Mentor Of The Month

How long have you been working in the arts? How did you get started?

If we count my career as a dancer, professionally in the arts it has been 20 years. I started as a dancer, I wanted to dance and that came from an early age. But I couldn’t do it, because it’s one of those things that you’re supposed to go to school for. So your career path can take different shapes, and also because of different situations in life for example, like a big economic meltdown in Canada i.e. The Recession. But I decided that I could give it a try anyways and become a dancer. I studied at Les Grands in Montreal and then I danced for Ballet British Columbia and I also danced for Judith Marcuse. After I was satisfied with what I had done, I became a dancer and that’s what I wanted to do.

I have always been interested in the arts, visual arts and theatre. I remember from a long time ago every Saturday and Sunday morning my Dad would put on CBC radio first thing in the morning at 7 am and listen to the news. CBC radio was very arts oriented, and that marked me I think, to want to be involved with something that was artistic. So after my career in dance in ’91, I transitioned into becoming a manager. Since that day, I’ve been in management.

So once you had completed your career as a dancer, although you never lose that in your heart. How did you make the transition from the arts into administration and management?

So before I started to dance, I was actually in was in CEGEP. I came to dance fairly late and my parents wanted me to go to school and get a job, just like everybody else. I studied in management at CEGEP for 2 years. This is where I discovered there was a program for older men to start in dance at Les Grands. So they had this specific program attached to CEGEP du Montreal, and this is where I decided to make a transition. 

When you say older men what age do you actually mean?

Late teens, I wanted to become a dancer at that point, and give it a good go. There was a recession in Canada anyway and I didn’t see any real future in management in the really short term. When I was young I did some ballroom dancing and I did a lot of physical things and I think it’s in me.

So after two years of management, I went into dance. However, every time we went on tour with Ballet British Columbia for example, I was always a person interested in, “So what happens when we check into the hotel. Ok, so we check people in and we organize people.” I always wanted to organize people, so I was always helping the tour manager. 

When I finished the career as a dancer, I actually went to the Banff Centre. They had this very specific program that was really intense. It was for 3 weeks, and we had a whole bunch of managers that had been in the business before. I just thought, “I don’t have a lot of experience in management but I’m going to be exposed to these incredible people.” It was really great because there were people like Pierre Desmarais, Celine Gagnon, and different people who had been in Ontario Arts Council. They had there own companies and they had the managers of companies. It was such a wonderful experience.

I always used The Dancer Transition Resource Centre for computer skills improvement, and I studied in travel agencies. So from one thing to another, I gathered all this experience around, “How do you make yourself become a manager.” I strongly believe that through personal experience and being exposed to other people, you can learn an incredible amount. By the way they work, by the way they relate to you. It’s some sort of long mentoring process. I believe dancers are fairly organized people and to make the transition is “I’m not going to say easy, because it wasn’t easy.”

You realize how much more you know once you’ve started doing it and how good you can be as a manger. Because being a dancer is, “One day you’re good, one day you’re bad.” So you have all these doubts about yourself. But once you start getting projects under your belt, you send people on the road, and you do all these things. You begin to realize that you have some talents, and you can use them to other parts of the arts.

Please tell me about Eponymous. How did this company start? How long have you been going for? What is your mission? Elaborate.

Eponymous started maybe 9 years ago now. It started with Jim Smith. At the time I personally was working at the Dance Centre in Vancouver, before there was the big building that they built. We had an office available and Jim Smith was in there, with his own little business managing various arts groups.  What happened was I had enough of the Dance Centre and needed a change. Jim offered me to go and work with him, and one thing led to another. We ended up in an office in the same building. So with Dorothy, we were the three official people who set up Eponymous.

There were very specific ideas about Eponymous. There would be one person who would do the meetings with all the companies and the artists, and that was Jim. There was also Dorothy who would do all the grant writing, which was the person who would do the publishing and marketing. My particular task was to do all the logistics of sending people on the road and organizing shows in Vancouver. So we had a very specific idea of how to structure the business. Meaning we all had very specific tasks, however everybody knew about the other person’s task. So if there was a person missing in the office you could always answer the questions. That was basically where Eponymous took shape.

Eponymous was all about the ability to pick the people we wanted to work with. Not only that we believed in there projects, but the relationship was very important. We actually told them that they were the best in the studios. We wanted to offer the administrative support to create what they wanted to create in the studio. So the separation was very clear. The artists were good in the studio, they were good with the ideas and our job was to facilitate the process for them, and to put financial stability and support to help them create their ideas.

Is Eponymous a non-profit organization and how would dancers afford your skills?

There is two Eponymous: There is an Eponymous Society, and there is an Eponymous Inc. 

Eponymous Inc. manages all the organizations, meaning that we do the grant applications. It’s basically like the organizations that would have a manager; but instead of paying the manager they pay Eponymous. This is how Eponymous is, so there is a fee for the clients. We wanted to do that because as you know cluster management is a big thing now. We have one office, one photocopy machine, one printer. But it saves money for all the clients because they have one place where they can come and shop. By not having their own office and their own manager, we provide all these services under one roof.

The other Eponymous is The Eponymous Society where we also wanted to do presentation. We wanted be able to present Robert LePage with The Far Side of The Moon. We wanted to be involved with other things too, like presentation of work. If there is a company coming to town can we present them? Can we take the risk and just do it. So that is Eponymous Society.

How has it felt like juggling both the management of artists and the presentation of work?

They are fairly similar in a way. One of them is that you are the salesman, you want to sell the shows. You want to call the other presenters and say, “There’s this show coming on, they are going to be creating this new piece.” That’s Eponymous Inc.

When we do the Eponymous Society we end up being on the other side. We are the presenter, so we have both sides of the coin. It has been a great experience to know both sides, because we know what the presenters experience, and we also know what the managers are experiencing.

Through this process of 9 years of being with Eponymous, what are some of the big things that you’ve learned? Or even perhaps mistakes that you’ve made and learned from and were able to improve on.

If you want to represent artists there is a need to make money, fair enough, I will say that.  However, you want to work with artists that you are going to believe in. There is also this thing about wanting to develop the artist, believing in the artist, believing that they are going to go somewhere. Creating this path for them, you want to make an investment in them. If you believe in them, you are going to work really hard for them. The satisfaction is really great when they have a great show, or when they go on tour. You get this real sense of accomplishment, and they actually enjoy it very much.

Also, as a manager you have to be responsible for them. In a way that if there is no money for their ideas, lets say on a high level. You want to be able to convince them that they can possibly achieve the same affect or the same goal without attacking their credibility. You can still have a great project. You just have to be a little creative about how you are going to do it. That’s one of the hardest things to do, but it’s not impossible. If artists are open to that, it makes a really good relationship.

In reality you want to be a responsible manager, you don’t want to send them on tour if there is no money. So sometimes there have been some really hard decisions to make.  “Are we going to send you on tour just because it’s a tour?  OR are we going to send you because it’s a new market.” There are all these things to weigh in. If there is going to be a deficit, are you going to be able to recover? What artisans are you going to take? You really have to have a heart to heart conversation, and those are not easy but not impossible.

I would say as a manager, if you do touring for example, because that was my specialty. I would say 75 percent of the time things are going to go wrong. So plan, if you have a deadline that’s supposed to be the 15th of the month, just tell everybody that your deadline is actually the 7th of the month so that there is a leeway. These are things that I have learned over the years. Just pretend that your deadline is earlier then what they are telling you.

What sort of advice would you give to an emerging dance artist, who is looking to start up a healthy organization and healthy framework that will help propel them forward in the future?

I would recommend looking at other people who have done it before. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. The steps are there, they are already in the system for you to create a not-for-profit organization if that’s what you’re into, and that’s how you want to access more pools of money, if you wanted to set up a charitable organization. But this is a real long-term look at the future, but you should have this look when you start. Like you might just want to be a dancer, but you might also have a company in the future. But I would say if you want to be a dancer only. You want to set the step so that when you retire, there is a comfortable feeling about retiring, and that you know you’ve studied a little bit on the side.

We are all busy with careers, but it’s not impossible to learn with osmosis. Looking at other people with what they’ve done. If you want to set up a company, see how other people have done it, Have they gone to non-for-profit? There is information out there that is free to look at. You can read a lot.

If you want to reinvent the wheel, do that in the arts that you’re creating. To become a manager the steps are there or really you just have to look at them and figure out a path that works for you. So lots of reading, lots of looking at other people and how have they’ve done it. Lots of other companies and people are very open to sharing their experience.

What keeps you working in the arts everyday? What keeps you coming back, and the fact that you’ve decided to dedicate your career towards this?

This may sound funny but for me, I want to be amazed by performances I see. We become so jaded when we see so many performances. Like when you look at the world and you look at the tree and then another tree. I don’t think you should see the world that way. Sure I don’t like everything that I see, but when I try to go see a performance or a painting or a music show, anything. I still want to give it the chance that I am going to be amazed by it. That I’m going to be like a kid when you see your first snow flake, or when you have this amazement about things that happen in life. Give it a chance! We become really jaded by the day-to-day life activity. The thing is there are some amazing things out there. When you look at the scenery, what really moves you? Try to remember when you were young, what moved you then? For me that’s what keeps me there, because the arts can do that to you. It can bring you amazement, and you can sit there in an audience and you become totally riveted.

Bio:

For the past 21 years Bernard Sauve has been actively involved in the professional Canadian dance sector. He began his career as a dancer with Ballet British Columbia where he had the opportunity to learn a repertoire of contemporary works by choreographers such as Jiri Killian, William Forsythe, Serge Bennathan and to name only a few.

Following his career as a dancer, Bernard applied himself in the area of arts management working with a number of dance organizations including, Jumpstart, Ballet British Columbia and The Dance Centre.

In 1998 he co-founded Eponymous Productions and Management Inc. – an organization dedicated to assisting arts organizations and individual artists working in Canadian dance, film, music theatre and the visual arts. Clients included The Holy Body Tattoo, Lola Dance, Vancouver New Music, Kidd Pivot.