Generator in conversation with Shakespeare in the Ruff + the Toronto Dance Community Love-In
“It’s a transitional year,” Eva Barrie says of Shakespeare in the Ruff, the company she leads with Kaitlyn Riordan—but she may as well be speaking for the entire arts sector. From small organizations to large institutions, and every CERB-supported artist in between, we are being asked to confront, create, and navigate massive change this year. Announcements of departures, job postings, and review processes signal major shifts happening at all levels of our sector—and they just keep coming.
This fall, the Toronto Dance Community Love-in and Shakespeare in the Ruff have both undergone hiring processes. The Love-in welcomed applications for a new ‘Lover’ to join their existing team of co-Artistic Directors; Ruff sought new artistic leadership to replace current co-Artistic Directors Eva Barrie and Kaitlyn Riordan. (Applications to both are now closed). The two companies are in long-term residence with Generator through our Company Collaborator program.
“I think these companies are at similar but different points in their development,” says Kristina Lemieux, Lead Producer at Generator.
“Because of their agility, Ruff and the Love-in can both teach larger institutions about a values-based approach to hiring.”
Their respective approaches offer insight for companies currently undergoing transition, as well as companies seeking to clarify values to support long-term transition processes and work culture.
Ruff and the Love-in also represent something more specific: the point in an organization’s life cycle in which processes become more formalized and ‘operationalized.’ Kristina offers the analogy of a tech start-up, where you receive outside investment for years before you become profitable; similarly, what we tend to see in the arts is people volunteering their time for years before they get paid commensurate to the hours they contribute. Both Ruff and the Love-in started to move towards more operational, less project-based funding a couple years ago; as a result, they’re now able to offer more stable income to leadership. At both companies, all leadership positions remain part-time, and the staff continue to be engaged as contractors, not as employees.
We brought them together over Zoom in October to discuss the ways they’re carrying out their hiring processes in this, 2020: the year that looks like no other.
Shakespeare in the Ruff's co-Artistic Directors Eva Barrie (left) and Kaitlyn Riordan in Withrow Park in 2018 (photo by Dahlia Katz).
The Love-in's (left to right) Robyn Breen, Shelby Wright, Ann Trépanier, and Oriana Pagnotta at a winter 2019 company retreat.
An atypical year
A typical year for The Toronto Dance Community Love-in would feature monthly in-person dance/movement workshops from October-June. There would be a two-week intensive period of workshops and performances in July, plus other discussions and productions from time to time. Ruff does one mainstage production of a Shakespeare adaptation—“we use the word adaptation very loosely,” Eva says— in Withrow Park each August. They also run a Young Ruffian education program for youth, and a Guerilla Ruffian mentorship program for Emerging Artists. Needless to say, programming at both organizations has shifted in the time of covid-19. Both companies have relied on a combination of shifting programming online and experimenting with carefully controlled, distanced in-person offerings in Toronto.
Why now?
Hiring processes take work—usually enormous amounts of time, energy, and care. “We have the resources to do that now,” says Shelby Wright, a Lover since 2018, “but in the past it wasn’t possible for us.” The Love-in has always had a collective leadership model, with the number of Lovers in co-leadership fluctuating between two and seven over the years. Historically, new people have joined organically, through some form of interaction with the organization. “We've been curious about what would happen if we put out a call for this role,” Shelby explains. “Who would apply and what could they bring to the team?”
“We firmly believe that the health of an organization depends on new perspectives and fresh ideas,” Eva says.
“Ruff, because of its size, is a great place to experiment. And it has a great community backing it, of audiences who are excited to see something different.” Earlier this year, Ruff hired Associate Artistic Director Desiree Leverenz after putting out an open call for submissions. Their current process will mark the first open call for artistic directorship in their history. Previous transitions have arisen from informal conversations and internal decision-making. Eva and Kaitlyn have been co-Artistic Directors since 2018, replacing the previous model of a single Artistic Director. With that transition in 2018, Eva explains, “what we wanted to put forth was an offer of how to work collaboratively, and within a flattened hierarchy.” For their call for applicants this fall, they were intentionally open to different forms of leadership models. “People assume there's a status quo that you have to maintain. And we're saying, you bring your own—you can change it!”
What’s changed?
At the Love-in, the approach to hiring for a new ‘Lover’ has been informed by some shifts in thinking that have emerged this year. They’re moving away from the language of “teaching” (workshops are now called Practice Labs), re-assessing engagements with artists to deepen them and make them less “transactional,” and changing how they find artists to engage with. “In the past, most or all of our engagement with artists was based on a list of artists that the Lovers would contribute to based on people that they knew about, or were referred to,” Shelby explains. “A big shift for the end of this season and into the next year is that we're meeting artists that perhaps we've never heard of, which is exciting. And specifically artists who are local—Toronto or GTA-based.”
Ruff had been working towards leadership transition for a while, and the past few months have pushed them to make the hiring process as thoughtful and considered as it can be. “We landed on this one,” Eva says “because we wanted to ensure the process connects to our values.”
The application process
Eva explains that a lot of her and Kaitlyn’s time went into contacting individuals who they saw as capable—even before the job posting went live.
“Some of the best leaders I’ve seen in the arts community didn’t know they were leaders.”
This process also included reaching out to other Artistic Directors and asking who they needed to know about. It also meant following up with folks who said they weren’t interested in applying, and investigating why that was. “We were heavily looking into how we could create an anti-oppressive, anti-racist job posting. So we're looking at how, specifically, what factors and what barriers stop people from applying.” One of the issues Eva identifies is one of transparency: people can be discouraged by simply not knowing what they’re getting into. With that in mind, Ruff prepared an Applicant Guide to accompany their job posting, the aim of which was transparency about things like salaries, workload, and what the application process would look like. They also identified their Hiring Committee (which does not include any staff), so folks would know who would be making the decisions. “We're very clear that our values are anti-racism. As a company that presents Shakespeare, I think it's very important to say: we do not worship Shakespeare; we use that text as a playground. We don't use it as a way to push forth colonial values.”
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for Ruff? “Build in time.” Allow people time to not only complete the application, but to consider applying in the first place—and then allow for enough training time once they’re hired. Another thing Eva found valuable was a Facebook Live Q&A event that she and Kaitlyn facilitated, helping them engage with potential applicants and see how they were reaching people halfway through the process.
Part of outreach for the Love-in has been not only reaching out to specific organizations to share the call with their communities, but also making a point of getting on the phone or on a video chat with those organizations. “Just so they know about the changes we’re going through,” explains Robyn Breen, a Lover since 2014. “Our organization has changed, and continues to change all the time.” They’re working hard to make sure applications aren’t just coming from people they already know. “The contemporary dance community is small,” Shelby says, “but we don’t want it to continue to be small.”
A priority for the Love-in has been taking a CV/resume out of the application process.
“We're less interested in what someone has done and more interested in what they want to do,” Robyn says.
“So much of our collective leadership is that we teach each other really valuable skills,” adds Camille Rojas, a Lover since 2020. “With other hiring practices, there’s maybe a checklist of this and that, but what we're really interested in is seeing how we can help nurture each other and our community in different, less institutionalized ways.”
Kristina points out that the way the Love-in has built their call “reflects the way in which the Lovers are constantly shifting and changing how they hold roles and responsibilities within the collective.” Shelby explains that’s an important facet of the Love-in being artist-run: “by collectively working, it means that if someone needs to step away, or take some time to pursue their own artistic project, there isn't a big gap that's left—we all carry the work together.”
The Love-In’s Ann, Oriana, and Shelby (left to right) working at the Generator office in 2019
Eva performing in Withrow Park in 2017 (photo by Dahlia Katz)
The interview process
Eva shares that her own experiences as an artist have helped emphasize the importance of respecting artists’ time. “Kaitlyn and I are both freelance artists, and we recognize that hustling for jobs is like 80% of your job—so people need to be compensated.” Ruff has been clear that anyone engaged in an interview process will be paid for their time. “This also allows people to prepare more for the interview, and to feel more valued when they come into the interview. We stole that from AMY Project I think!”
Shelby agrees—the aim is for the “interview process” to be a ten-minute phone call; if it goes beyond that, people will be paid. For both the applicants and the Lovers doing the interview, Shelby wants it “to feel like they’re participating in a Love-in event—joyful, loving, respectful.”
“We are constantly trying to push against hierarchical structures, which is why we've organized ourselves the way we do.”
Even though it will be still an interview, “we want to find a way for it to be a little bit horizontal,” Shelby says.
How they got here
There is an openness inherent to both Ruff and the Love-in’s calls for applicants—they know they’re going to be faced with radically different proposals, visions, and offers. But they’re not worried. “For me,” Eva says, “it's about clarity in values.” She is fully supportive of future leadership going in their own direction. “My only thing would be, we've worked very hard to ensure that this is a place where that does not perpetuate harmful stereotypes and practices of white-centered organizations. Ultimately, Ruff is a playground, and however people want to play with it, go for it. And those sorts of values, I hope, are ingrained in the company already.”
Reading through the applications that have come in, Shelby says, “it’s really nice to be able to either see Love-in values there, or not.” The company has gone through the process of identifying their values, even (and especially) as those values change. Ruff has done the same, and they’ve shared their ‘5 Key Values’ as part of their job posting.
“None of this work was born this year,” Kristina says. This kind of clarity in values comes from years of sustained effort by these leaders, and a commitment to running organizations that put values at the forefront.
Eva emphasizes that the work of building the culture of an organization has an important bearing on who gets hired, and how they navigate that role. “If you’re looking to hire from Black, Indigenous, or people of colour communities, the culture of the organization already needs to be moving in that direction. Otherwise, if it's a white centered space, it's likely it will stay a white-centered space—unless you actively, actively dismantle that. When we were talking about what’s stopping people applying to Ruff? The question became do they see themselves in classical work? Eva sees this deep groundwork and space-making as central to her and Kaitlyn’s jobs as Artistic Directors:
“We need to prepare people and set people up to come into these work cultures, and to thrive.”
Ruff and the Love-in are both examples of organizations that have transformed their values and work cultures over the past couple of years. They have managed to grow in scale and stabilize their funding while remaining agile; this has been accomplished by a commitment to self-examination, continued learning, and accountability. We believe their collective insights speak to the importance of companies putting time and care into identifying their values (especially when they are at inflection points in their growth), and infusing hiring practices with those same values and priorities. We hope their insights will inspire those in similar situations, and lay bare some of the work and thinking that goes into these processes.
Generator will be undergoing its own leadership transition over the next year (you can find the announcement about Lead Producer Kristina Lemieux’s coming departure in our 20/21 Season Update here). We’ll be documenting more about the thinking and processes that are going into it, right here on our Learning + Explorations blog. If you have any questions for us about anything discussed above, or any questions you’d like us to explore around leadership transition, send us an email at info@generatorto.com.
This blog post is based on an October 23, 2020 Zoom conversation between Generator, the Love-in, and Shakespeare in the Ruff. Present at that meeting—from Generator: Kristina Lemieux and Annie Clarke; from the Love-in: Camille Rojas, Robyn Breen and Shelby Wright; from Ruff: Eva Barrie.
About Shakespeare in the Ruff
Shakespeare In The Ruff is a Toronto-based theatre company dedicated to exploring the possibilities of outdoor, site-specific theatre, re-imagining classical works, and fostering the next generation of theatre artists. Ruff strives to create accessible work in Toronto's Withrow Park, and welcome those who may not have connected with classical works in the past. The company has multiple training programs for emerging artists, and prides itself on deep connections with the Riverdale community. Shakespeareintheruff.com
About The Toronto Dance Community Love-in
The Toronto Dance Community Love-In is a not-for-profit artist-run dance organization based in Tkaronto, with a mandate to uphold generosity, respect and LOVE. The organization is nomadic, hosting an array of programming including workshops, performances, facilitated talks, collective practices and a summer festival in various spaces across the city. By connecting, supporting and welcoming artists locally and abroad, the Love-In provides a responsive platform for sharing experimental approaches in dance education and creative practice. tolovein.com
