INCUBATE: Bringing Toronto’s Artists to the World Stage

Toronto Arts Foundation, Toronto Arts Council and Luminato share a common purpose and understanding – that bridges must be built between Toronto’s thriving, enormously talented arts scene and the world.

International festivals such as the Edinburgh International Festival or the Melbourne International Arts Festival, make programming commitments several years in advance of production. Proposing a new work to a festival requires a detailed presentation that will excite the programmer.

Incubate, an innovative pilot funding program, has been created to assist Toronto artists in developing the earliest planning stages new work and promoting it to international markets.

“Many more Toronto’s artists deserve to be seen on the world stage,” said Claire Hopkinson, Toronto Arts Council and Toronto Arts Foundation’s Executive Director. “One way to assist is at the very beginning of the process, by providing funding which enables innovative concepts to be developed into fully realized proposals, ready for presentation in an intensely competitive arena.”

“Luminato reaches out into the Toronto arts community through our presenting and commissioning of new local works, but we would also like to contribute to the future growth of Toronto artists by helping them to bring their ideas to the attention of presenters both here at home and internationally,” said Janice Price, Executive Director of Luminato. “High-quality proposals created through Incubate have the potential to attract international co-commissioners who can help with the project’s development.”

This pilot program began with a commitment of $25,000 from the City of Toronto Community Partnership and Investment Program through the Toronto Arts Council, matched by private donors contributing an additional $25,000 through the Toronto Arts Foundation. With the involvement of Luminato and their contribution of $50,000, the funds available to Toronto’s artists doubled in 2009 to a total of $100,000.

The Toronto Arts Council manages all aspects of adjudication and awards. Projects funded through INCUBATE may include research and development, commissioning, workshopping and documenting of a new work.

2009 Funded Projects:

Suba Sankaran, Ed Hanley, Rich Brown and Patrick Graham comprise the world music ensemble Autorickshaw. They will collaborate with the Penderecki String Quartet and guest artist Dylan Bell on a project entitled Bollywood Strings: An East-West Musical Masala.

Pulitzer Prize award winning composer David Lang and award winning Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin will collaborate on a multimedia project entitled Elevated, to be produced by Contact Contemporary Music

The Blues Project will explore the origins of blues music from Africa to the plantations of the southern United States in a theatre/concert hybrid developed by Hope and Hell Theatre Company.

Jumblies Theatre, known for its ground breaking work in community engaged art, will develop a multi-layered performance-installation for two music-driven works by Wende Bartley and Alice Ho with the common theme of place and displacement. Collaborating communities include artists from the Somali and First Nations communities.

Journey from Alif to Zed will explore the story of one women's journey from displacement to integration in her adopted land through original music by Maryem Tollar, three culturally distinct dancers and two Arabic percussionists. Maryem Tollar Ensemble will develop this multimedia performance.

Inspired by Tahiriah and the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, Moleman Productions, will develop a piece that explores the nature of truth and what it means to find and express one's voice. This collective, led by Erika Batdorf, will combine storytelling, movement, dance, singing, and Middle Eastern and First Nations chanting/singing.

The Music Gallery will develop a musical work entitled Man vs. Machine, to be staged in an industrial warehouse. The project will be a collaboration between three Toronto composers and LEMUR (League of Electronic Music Urban Robots), a Brooklyn, New York-based collective who will build robotic musicians and instruments.

New Adventures in Sound Art will develop an interdisciplinary stage work for solo mute performer, pre-recorded spoken voice, electroacoustic sound art and lighting with a mixture of international and local artists, Darren Copeland, Mark Cassidy, Gareth Crew Danny Grossman and Sebastian Schafer.

Beauty Dissolves in a Brief Hour is a new chamber opera in development at Queen of Puddings Music Theatre comprised of three 15-minute works commissioned from three composers: Fuhong Shi, John Rea and Pierre Klanac.

To spark new works designed for the international stage Tapestry New Opera Works will collaborate with four opera and theatre companies in the United Kingdom at their International Composer-Librettist Laboratory in Toronto in 2009. Four Canadian creative artists will be paired with four creative artists from companies in the UK.

Toronto Consort a chamber ensemble whose core repertoire dates from medieval, renaissance and baroque Europe, will collaborate with the Peter Chin’s multidisciplinary company, Tribal Crackling Wind, on a contemporary project entitled Orphic Voices.

Voice-Box will fuse boxing and opera in a one-hour live-action interactive performance. This will be developed by Urbanvessel, an interdisciplinary collective creating performance works rooted in the sounds and spaces of the urban environment.

Woodchoppers Association, a collective of improvising artists, will initiate a collaborative project with international partners in Cuba and Mali. Collaborators include Centro De La Musica Rafael Somavilla Matanzas (Musicians Union) from Cuba and L'Institut National des Arts from Mali. Artists will hold a series of exchange workshops in Toronto which will also be recorded and videotaped for a documentary.

2010 Funded Projects:

Blackandblue Dance Projects will create and document a new dance/theatre work by Sasha Ivanochko for a large group of multigenerational dancers in response to the lyrics and score of Olivier Messiaen’s Trios Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine.

Bluemouth Inc. Presents will co-create an interdisciplinary, site-specific work with Hammergin, an Irish company on Cape Clear Island, Ireland’s most southerly island. The work will examine local history, culture and traditions.

Crow’s Theatre plans to further develop Liza Balkan’s Out the Window and to document the workshop process. The work is inspired by the true-life death of a man during an encounter with police in Toronto.

Mammalian Diving Reflex will research, develop and document 600,000 Years. The work, developed in collaboration with Australian artist Lenine Bourket, examines young people’s relationship to their local community through ‘being’ in public spaces.

Modest Productions will develop and document two new works by Rehan Ansari and Bilal Hasan Minto. The two thematically linked one-act plays, presented under the title Split Screen, explore local struggles and uncertainty within a global context and the challenges of migration to the west.

Native Earth Performing Arts will develop Tombs of the Vanishing Indian by Marie Clements. The work explores the human ramifications of government policies regarding the indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the collection, storage, and display of Aboriginal artifacts in museums.

Necessary Angel Theatre Company and Quebec director Bridgitte Haentjens will collaborate with a diverse group of fifty women on the development and documentation of a large-scale work that expresses the diversity of Toronto. The work combines song, movement and music with a poetic text to explore the separation of daughter and mother.

(OMK) The Cathy Gordon Collective will promote and develop Lost & Found, an on-going large-scale project to create community-specific work with artists and residents. Each project creates a catalogue that is followed through to the next part. This stage of development will publish a catalogue and website document for two parts: Loss in Lansdowne and Memoirs Mile End: Marchez Un Mile. The catalogue and website will be used for promotion but are also source materials for the development workshop.

Praxis Theatre will develop Section 98, an open-sourced, interactive work that uses performances and technology to explore and debate individual and civil rights.

Small Wooden Shoe will develop a new translation, including a film component, of Bertold Brecht’s Life of Galileo, translated by Jacob Zimmer and Birgit Schreyer. The work exposes and questions Galileo’s choices so that we might see the processes that lay behind them exploring modernist ideas of scientific research.

Theatre Centre will develop work by resident companies, Public Recordings and Out the Window Collective, to prepare them for the international market. They will promote the Centre’s residency program which connects companies with potential bookers.

Topological Theatre will develop, document and create promotion materials for Lost Voices by Ed Roy. The work examines the growing phenomenon of unaccompanied minors crossing borders at international airports.