Mentor Of The Month

Q & A WITH BARB CLAUSEN

LISTEN TO PODCAST TO HEAR ENTIRE INTERVIEW

How did you start your career in the arts Barb?

I started out as a recreational dancer having taken dance in high school but not pursuing it as a discipline. I moved from dance classes to being in a junior company to going to school in dance, not ever training as a professional dancer but always pursuing it as an interest and then I fell backwards into administration.

What was your first gig?

I had been in school, had my second child and wanted to be at home more. I was actually approached by a manager of a dance company, Terminal City Dance, which was the name of Karen Jameson & Terry Hunter’s company at the time. She asked me if I’d like to learn the business and I said ‘sure.’ So she said ‘Well come and be my assistant.”

Then half way through the year she said “Oh and by the way I’m going to go away for a year with my husband on sabbatical and tag you’re ‘it’”. I spent a year training with her more or less. Then I was dropped into the very interesting situation of a company that was in transition. So, during my year at the helm the company separated into the Karen Jameson Dance Company and what is now called Vancouver Moving Theatre.

I know your career has taken you to a lot of other places, can you tell us more about that?

I’ve always been interested in presenting. Luckily I was able to do some presenting when I was at Terminal City Dance. In fact when those artists separated into their own companies, they actually formed two new companies and left Terminal City Dance Research. I took that on as a presenting project and was lucky enough to move into the Firehall Centre when it first opened with Donna Spencer inviting me essentially. She did all of the theatre programming and I did the dance programming.

Subsequently I joined the Canada Council for a couple of years and came back to Vancouver as the first Executive Director of the Dance Centre and the rest is history.

I know a lot of people know the work you do in cluster management, could you tell us a little bit more about that?

It developed organically, after my stint as Executive Director at the Dance Centre. I actually had what was probably a classic burnt out situation, so I left that to just work at home for a while, chill and figure out what I wanted to do.

I think the problem for me, as the head of the Dance Centre, I found myself doing a lot of work that really interested me but it was far less clearly defined in terms of what it wanted to do as a service organization. I just crawled away after four years of that, having really enjoyed it but having gotten, as I say, burned out.

So when I started working again which was not too long after that, I took on contracts that interested me working with artists who I liked and I did that for some time. The first thing I did was I had a contract with the touring office of the Canada Council and then I began to take on interesting small contracts with David Macintosh of Battery Opera, Andrew Olvine and with people who I could really enjoy working with specifically.

Eventually, I got into a situation where it looked like there could be some funding for the nature of the work I was doing. I was able to get some strategic initiatives money from the CCA, because it was perceived by bureaucrats at the time that this kind of work that was going on in Vancouver by Jim Smith (Eponymous) separately and by me in a different way was of interested to the CCA and later the BC Arts Council in terms of making an affordable cluster or shared management model. It grew like top seed, I didn’t strive to create it just became that.

Are there any limitations to cluster management? Many artist and companies are challenged to find arts administration and cluster management has seemed to become the answer to that. It’s not so easy is it?

I think there is no formula. My sense is that when you look around the country and you see who is involved in this kind of work. It’s almost as though it’s an artist driven organization, I don’t call myself an artist but the nature of the organization that I have built it has really been build around my interests and experience which is very different from what Eponymous, Diagramme, the agent Meno Plukker, etc. We’re all doing things in slightly different ways and it’s all based on our talents and interests.

Yes in my case, the challenges have been to determine what it is that I providing, why and for how long. That again has grown over time and I am now very comfortable with the model, which tends to look like, in retrospect, mentoring, helping smaller organizations develop capacity to the point where they’re interested and able to find there own management per mutations. In each case, the have devised completely different management styles.

What at the root of it all keeps you going?

That’s very interesting…I can’t say exactly. I’m interested in the form. I’m interested in facilitating the vision of artists. Particularly artists who I like as people and whose work I admire and who I feel have market potential. The most satisfying part of the job for me has always been the connection between the audience and the work. I very much enjoy helping artists clarify their vision on paper, I’m fine with budgets, I enjoy strategic planning but the most fulfilling part for me is the actual experience in the theatre with the audience and engaging with the work.

More satisfying to me now, is my own experience as a presenter. I am doing less and less with the hands-on management, I’m very interested in mentoring young administrators but I’m taking great enjoyment in the presenting we do at New Works.

You mentor a lot of emerging arts professionals. Do you have general advice for the rest of the community?

What’s interesting is the generation that is coming up now has already a different take than my generation did. For better or for worse, my generation tended to work long hours, be underpaid and contribute in ways that the current generation isn’t willing to and good for them.

I really believe that there is a pretty serious shift going on about what is acceptable, what’s acceptable in terms of career path, there is a lot more willingness and ability to move on, to move up and to move over, I commend and support that. I don’t think that anyone should work at any job that burns them out. People do that by passion. The arts are in general under paid, artists certainly work under or unpaid and administrators have always done that as well, most certainly in dance. Not all administrators and not all the time but I think that trend is shifting, is interesting and important and will have great repercussions on the field.

I say, the most important thing you can have as an arts administrator are boundaries.