Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic visionaries shaping Canadian theatre today. In a mixture of lighthearted banter and deep dives into artistic practice, this column invites artists to voice nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlets at the feet of a glorious, frustrating artform.
In volume six of Speaking in Draft, interviewee Theresa Cutknife shouted out Labour in the Arts, a collective of arts workers that hosts Zone Out events where attendees cannot, under any circumstances, talk about work. I loved this idea; it made me want to learn more about Labour in the Arts, its founding and purpose.
I got in touch with Emily Jung, one of the co-founders of the collective, who generously agreed to an interview. Jung, like so many talented artists in the Toronto theatre scene, is a multi-hyphenate. Outside of Labour in the Arts, she is the director of communications at the Theatre Centre, a playwright, and a visual artist. Noticing a lack of mentorship for early-career arts workers in the sector as a whole, Jung and her colleagues did a deep dive into the history of the Canadian theatre sector. That research has spurred Jung to ask important and ever-present questions about funding, political responsibility, and the power of workers, that every generation has to wrestle with anew.
What is your pop culture obsession of the moment?
I am Korean, so I like anything that gives me dopamine. I love really addictive K-pop songs. Blackpink’s Rosé and Bruno Mars have this song called “APT.” It’s giving me so much dopamine right now. And before that it was (G)I-DLE’s “Wife.” So good.
You have a background in visual arts and arts management. How did you come to theatre?
It’s actually a really boring reason. I always wanted to pursue visual arts when I was younger. My parents were first-generation immigrants. They were like, ‘Art is all about connections and you don’t have any.’ So they encouraged me to apply to the arts management program [at the University of Toronto], to familiarize myself with the industry, and because it allows you to double major in visual art. The program was naturally theatre-oriented because a lot of mid-size companies in the arts are theatre companies. I did my first work-study at Canadian Stage.
Still, after graduating, I worked in the literary sector for three years; I worked at TIFF for a little bit of time. I was jumping around a lot. I really entered Toronto theatre when I started working at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. The TPM staff didn’t see me in person for a full year!
You co-founded Labour in the Arts with Jason Li. Besides yourselves, the original members were Madeline McCaffrey and Wing Lam Leung, and current members include Amanda Lin 林美智. I love that part of its mission is to ‘demystify’ the arts sector. What made you want to use that word?
My relationship to arts labour changed in 2019, when I worked for a really toxic team at a company in Toronto. That experience deeply traumatized me. I physically could not work for a few months. I would go into job interviews, and in my brain I’d be like, ‘Why am I saying these things? I don’t want this job. I don’t believe in the arts anymore.’ I came out of it when I was let go from TIFF as part of the lay-offs in response to COVID-19. I had to really sit and re-evaluate my relationship to arts work.
It’s interesting, because I think I had a successful start to entering the industry, unlike a lot of people who struggle with it. I found a full-time job after graduation. I had a great time, mostly, and I would be like ‘What’s wrong with people? Just do the work.’ Then, to sit there and be like, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I did everything I needed to do and beyond, so what went wrong?’ — that made me want to look at systemic issues in the arts with more scrutiny.
My friend Jason Li and I started to do independent research. We had conversations with grant officers and ex-grant officers. We contacted Profesor Paul Schafer, one of the founders of the Schulich Arts Management MBA Program at York University. We started reading academic papers on arts management practices beyond Canada and the West: in Japan, for example, and in the Soviet Union. We started to contextualize the arts industry.
At that point I had worked in theatre, the literary arts, in a commercial gallery, and at TIFF, and in so many different positions. When you’re entering the workforce as, say, a marketing intern, you’re just given tasks. You’re not given an overall picture of where you’re providing labour. Something about that is not empowering whatsoever. I was asking myself, how does Labour in the Arts, as a collective of arts workers, gain a sense of clarity? How can people in their early- to mid-careers have that clarity [more generally]? Once you reach a senior management state, then a lot of information comes to you naturally. People give you mentorship and teach you how things are done.
How would you characterize the collective’s overall purpose?
We have several missions. One is to talk about [the arts sector], because just by talking about it, it empowers us to be above this mystifying scary thing. Another is to tell people that the system does not operate without workers, without artists. There’s something that the system owes us in terms of our dignity and our safety and our work.
There’s also an aspect of wanting a culture of politically activated workers. We need, as workers, to have a culture to fight for arts funding. We all want the arts to thrive and be excellent. We want it to be an inspiring place and a sustainable place. Workers are a key part of that conversation, and I think they’re systemically excluded from that conversation right now [because] we rely on leaders to do work [like fight for funding]. I think there needs to be a bridging of that conversation gap.
How would you respond to a certain line of thinking that says that the arts do not exist to be directly political?
I would respond by saying, I don’t expect you to be on the ground in Gaza and helping people. I don’t expect you to be at safe injection sites doing the injections. I don’t expect you to be out there fighting the police at encampment sites that are being taken down. But I think being protective against political conversations makes theatre, and art in general, look stupid. It makes it look like it doesn’t know what’s going on in the world, which means that art that only serves elite people for whom those social issues have no impact. Maybe [the western colonial theatre tradition] used to be that, but it has decided that it’s not anymore. It has decided that it wants to push boundaries. It has decided that it wants to respect diversity, equity, and inclusion. It has decided that it wants to represent people. So you cannot shy away from the issues that impact people [here and now]. You cannot shy away from world issues.
As a worker I can say what I want to work on and what I don’t want to work on. What I don’t want to work on [are productions that don’t] know what’s going on in the world, that serve that certain kind of elite identity.
What, for you, in your view is the ideal relationship between a theatre institution and the community it serves?
I want theatre to be so ingrained in everyone’s day-to-day life, that it becomes natural to go see a show that’s happening locally. It should be an integral part of society for people to be able to access a cultural space, go there, and experience something that energizes them.
If I attend a festival as an audience member and it’s clear to me that there’s an absence of curatorial vision, I’m allowed to be upset. I’m allowed to be upset that an industry allows festivals to exist without curatorial clarity, or supporting curators with a sustainable salary, or giving society a clear understanding of what a curator even does.
I think when experiencing a work of art extends into something else, that’s usually a sign that someone saw a really good piece of work. I was talking about this with a friend recently. When we see what in our opinion is a mediocre or bad show, we want to go home and we want to watch YouTube, we want to doom scroll. But when we see really good art, when we go to a really good concert or see really cool exhibits, we want to come home and we want to write, we want to read a good book, we want to see that movie that we loved. I want to go see a show about food, and then go home and cook.
In another interview with Club Friday, you talked about the need for more arts funding in Toronto. How might arts organizations and arts workers increase overall funding for the sector?
A good example [of a successful initiative] is the ArtsVote movement. People don’t value the existence of ArtsVote in Toronto, but it’s a powerful thing. ArtsVote gathers hundreds of people in a room every time there’s an election here for mayor. So then the mayoral candidates have to come and they have to appeal to arts voters. Even conservative candidates have to come with some kind of arts and culture plan. We would not have gotten that recent Toronto Arts Council funding increase had it not been for ArtsVote. Get a collection of people and start an ArtsVote in your community, in your city, in your town. Start municipally.
Another way to think about this is, in a country like Canada where settler-colonial history spans just over 150 years, how valuable is heritage? Artists are doing heritage work.
We could be in such an exciting moment of arts history. Think about the creation of the Canada Council in the ‘50s. Think about the kind of funding that was put into the arts at that time [during the post-war economic and nationalistic boom], and what that has done over time. Margaret Atwood — I don’t love her, but look at how the girl’s doing! Michael Ondaatje. These are people who were funded during that time, and they have created something called CanLit that has a presence in the international literary market. We have to fight for these things. It can’t happen without action.
Can you unpack the ideas of artists as heritage workers? I think that’s fascinating.
Whether artists like it or not, everything that we do builds Canadian heritage. We are literally doing that work in [what are relatively] very early moments of the history of [Canada as a geopolitical entity]. It has only 150 years of history, so artists and art workers today are actually contributing directly to early works of Canadian heritage. We should be compensated [properly] for that. We’re writing grant reports. That’s an impact report. We’re doing government work. When people advocate for universal basic income for artists, I don’t think it’s a far-fetched thing whatsoever because artist work is social work. It is also heritage work. We’re writing about the vision we have for the societies that we serve, and we’re not being compensated for it. Again, I think it is because of, systemically, a shy industry.
I think I could sound naive when I say things like this. Again, it’s not that I don’t see what’s happening in reality, but there are things that could be. I am so much more excited about what could be if people were able to set aside their differences, and at the very least collectively fight for arts funding. Where would we be right now?
What are you excited about in your own work as a playwright and visual artist?
I love multilingualism. A play I’m writing, Dead Korean Girl Comedy Show, is a bilingual play. I want it to be fully captioned in Korean and in English so that a Korean person at any language level, either in Korean or English, can see and understand it. But I’m also curious about translation to languages other than English and French. When we do outreach for culturally specific work, I think it’s really important work; but realistically, if I’m Korean, I don’t necessarily just want to go see Korean work. I want to go experience cultures that I’m maybe not as familiar with — but maybe I don’t speak English fluently. So can I offer subtitles in Spanish one night? Can I offer subtitles in Arabic one night? This is a city where we could do that. I love translation, and the expansion of people’s world due to language.
Recently I’ve been exploring the slow process of international exchange with Theresa Cutknife. We’ve been working with a Korean company, Baram Company, for almost two years now. We come together and have conversations about eco-dramaturgy, which is an attempt to try and tell stories from non-human perspectives. It’s been fascinating thinking about international exchange, not just as a transactional thing in order to tour, but as an available tool to expand our capacities as artists.
Thank you so much for this conversation.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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