the things we’ve tried very hard to do as an organization is convene gatherings for people doing this work across Canada. We’ve done many of them, and also bringing people from other countries here to work with and engage in dialogue with practitioners, mostly from the Global South. There’s growing interest from young artists in doing socially relevant work. So despite all the challenges of the current context, I’m sort of cup one-third empty and two-thirds full. And it’s time to step back.”
Judith described her evolution from dancer to choreographer to organization director, activist, researcher, and advocate. I noted that in many of our podcasts, guests had talked about the challenge of lifting their heads from the tasks of surviving and making work to engage in larger questions of policy and practice. She made reference to growing up in a progressive family, so always being aware of how social issues intersect and needing to act on them.
‘I realized early on,” Judith explained, “because of my battles with the funders for legitimacy, that the larger question for the sector was visibility and legitimacy. And I like a good fight. I have colleagues who were involved in advocacy work for the whole art sector. With their assistance, I gained access to politicians and bureaucrats. I went through a couple of years where I was in Ottawa having dialogue with people at the federal level — there were something like 60 meetings. It was really outrageously revealing to understand the gap between what we were doing and people’s perception of a very narrow range of art practice. So I’ve been trying to expand notions of what art is, and what it can be for our communities, with our communities, for a long time now. We created a national network of art for social change organizations called ASCN, the ASC network, with hubs in every province and territory, designed for knowledge exchange, for mutual support, and for advocacy. That organization held its first three-day national conference about a year ago, so we’re still in our initial stages, but hopefully, the organization will survive and flourish.”
I came away from the conversation impressed by what Judith and her colleagues had accomplished. I had been slightly involved in the ASC! Project, a massive, multi-year research project involving universities, organizations, and artists across Canada. Judith talked about what that research had revealed. She offered a detailed glimpse of her working approaches via the late 20th century ICE project, engaging young people in the problems of teen suicide and violence. Tune into the episode for a truly rich account of long-term commitment to the work and its impacts, of the skills and awarenesses the work demands, and of the necessity of sustaining it despite the dominance of short-term funding approaches, and to the critical importance of partnerships.
Yet after decades of important work, the organizations Judith has led are going into hibernation, and funding is a major factor.
“That is the main challenge for our sector up here,” Judith explained. “the lack of core funding. As I’ve described, the processes are often very dependent on the development of staff, on bringing young people into the team and compensating them as in the case the ICE projects. There’s a lack of understanding that without that operational support, and with the dependency on short-term project funding, so much of our work is begging. And I guess for me, I’m tired of begging. So on a very personal level, I am going to be liberated from that as I transition to doing other kinds of work.”
As you’ll hear, Judith’s future work includes writing a memoir and returning to the studio to explore more choreography. “I’ve been missing it terribly, and I’ve been dreaming about it,” she told me. “So I guess that’s a mandate.” Listen to this episode and I bet you’ll agree.
“When You Dance I Can Really Love,” Neil Young.
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