By Matt McGeachy
The Canadian Stage Company recently announced that Matthew Jocelyn had been hired as its new artistic and general director. Jocelyn, a Toronto-born Canadian who has spent his professional life in Europe, is presently the director of the Atelier du Rhin, a French national theatre and a centre for interdisciplinary work in Europe.
Jocelyn has degrees from Mount Allison University and McGill, and he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Last week I caught up with him at the Berkeley Street Theatre before he headed back to France.
MONDO: What do you view as your biggest challenge coming to the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto?
Matthew Jocelyn: My biggest challenge is to really understand and appreciate what the pulse of the artistic community is in this city and how I can participate in that in the most efficient and effective and exciting way. There are a lot of great theatres in this city and many great artists, some of whom I know, some of whom I know of, some of whom I have heard of, many of whom I don’t or I haven’t. So, that’s the community that is mine now, it’s as though I’m adopting a huge family and I hope that family is adopting me a bit, so the question is what is the specific role that the Canadian Stage Company can play in the future. In the past, the role that Canadian Stage has played is a very important and exciting one, but my own history and my own culture is quite different from that, and I haven’t been hired to deny that history and that culture, I’ve been hired to use it.
MONDO: You have spent your professional career outside of Canada. Could you comment on the biggest benefits and some of the obvious and not-so-obvious drawbacks?
MJ: The great benefits for me are two-fold. One is that I have had an opportunity by circumstance, life choice and professional choice to work with some exceptional artists from around the world and be exposed over the past 28 years to really profoundly moving and important artistic movements. I’m not saying that’s a huge advantage, it just happens to be what makes me up, that’s my culture. Coming back as a newcomer, well, there is always an advantage to virginity. It doesn’t last long and the breakthrough is sometimes painful, but I do come to this theatre with a certain naïveté, and that innocence is something to play with and to build with and to make encounters with. One of the drawbacks is that everything takes time. I have some time but not infinite time.
It might be considered that I have turned my back on Canadian culture, and so why the sudden interest? I didn’t [turn my back] and I’m not, it’s just by circumstance that I’ve worked elsewhere. If I were going to Australia today, where I have never worked professionally, but if by circumstance I had been hired to direct the Sydney National Theatre, I would be in a little bit of the same position as I am coming here. At the same time, this is my town and I feel it profoundly and am very excited by it.
I just sat in on a meeting of Region 5 PACT. I saw people I had met 20 years ago, and people whose work I had seen 30 years ago, and new voices I had been hearing about for the past couple of years. It’s very exciting because it connects in a very holistic way into a bigger picture that is really going to turn into something. I’m not really worried about drawbacks.
MONDO: You have spent a great deal of your professional life in France. What do you view as the major cultural difference between the way people see theatre in France, and the reason they go to the theatre, from Canadian audiences? Are there any major differences?
MJ: I’m not in a great position to comment on Canadian audiences and why they go to the theatre, so I’m ready to discover that. I know why they go to the Stratford Festival, and the Shaw Festival, and those are great reasons to go, but I don’t know a lot about Toronto theatre because I have not done that in a number of years. However, there are a lot of fundamental differences. One of them is the financial structure. French publicly funded theatres are funded upwards of 80 per cent of their financing. Publicly-funded Canadian theatres are funded 10 – 25 per cent of their financing. That has two immediate consequences. One is that ticket prices are less expensive, but it also means that the theatres have more scope in what they can play with because they are less dependent on ticket sales for their revenues. Theatre audiences are perhaps more familiar with less traditional work, or experimental work, and consider it part of their normal “diet” to see works that they have never heard about: they have never heard of the author, or the director; they are going to be surprised by the aesthetic; they might see something for which there are no real reference points. I’d say that that’s a fundamental difference.
The other is the quantity of the work on offer. Because there is so much public funding in France, there is a plethora, perhaps even too much, theatre being produced in France. Actors in France, when they are not working, get unemployment insurance. Actors in Canada, when they are not working, work at the box office of the CSC or the restaurant down the street. And boy, am I happy to have those actors at the box office! They form a unique and valuable part of the team, but it is a very different personal economy. Actors in France, when they are not working, are reading scripts. They have a support system.
MONDO: Do you anticipate that we may be seeing more Francophone Canadian productions in translation?
MJ: One of the great traditions of Centre Stage and then Canadian Stage was to support Quebecois theatre, scripts that are from French-speaking Canada. They haven’t been absent in the past number of years, but it’s fundamental role of Canadian Stage to represent what’s happening in Canada today, both in French and English theatre, and also the diversity of people living in this country and this city. So, yes, there will very definitely be Quebecois theatre on the stage!
MONDO: You said something at the press conference that I really liked: “There is no such thing as a Toronto audience.” I was wondering if you might expand on that idea: do you think there is a place in Toronto for more avant-garde theatre as they have in Europe?
MJ: The GTA has a population of five million people. All five million of them do not yet go to the theatre, whatever theatre that happens to be. But every single one of those people is a potential audience member for the Canadian Stage Company and for the theatres of my colleagues. There is a place for every kind of human expression in a city of this size-every kind of organized human expression and every kind of disorganized human expression! I happen to head an institute for organized human expression! Of course there is a place for absolutely everything that can be said in a poetic, aesthetic, political, meaningful and heart-wrenching way. The question is: how do we reach those people?
There is a great audience base at Canadian Stage and they have been exposed to many kinds of theatre. But there is a place for new kinds of expression. Some of them will love it, and others will not, but we have room to grow. I’m not suggesting radical change, but what we want to do is present with conviction what we think is great and necessary theatre today, and to be as open and imaginative as we possibly can in ways to find those people who are interested in that. And those people are changing all of the time; everything is changing all of the time. We can’t say, “We’ve got our audience,” ever!
MONDO: Atelier du Rhin is renowned for interdisciplinary works. Do you view interdisciplinary work as something you would like to strive towards at the Canadian Stage Company?
MJ: Absolutely! I think that it’s because that is one of the directions a lot of artists are working today. We have marvelous exposure to truly ground-breaking artists in Europe, and many of them are choreographers. These are the people who have done dance or dance theatre, and are a constant source of renewed thought about what goes on, on stage. I can’t imagine not inviting a number of those artists, but also discovering those Canadian artists who are heading in that direction.
MONDO: Do you have any guilty theatrical pleasures?
MJ: My guilty pleasure about the theatre—and it’s not guilty, it’s an intimate pleasure about the theatre—is being in the theatre alone, late at night or early in the morning, and just absorbing all the life that has taken place there. One of my favourite places in the world is to be on the beach, alone, in a storm, and being alone in the theatre is similar to that overwhelming sensation.
