Emily Dix
About This Episode:
This week on Stageworthy, host Phil Rickaby is joined by Emily Dix, artistic executive director of Bygone Theatre and the lead behind their mixed use affordable arts space, The Bridge. Emily shares the company’s journey from its beginnings in classic theatre to its evolution into original Canadian works that blend vintage aesthetics with contemporary themes. She discusses her creative process, the importance of atmosphere and design, and the challenges and rewards of running an independent theatre company.
This episode explores:
- The evolution of Bygone Theatre
- Building immersive, design-driven theatre experiences
- Challenges and opportunities of running an indie company in Toronto
- The role of aesthetics, nostalgia, and storytelling in Emily’s work
- Directing, producing, and writing for small-scale theatre
- Fostering community and mentorship in the theatre scene
Guest:
🎭 Emily Dix
Emily Dix is the Artistic Executive Director of Bygone Theatre, and the lead behind their mixed-use, affordable arts space, The Bridge, located at 379 Adelaide St. W. She has nearly 20 years of directing, producing and design experience in theatre, and has dabbled in film and tv as a researcher, designer and production coordinator. She has a degree in English, cinema studies and drama from UofT, and a paralegal diploma from Seneca College. In addition to running Bygone Theatre for 13 seasons, Emily has worked with companies such as Tarragon Theatre, Crow’s Theatre, Theatre 20, Hart House Theatre, and numerous indie companies.
Connect with Emily & Bygone Theatre:
🌐 Website: http://www.bygonetheatre.com
📸 Instagram: @bygonetheatre | @379thebridge
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Transcript
Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain minor errors.
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast.
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But this week, my guest is Emily Dix. Emily Dix is the Artistic Executive Director of Bygone Theatre as well as the lead behind their mixed use affordable art space, the bridge. There’s a lot to say about the future of the bridge, and what’s happening there.
And the services that the bridge has provided over the years are super important. So listen to this episode to learn about Bygone Theatre, but also the bridge, what they do and why they need your help. Now here’s my conversation with Emily Dix.
Emily Dix, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate this. You are the Artistic Executive Director of Bygone Theatre and the behind the bridge.
There’s so many things that we could start. Why don’t we start with Bygone Theatre? Tell me about about Bygone Theatre, what it is and what you do.
[Emily Dix]
Sure. So we are in our 13th season now, which is kind of crazy to say that’s with us having taken off a bit of time because of the pandemic. But yeah, we are a company that puts on shows that were written or set in the early to mid 20th century.
We’ve done a lot of suspense theatre. So recently we did the birds and the rear window. But we also done some comedies.
We’ve also done some musicals. And so we had a couple kind of funny years because we’ve been managing the bridge. So we had like a full season for our 10th season a few years ago.
And we became a charity then. And then since then, because of various scheduling things and finances and stuff, we’ve more helped some other companies produce things that put on our own main stage stuff. So we have a program called Bygone Theatre presents.
And that’s basically where we take a young artist who’s trying to start a company and has either not produced before or has maybe done sort of one show. And we try to take some of the risk off of producing, but still let them do their own thing because I’m a very strong opponent of learning by doing. And yeah, so we did a show last year with Arrowood and that was called Talking to Dead Cats in the Night.
And that’s what we’re working on right now is one called Inhuman Resources with Try Not to Drown Theater. So that’s the only like play we have a scheduled thing coming up. It’s a little scrambled.
I don’t know. We do a bunch of different stuff and it keeps changing.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’m really interested because I mean, you wear many hats with bygone. Not only do you direct, you make props. I think it was, was it rear window where you made accurate TV dinners?
Was that like?
[Emily Dix]
Yes. Which you couldn’t even see on stage. I really like prop food.
I have kind of a weird impact on it like my whole life. I don’t know why. So I always make a lot of that.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, it could be, it certainly helps the actors feel like they’re in the middle of the of the scene. So you do so much, but I’m curious, what’s the genesis of bygone? Why did you feel the need to start the company and what drew you to this period?
[Emily Dix]
So to be really frank, what actually started it was two main things. I was at U of T and I had done a bunch of campus theatre there. And campus theatre is great for giving you a chance to do shows that are more expensive than you’re likely going to have a chance to work on again for a long time, like musicals and things.
Campus theatre is not great for working with a group of people that are all invested in the same way. So you have some people that are really, really into it, maybe more so than they should be. And others that try, you know, are stage managers and try to not show up for your first show because they want to pick up their mom from the airport.
And so I just after several years of frustration through that step, there was one show that we put on that I directed that did quite well. And it actually sold out. And so I knew it hadn’t like had made money, but of course I didn’t make any money on the show.
And not that I went into it to do that, but I had like cut everything else out of my life for several weeks. And they wouldn’t let me put my name on the poster because they’re like, we’re not selling you, we’re selling the show. And there were just some like frustrating little things that made me be like, okay, if I can pull this off, I think I can pull off my own shows that are a much smaller scale.
So part of it was that. The other thing was, I was looking around at the types of theatres I hoped to work with, and the stuff, I just always liked vintage things. So the two places that appealed to me most were Soul Pepper and the Shaw Festival.
And I realized that it’s near impossible to get into either of those groups in any capacity as an actor, definitely as a director, any of that stuff. And also that they’re really expensive. So I couldn’t even afford to go and see them.
So my initial thought was basically, okay, well, let’s do something that puts on the same types of shows because they certainly don’t have to be expensive. And does it in a way that those of us who can’t afford these tickets, those of us that are never going to get an audition there because we don’t have classical theatre training can still be involved. So it was a little bit of spite.
You know, the love is what’s kept it going.
[Phil Rickaby]
Spite is an incredible motivator to get things going, but you are correct. Love is what keeps it going. That idea of we won’t put your name on the poster, we’re selling the show.
I mean, that exists in professional Canadian theatre as well. So seldom are the actors’ names even promoted at certain theatres around the city. They’ll use their images, but they won’t promote the actor.
And I think that that sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of keeping people who are making theatres in their little silo so they never get too big. Nobody ever really hears their name. It’s like, I sound like there’s a conspiracy against there being stars in Canada.
[Emily Dix]
Oh, that’s a whole park for us. It really is.
[Phil Rickaby]
It really is. In terms of the kind of plays that you put on, I do feel like it’s more than just you wanted to do the kind of thing that Salt Pepper might do. You’re drawn to a particular period in Hollywood, right?
So what is it about that period that appeals to you?
[Emily Dix]
I’ve just always liked old stuff and I’ve always liked creepy stuff. My mother will tell stories of how when I was literally four years old, I was asking about serial killers. I was always drawn to kind of the dark side of things.
And there’s tons of that in film, but you don’t see a lot of it in theatre, which is kind of funny because that energy that theatre brings lends itself so well to a good suspense or thriller because you’re there and feel the energy and everything. I think there should be more of it. And then I’ve just always been a big fan of Golden Age Hollywood.
And part of that is the kind of stylized element of it, which works well with theatre. But the main thing is probably that because there were so many restrictions with the Hays Code and stuff then, you had to be really clever with your storytelling. And we don’t have to be clever anymore.
There’s certainly lots of really smart stuff out there. But for every really well-done, clever show, there’s also something that just throws out a bunch of sex and violence and is like, there you go. And you become so desensitized to it.
It’s really quite disturbing, the stuff I can watch and not bat an eye at. And aside from it being disturbing, it just means it’s also taking away some really great storytelling elements because we’re not going to be… I imagine going and seeing a true Shakespearean show when he was still alive and seeing the blood come out from the squibs and stuff, and how insane that must have been and intense.
And now you watch movies and someone’s head’s getting cut off and it’s being worn. There’s just no effect. But the storytelling that they had to use to get around the code, I think, are the same kind of conventions that we can use to tell stories on stage in practical ways.
I think it just makes for better suspense. It keeps people kind of gripped. And I think people like mysteries, even if they don’t know it.
You always like something where you can try and guess what’s going to happen, right? You might not think you like the mystery genre, but people who watch reality TV, they’re like, oh, did you see how he talked to so-and-so? And now it’s all the same thing.
We’re always trying to find patterns and guess what’s going to happen next.
[Phil Rickaby]
There’s also that in those older movies, we didn’t have huge… I mean, they were inventing special effects, so they needed to keep the cost down. When the monster is off screen, it is far more terrifying than when you see it in all of its CGI glory.
It is so much more effective to allude to things is what you imagine is so much more terrifying than anything you could put on screen. And I think, you know, again, theatre could sort of lend itself to that too, because we don’t have CGI and stuff like that in special effects yet. But there’s also, you were sort of alluding to the thrillers and things like that.
And in Canadian theatre, we do not do genre very often. None of the theatres are really interested in genre. Our publishing industry isn’t really interested in genre.
And so in some ways, if that’s something that could bring you into the theatre, you’re not getting that, except from a company like Bygone Theatre, for example.
[Emily Dix]
There is very little of it. Again, I’d see a few at the Shaw Festival, but you know, I went and saw Rope there a few years ago, and I would think I’ve actually been so disappointed at a play. There was no suspense at all.
It was so flat. It really, really sucked. It was too bad because I’d seen a lot of indie theatre, a lot of fringe shows and stuff.
So this was like a beautifully put together show. And you could tell it was talented actors, but it just was absolutely flat. And I kind of thought, well, okay, they haven’t figured it out.
I don’t know what the reviews were like, if other people felt the same, but if it doesn’t go well there, then no one’s going to take a chance on it again.
[Phil Rickaby]
Steven Connelly Yeah. I mean, I also think that it has a lot to do with a lot of theatres need to, their perceived need to, they must be due theatre that is quote-unquote important. And if it’s not, if it’s not important in capital letters, they won’t do it.
And I’ve always thought that there’s space for important theatre. That’s necessary to do that. But we should also do stuff that’s a little bit of a crowd-pleaser.
[Emily Dix]
Yeah. Do you always want to sit down and watch a documentary or sometimes do you want a buddy flick? Do you want a horror movie?
And also the thing that really irks me with that is like, so the types of shows we put on are definitely more like commercial leaning in that they are like story-based things and they’re not about like a clear issue in their plot, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not about important things. Rear Window was an adaptation I did of the short story that inspired the Hitchcock film. So the Hitchcock film is fantastic, but the main thing that it’s missing is that when this guy who is a photographer and has broken his leg, so he’s stuck in his home, sees a murder out his back window, he tells his girlfriend who immediately believes him.
And then they go about just, how do we catch this guy? And the first time I watched that as like a kid, I remember thinking, why did they believe him? Why would you think he saw this in the middle of the night?
And then as it got older and you think about how much people drank and what type of painkillers they were given then. And after COVID, how, and we first did this before COVID, but we did a revival of it after, how warped your view on things becomes when you’re isolated. I thought all of those are, yes, it’s a story about did this guy, but did he or did he not kill his wife?
And we tried to leave it a little more open-ended than the movie, but it’s also about what happens to you in isolation? What happens when you’ve got substance abuse issues that people around you don’t notice? What happens when the person who notices is maybe not the person who can help you?
There’s all of these things that I think are still important, but they’re not likely to be flagged if someone was just skimming through it as a, oh yeah, this is an important play. This is just a fun thing. But I think all of the shows we’ve done have had something about that.
I always like getting into the individual mind and the psyche, and we only put on things like they’re, even though they’re old, they’re always relevant to today. Otherwise there’s no point in us putting it on, right?
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Emily Dix]
I think when you have a bit of that distance and time, you can look at stuff like that. If we put on a play that was basically the same, but was modern day and said, hey, it’s about this guy who already has some like war trauma and stuff and toxic masculinity, and then he is injured. So he’s on painkillers and mixing them with alcohol.
It’s set present day. People will be like, oh God, that’s a dower. I not want to see it.
But when you’re like, no, but it’s the 50s. And it’s like, remember, Jimmy Stewart played this character. Then you can go in and be like, okay, I can enjoy this and get some of that without feeling like it’s being thrown in your face.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I mean, genre is always about something other than what it’s about, you know, maybe do a zombie thing. It’s not about zombies.
It’s about consumerism or it’s about groupthink. It’s the genre of things can say big, important things without hitting people over the head with a sledgehammer. And we can entertain people.
But again, I’ve complained about this for years, about the fact that like we seem anytime that I’ve brought it up, there’s always somebody who thinks like, what are we, Hollywood? Or what are we supposed to entertain people? Like, as though the worst thing you could do in theatre is entertain.
[Emily Dix]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess, again, a whole, a whole podcast you could do. But I, I do think theatre is not there to be our own personal therapy.
And it does not have to always be there to get across a important message. I think it’s art. And it can go, there’s room for it to be all different types of things.
And you don’t have to go into it knowing it’s one thing or another. And the most important thing is I very much feel agree with the idea of the death of the artist. Like once you put it out there, if you come and see my show and go, Oh, clearly, that’s, you know, about the war or whatever.
Great. You get that from it. Sure.
It doesn’t mean that that’s what I intended. It doesn’t mean it’s what the actors intended. That’s the joy of art.
[Phil Rickaby]
It is the joy of art. I really, I’ve had some great experiences where people tell me about a show they’ve seen that I was involved in and what they think it’s about. And they have a completely different take on it.
And I think that’s fascinating. And I love when that happens. There’s a freedom to that.
Let’s talk a little bit about let’s shift gears. And let’s talk about the bridge before we get into the recent developments about the bridge. Tell me a little bit about the reason for creating the bridge, the kind of programs at the bridge and just generally why it’s necessary.
[Emily Dix]
So probably my main kind of passion in the arts and here in Toronto is having things that are accessible. And I know every company now has some kind of accessibility mandate, but that tends to focus on a lot of physical accessibility and then attempts at accessibility to disability, which is all needed, but is not the entire thing because accessibility should be about literally how everyone can be involved. And the thing that most of us artists face is not having regular income.
I don’t know. No, it’s not true. I know like two people who make a living only doing the arts, but they live very poorly.
And it’s not a lifestyle that everyone can do. And it’ll depend a lot on if you got a good apartment 15 years ago that you’re still in. So affordability is very, very important to me.
So when we went looking for a space, the thing I had been saying from the beginning was I want somewhere that has $10 an hour rehearsal space. The reason for that was I wanted to make sure it was below minimum wage and minimum wage was a bit lower then. So now we maybe have like a little bit of wiggle room.
If we end up somewhere where it goes up to 12, I’ll feel like we’re still needing kind of what we need. But the main thing is I don’t think you can call something affordable when it costs more an hour than the average person who needs that earns an hour. And most artists, I think, end up making basically minimum wage because we’re doing gig work or we don’t have insurance.
And so even people that you see, you know, oh, they’re getting TV gigs and separate, but they probably also had long stretches with nothing, or they’ve got all these other expenses, or they went to theatre school, they’re still paying that off 15 years later. So if you’re basically trying to manage your life at minimum wage, and then you want to go and put on a show, and you have to pay $20 to $40 an hour for just space, just space to rehearse, let alone a space to put on a show, and all the other stuff that goes into it, there’s no way. There’s no way.
And there’s not really anything that supports that very much. So that was the first thing that we wanted to do was have a space for that. And then we had quite unusual timing because we basically, we started this up in August of 2023.
And about a month after we’d been there, Artscape went into receivership, which we’ve been hearing whispers about from people, but it happened a lot more abruptly than any of us thought it was going to. And we knew people that suddenly couldn’t log into their system and stuff, and people that hadn’t been paid, despite companies putting out things to the news saying everyone’s been paid. And I was like, hounding people on that.
I think a lot of the issues on social media for always asking these things. So we were able to help a little bit there. We did, we had an unofficial Weeblash thing because there were a bunch of artists who suddenly didn’t have their space.
So they spent the money and put the time in and that was coming up so soon. So we did that there. And then they mostly, they were in different kinds of disciplines.
So they sort of scattered out around, but we were working with a group called Uki and they do very different art than we do. It’s not theatre. It’s, I’m always terrible at describing them, but they do anything from like, they’ve worked with AI, but in good ways.
And every time I say AI, people get like up in arms, but no, they do interesting stuff with it. They do more like installation things. They’ve done some music stuff and all of that.
So they came from a very different space than we were from. And we basically wanted to meld some more types of artists in one place. And one of the people who had been there with us, I won’t name him in case I say anything that I shouldn’t say, but he basically told us that about how Artscape had some of that initially and how it was great that there were all different types of artists just sort of in the same space.
And I’ve heard the same kind of problems with the CSI, but then as things have grown and it’s, it’s gotten more grouped off and it lost the whole community vibe. And that always comes back down to money. And so I really wanted to have something where we could have it as inexpensive as possible and whenever possible free to have all different types come together.
And we never reached what I saw as our potential. And yet still we’ve met some really great artists from all different backgrounds. So it showed me that it’s really necessary.
And there are people that want to do that if you just like make it available and keep things a little simpler. And I don’t try and like put these near little boxes that I see a lot of
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, the, the, the idea of how much people often pay for say rehearsal space, everyone, especially people starting out, but indie theatre in general, you want to make something and maybe pay people, but you can never get to the next level if you’re consistently just throwing everything you all the money you have into the early production. So having an affordable rehearsal space and truly affordable rehearsal space, for example, is hugely important. So I mean, I thank you for doing that.
It’s I think it’s important that that we acknowledge things that you’ve been working towards. But there have been recent developments and we should talk about talk about that.
[Emily Dix]
Yeah, so just before so I just got back from my enclosure move, just the first time I’ve ever gone overseas. And the first time I’ve had more than one consecutive day off since we revamped bridge. So that was needed.
About two days before we left the country, our landlords came by and said they were going to terminate our lease early. So we were supposed to be there until the end of August, we didn’t expect that we’d be able to renew our lease, we were already looking into two different, different options. But we had just recently renegotiated things with them.
So the long and short of it is, we came on a few years ago, we had a fixturing period, which is basically, we didn’t do any capital improvements or anything. But most people who took over a space like that would have done some kind of rentals. And during that time, instead of paying rent, you pay a fixturing fee, which is basically your your utilities, though, it’s more than utilities that will get involved.
So we paid that. And then the rent was going to go up to something tremendous. I mean, 14,000, I might as well just say that, yeah, which is still way, way, way below market value.
But way above, you know, anything we had, but we had spent like a year applying for so many grants and different types of funding and talking to try and talk to the city, we talked to the MPP, we talked to just various wealthy people and tried to raise money and kept saying, Look, if we can get $250,000, we are covered for our entire lease period, that will mean me working full time to part time workers, every all rentals will be 10 bucks an hour, we had all this programming plan, like, it’s a huge amount of money for us, a little company that, you know, for the first 10 years, we never got over 8000 in revenue. But when you look at some other big projects that have happened, it’s nothing to drop them. So we were we were hopeful.
And then we were also hopeful when Artscape fell out and thought, Oh, maybe we can get some of that. But no, it’s been the opposite. Everyone’s sort of tightening their purse strings.
And so I think it was last February, we said to them, Look, we’ve tried all this stuff, we showed them the things we showed them all of our financials and everything and said, We just we don’t think we can do it. There’s no way. There’s no point in us trying to charge more and get people in.
There isn’t the demand for it. We want it basically. And they said no.
And they’re like, But we can renegotiate this with you. We’re going to let you have the space for $3,000 a month. We don’t want to hear from you again.
But you are going to send us detailed reports every month of exactly what you’re doing. So that worked for a couple months, because it was our understanding that basically, they didn’t want to have to deal with us at all. This is a spot that had been slayed for redevelopment.
And I don’t know if that’s still going to happen or what, but like, they were just sort of running out of time with us. And also Allied is huge. It’s a billion dollar company.
And so we figured, Okay, they want to see this to make sure we’re not trying to screw them. Fine. We have to keep all those records as a charity anyway.
But they got started getting like stricter and stricter on things and limiting the types of events we could do. And so some of the things that had actually brought in money, we lost because of course, we’re not making money in $10 an hour. And they also held filter over our heads, the fact that at any point, they could change it and decide No, you have to immediately so it makes it really hard to plan.
And it’s it’s a lot more stressful and exhausting than I realized it was like I was annoyed by it. But seeing my house decline, and how much better I did when I took a week off from it, I realized like, Oh, yeah, that’s constantly, you know, dealing with the people on one end and trying to get artists in and renters and stuff and knowing that like literally with a day’s notice, and that happened a couple times that with the rent coming back up, but they announced, Hey, we’re now going to charge you this thing. And like, we have such small margins, we don’t have an operating, we don’t have operating budgets. We, I don’t get paid most of the time I did a full year of full time unpaid work, and then was like, can’t do this again, because we don’t make enough money to live.
And then we’ve had a couple donations that have paid me $500 flat a week for a few months now, but that’s still less than minimum wage. And so that’s the thing, too, is like, you can’t even get someone to help you because you can’t ask someone else to work for that little rates, the fun thing that you always find in theatre, everyone says we need to pay artists, great, well, then we need to charge more. Oh, but we can’t do that.
And, you know, so we’ve been living in that fun space. Yeah, but we had just renegotiated this. And we thought, like, it’s probably gonna be a bit of a pain, but we’re gonna be good till the end of August.
And so we announced new programs, we brought on two companies in residence, I was talking to several high school co-op students, we had groups that had booked out the space to do shows that I’d given additional discounts to there was one that was going to do a show. And they wanted to book it for a week, because they’ve looked at our pricing and asked, and we’re like, I think that’s gonna be about 1500. And they said, Oh, we could probably get down to more like 11.
And then they were talking about it like you can’t do the load in show load out in one week format that doesn’t help anybody, let’s give you two weeks for that price. And like, we could do that because it was, you know, because we’re not trying to make money and we had low enough cost. There’s nowhere else they’re going to find a space that size for two weeks for $1,100.
And it’s really shitty, because I’ve been talking to them about it for a long time. And we were helping them with some other things. You know, we have some of our stores stuff there, we’ve let that out to programs or to companies that are doing period productions, because we have a ton of stuff, but that’s the expensive thing to start up.
Yeah, there’s just a lot, a lot of things, a lot of people that are gonna be let down. There’s also individual tenants that had private office spaces that were 500 bucks each, which is quite a bit below what you’ll find that the closest comparison or so like, of the co working spaces that are a bit smaller, and are like a desk, basically, but they had their private lockable office plus access to the big room. So you know, two of them work with textiles, they had the big board table to put stuff out on.
And yeah, there’s just and then there’s also my company stuff, like I, I’m supposed to be doing a workshop of a play I’ve been working on. That’s really the least of it. But we’ve got a big tech program that we were just launching.
There’s just a lot, a lot of stuff that we sort of crammed in, because we knew we had very little time, and that we might not get the opportunity again. And so it’s really frustrating to have had them come and cut it off with no notice. And when I sent that to them, when they said that, it’s like we literally just launched a new immersive tech program, which is like one of its kind.
We’ve got these shows lined up. The woman interrupted me and said, you’re paying very little money. Like, well, I don’t know what to say to that.
Sure, you’re worth so much more money than like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, no, I guess the difficulty with a commercial landlord is that they can do that kind of thing. They can decide to raise your rent. There’s so many little businesses, little shops, restaurants and things like that that go out of business because the landlord has decided to increase their rent beyond what they can afford.
It’s just the what you’re doing at the bridge is so needed that it’s really quite upsetting that it can end so quickly.
[Emily Dix]
Yeah, it is. The problem is we don’t really live in a country that values the arts, unfortunately. And we’re in Toronto, are in one of the best cities for it, and it’s still not a good city for me.
It’s really expensive to live here. The people with money need to decide. I could go on a whole long thing about how the laws need to change around empty commercial space, because honestly, that’s what the main problem is.
It would be one thing if we were competing and there was someone who’s like, oh yeah, I’ll pay the $30,000 a month. Why would they want to take the $3,000 from you? There’s no one banging down their door.
This space sat empty for four years before we were there. That was what going into it, I naively thought, hey, we’re a charity, so maybe there’s something we can offer. Wouldn’t you want to have it be used if it’s covering your expenses?
No, they don’t. Because the real estate market is based on speculation. They actually give us lower rent and they have to report that.
Then that lowers the value of their assets. Depending on how things are mortgaged and all of that, it can also make it so that they can’t get their mortgage renewed. It’s a way, way bigger thing than anything we could possibly do anything about.
It needs to change on the legal side of things, because it obviously is working for the wealthy people at the top. Why are they going to change it if they can have empty buildings and say, oh, they’re worth all this money, even if no one’s paying it for it?
[Phil Rickaby]
Doug, can’t they also essentially claim a loss in the tax and say, well, it was empty, so we lost all this money, and the government will pay me for having an empty building, and here we have thousands of storefronts that are empty, thousands of office spaces that are empty that could be put to use if the city really valued the arts. Also, not only you mentioned that rent is expensive for living, but all of the spaces that artists can work in are expensive. The theatres, the rehearsal space, everything prices out the artist.
Even with that, grants are falling in terms of how much it’s available. It’s a real struggle for artists, especially indie artists. Is there anything you could talk about about what you’ve been doing, how you’re looking forward, it’s still too early days to be able to say what might be on the horizon or what’s happening?
[Emily Dix]
We’ve gotten a lot of support. We got a lot of support when we first moved in, but I think we’ve gotten more support now, so we’ll see. I think, for better or worse, people are more likely to support you when it’s a crisis, instead of being like, hey, here’s an opportunity, and they go, okay, great, you’ve got it figured out.
I know a lot of people, I’ve put little videos out to make it clear because I’ve heard whisperings of people being like, oh, what did they do to get that? Oh, they must have all of it. No, we personally have no money.
We’re poor. Our company didn’t have any magic thing. It was really nine months of negotiating.
The main thing that makes Bygone different is we are a charity, but we are probably the smallest charity in the theatre community, almost certainly, because we don’t have any actual stuff. Even something like Obsidian, which I believe only has two, they still have some set expenses. We didn’t have any.
I don’t generally get paid, and if I do, I get paid for one of my roles on one of the shows. We had the benefits of a charity without any of the existing commitments, and so we could take a bit of a risk, is basically what it is, and we decided to do that. We put this out.
We’ve had lots of community members reach out. I know they’ve reached out to media and stuff. I know BlogTO did a little thing.
They’re welcome to reach out to me. They have not. They said they did, but yeah.
We have talked to Chris Flever, who’s the MPP. He’s so supportive. He came to the bridge launch that we did a couple years ago.
He’s going to reach out to some people. He suggested some places that might have connections. The Deputy Mayor, Uzma Malik, we had talked to, I guess that’s a couple years ago now, Carter just talked to her today, I think.
I very briefly managed to quarter the Mayor and speak to her about it a little bit, mostly to be like, remember the name so that when the emails come in, you hopefully actually read it. So yeah, on that side of things, the city has said that they’re supportive. They said that they’ll write letters of support, and it’s a city.
Everything’s going to be kind of slow moving, but they know who we are. We’ve talked to a couple leasing agents. I have less faith on that front because if we’re going with a commercial landlord, it’s going to be the same thing, right?
In an ideal world, we either get a city run thing so that it’s just set and done, or we find money through grants or whatever it is and just pay a landlord the normal rent so that we can enforce our rights a little bit more because it’s so hard to plan. You don’t qualify for a lot of grants either. This space was already only a three-year lease, so most of the grants for operational, those kind of things, it’s got to be five years.
Then you’ll have to have so many years of audited reports, and we’ve only been a charity for three years. We are limited. We’re also limited in that I don’t know if Allied is going to give us back our quite substantial deposit.
I think they should. I expect that they’ll try to not give us back at least some of it. Yeah, and then it’s a matter of, well, what stuff can we…
I’m willing to take personal risks in that I will do a lot of unpaid work, but again, we don’t have money. We don’t have any assets or anything, and our company is very small, so there’s nothing we can do just as individuals that will help us get a space. Then there’s also a lot of things to consider because there’s different people that might be interested in partnering up, but the problem that we had when we first moved in, too, was our first group of people were great because everyone understood that it was like, yeah, you’ve got some private space, but it’s also a weird kind of co-working thing, and rehearsals get loud.
While I want different types of artists there, artists again tend to not have a lot of money. The ones that do are some that are more in the tech stuff, but they might not be able to work in a space that sometimes has people singing or yelling, right? So we could consider trying to put some soundproofing.
Thank god we didn’t do that because that would have cost a lot of money. That would have been down the drain, but there’s all these different things you have to balance. All that has to be figured out by a group of us that aren’t being paid for it, and it just takes a lot of time.
Yeah, so we’ll see. I am trying. We have also had some things, like TAPA has been supportive.
They’ve offered, for bygones, some free co-working space, which is very generous. It’s probably not really needed, though, because I can work from wherever, but they’ve also said that if we have anyone who had rehearsal space booked at the 10 an hour, they’re going to extend that for anyone that’s booked so far. But the biggest thing that people are going to be missing out on is the private space and the performance space, and that I don’t have a solution for.
So I am going to keep looking, whether it’s something that we have or, by some miracle, somewhere in some other group. But I know prices are going up everywhere. One of the last affordable theatres, we’ve had a few people that cancelled bookings there and came and did stuff with us because they just jacked up their prices.
I’m sure you can guess which one.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’m going to ask a question, and I think I already know the answer to this, but somebody listening might not. They don’t know your history. They don’t know you.
Why do so much of this unpaid and put so much into this when you’re getting so little back? What makes that important to you?
[Emily Dix]
Because it won’t happen otherwise. I guess it’s a mix of a tiny bit of desperate optimism, along with probably some masochism. I’ve always loved the arts.
I grew up somewhere that did not have… I grew up in Kitchener Waterloo, so there were not really a lot of opportunities for stuff. It was kind of the worst of both worlds.
It wasn’t small town. There was enough to be like, oh, there’s a drama group, but you sign up at 14 and then find out they’ve combined you with the six to eight-year-olds because there were enough people. There kept being glimpses of opportunities, but nothing ever really there.
The same thing happened through high school. They opened a new school when I was in grade 10, and it was supposed to have media as a magnet program. Technically, I was the TV producer there for the few years I was there, but we never actually got the cameras.
I just had kind of a history of saying, yeah, okay, I’m going to take this on and not really having the resources, but it has meant that I got to try a bunch of stuff. It’s kind of disturbing to think now because I don’t feel that old, but technically, I started designing for theatre 20 years ago, which feels insane to say, but I did. I’ve just been doing it a long time, and I’ve seen how things have changed and seen where it’s started to seem promising and seeing stuff crash.
I moved to Toronto in 2008, so right when all the jobs went away. I’ve been lucky in that in my younger days, I did have some jobs that paid well, and I had roommates, so I could afford to take some of those risks. That’s the thing that I keep saying to some of the young artists I work with now.
When they’ll ask me, they look like, how could you possibly do this? I couldn’t do it now. If I was 20 right now, and I was trying to start bygone and put on the types of shows I did, it would literally be impossible.
The cost of doing these things has gone up so much more than what we’re earning. I earn less now than I did when I was 22, by quite a bit. And yet, then I could put on a whole show in a theatre for $3,000, and now you can’t even get the theatre for that.
I kind of feel like already when I started out, it was difficult, and there weren’t a lot of opportunities for people to get going. But that’s getting worse. If we don’t do something, we’re not going to have any actors under 40.
We’re not going to have any directors under 60. And then, is it all just going to go away? And then as stuff is getting worse in the U.S. too, we can’t rely on that. We’ve got to do something. I’ve always been the type to organize things and get it done. And I’ve also always been the type that feels like you can’t ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.
We have only had cool shows where we paid everyone a proper union rate. We started paying people something as soon as we could, and that’s always been a priority. But I also don’t pretend like…
And I see this happen with a lot of companies. There are companies that keep doing the artist collective policy a little longer than they should, so they can do things without paying people what they’re worth. But that’s not sustainable.
And you can do that to start something. And then I really think as soon as you’ve got a bit of a foot up, you need to take that step. And we did that, and it was terrifying, and it broke for a while.
But it also is what led to us eventually becoming a charity and getting a spot. And so it is worth it. But I also realize that not everyone can take that risk.
As much as I’ve seen that I’m poor, I do also live with my now husband. So there’s two of us. We don’t have kids.
So they’re dog. And so there are risks that we can take that not everybody can. So I think you should do that.
And I don’t know, I just feel like eventually either it will pay off, or I’ll get so jaded that I’ll just quit and never do any of it again. But then at least I can say, like, oh, no, I did actually try all of that. And you do meet great people along the way.
There are lots of people that also have that same kind of drive. And if there’s enough that get together, and then we get the right situation, something good will come of it. That’s also how, honestly, all the major theatres in the city started.
It’s just that then the missing piece is they had major government support.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yes. Yes. They were doing little things.
And then in the late 60s, early 70s, there was an influx of massive amounts of money. And that’s why they were able to do what they do. And because that’s all gone away, that’s why other people cannot.
[Emily Dix]
Yes.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Emily Dix]
Yeah. Which is surprisingly, though, a thing that a lot of people don’t seem to realize. And they look at something like Factory or Terragon and think, like, well, no, this started as these little, you know, rough and tumble, get yourself together.
But then somebody saw, oh, there’s promise there and gave them the support. And now they’re institutions. And I think instead of just putting more and more, I’m not saying they should go away.
They’re great. But instead of just putting all of our resources into these things, why don’t we say, hey, look how well that worked. That was something new then.
Maybe we should do the same thing now. And it’d be great if I’m a part of one of those. It doesn’t have to just be bygones, though.
That’s the thing I’ve tried to make clear at The Bridge, is we have quite a narrow mandate, which I like. But I am still putting the overall community stuff above that. Because you have to.
I don’t really know why you would prioritize just your one narrow artistic vision. I like directing. I am going to keep directing our own main stage shows.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think we should be like bringing on people for different things. That’s why we do the Bydon Theatre Presents. I don’t direct any of those.
That’s all people that I just sort of like help with stuff. And then hopefully, if we keep just sort of lifting everybody up, eventually, the powers that be will pick someone. Something will happen.
[Phil Rickaby]
I do like what you said about if you get enough people who are doers together, and the stars align, that things will happen. I love that you are bringing doers together. And our industry needs people like you who are passionate and willing to do the hard work.
I hope that things come together and that The Bridge can continue in some form. And that the people who are doing it, like yourself, can actually get paid a living wage to do it. Because I think that it’s necessary that that happens.
Otherwise, people burn out, and then they get jaded, and they go away. And the work that they’ve done goes away.
[Emily Dix]
I mean, if some more film and TV stuff came back, I could do that, too. The year that I started doing all of our things, it was because I had an eight-month researcher gain, which paid well enough that then I was like, okay, I can stretch this out. Instead of living well for eight months, I could stretch it out for a year.
And that was what allowed me to then spend a year doing bygone full-time and realizing, oh, this really is a full-time job. So I would also, if anyone wants to hire me for some of that stuff, bring it on.
[Phil Rickaby]
Emily, in the time that we have left, I really want to talk to you and get to know you as an artist outside of bygone and The Bridge. I’d like to do that by learning a bit about your origin story. You mentioned growing up in Kitchener, but what first drew you to theatre?
What made you want to do it?
[Emily Dix]
I liked doing it before I knew what theatre really was. I was one of those kids that I literally was writing scripts and trying to get my friends to act them out when we were about four or five in the backyard. I remember saying to my friend Ian, getting really frustrated with him, because I had the same words that we decided.
And he said, no, we just play in front of the grown-ups. That’s why it’s called a play. And I’ve come to this age of growing up.
Chris Moody was with my little cousins too. A bunch of us were around the same age, but I was the oldest. And so I was often put in charge of them.
And there’s like a family reunion video. And I remember saying to them, because they want us to do something for the video. Okay, what’s a song we all know?
I’m a little teapot. And like, we know the things. Yeah.
Okay. And we’re doing it. And my youngest cousin’s not doing it.
And I look at him with like murder in my eyes. So I’ve chilled out with my actors. But there was poems that I put on a little play in grade four too, for my teacher who was retiring and wrote some weird little thing.
I had one artistic person in my family, my great uncle, my Uncle Jim. He is an Ottawa, and he was a drama teacher for many years. And he’s been an actor and a director.
But he lived far enough away. I’d see him at holidays and stuff. He’s been a great supporter as I’ve been an adult.
He is always coming out and seeing our shows. But yeah, I don’t know. I always liked I used to read nonstop.
I always liked playing pretend. And I, I set up like scenarios with things I didn’t play with, you know, when I babysit and I see kids playing with dolls, they were making them talk and stuff. I never did probably look really creepy.
I never spoke out loud. I set up little scenes, and I’d sit there and stare at them and have the conversation in my head. And yeah, I think mom used to laugh about the difference between my Barbie shelf where everything was posed and they were holding things and stuff.
And my sister’s where all the dolls were naked and just, you know, all across the floor. So I’ve just always been that sort of type. And then as soon as we started having any kind of theatre in school, which I guess is a little bit in grade six, I realized that I liked being the one to like kind of oversee stuff.
But it probably wasn’t until like I directed, you know, things through high school, and we did the Sears Drama Festival, whatever that’s called now. And one of the drama awards in high school, but you know, from a small town didn’t really mean too much. And then I went to U of T.
And I couldn’t do the drama program because I, for one, I didn’t have the money to get to the audition for it. But also I realized like I was gonna have to work through school. And most drama programs, you can’t.
So I did English and I worked during the day and then I did classes in the evenings. And then once I realized, oh, I can manage this, I started doing campus theatre too. And then started Vibon.
I just like to be busy. Yeah, and I’ve just always been the person that’s kind of overseeing the big things and organize the stuff. And a friend of mine said to me, someone who’s not great with compliments and has given me maybe two in the 10 years we’ve been friends, said, well, I think producing is what you’re actually very good at.
And I’d only ever produce stuff out of necessity. And I was like, oh, if he’s saying that, then maybe I actually need something because he’s really not one to get compliments. And I started looking at how producing can be artistic in its own right, instead of just being the one that has to, you know, go through the receipts and everything.
So I like doing that. I still probably like directing the most, but I just never thought there was any chance of that being something I’d make a living at. I have had, hey, producing jobs with different companies.
So there’s more possibility in that. But yeah, I like telling stories. I like hearing stories.
I apparently have a good knack for them. I find it really easy if we like watch a movie or something. I always know exactly what’s going to happen from the beginning to like kind of an annoying point for me and those watching with me.
But it means that I find it really easy to break down things and to edit other people’s stories because I can.
[Phil Rickaby]
When you were when you were a kid and you were sort of directing your relatives and neighborhood kids and things like that, at what point did you make the leap from doing that to realizing that that what a play is and that people in theory can get paid to do this, that it’s a career, it’s a way of life?
[Emily Dix]
I definitely knew about film before theatre. I’m trying to think of the first time I even saw a play. It might have been like grade seven.
It probably was. That was the first time I was in. We did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I think we saw something that year.
I always knew that Uncle Jim did some of that. There was some TV series that was about famous artists and stuff, and he had been on that. I remember my mom calling me to come down to the series because, oh look your Uncle Jim’s on TV.
So I knew that acting was a job, but I don’t know that I really connected all of that. I used to want to be an actor. I think most people that go into the arts that’s sort of their first thing into it.
I still love acting, but I hate auditioning. So if anyone ever wants to just hand me a part, I’ll do it, but I’m terrible at auditions. They’re mortifying.
I hope I make my auditions bearable for actors because I know they could be really terrible. Yeah, I guess probably I started thinking about it more middle school or high school was when I would watch stuff and think, oh I could do better than that. There was a reality show that was to get the next Second City.
First thing is they did improv through high school too. I was on our improv team. Watching that and seeing how terrible the people were, it was like, oh my god.
It was my goal for a while as a teenager. I was like, I’m going to be on SNL. That’s going to be my thing.
I didn’t do anything to move towards that. I moved to Toronto. I took two Second City courses.
Too much money went into practical stuff, but it’s funny because I now know Rosie Shuster, who was one of the people who started that and had been married to Lorne Michaels. I never got on SNL, but if I told high school me, oh yeah, you’ll just know the woman that started this, they’d still be excited.
[Phil Rickaby]
You sort of alluded to this, but I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit about Lifeboat.
[Emily Dix]
Lifeboat has been being dragged out because we need a very particular kind of location for it. John Steinbeck wrote a short story, which was never published because very early on, Hitchcock bought the rights to it to make the film. Steinbeck hated the film so much, he wanted to just wash his hands of it.
I haven’t been able to actually read the Steinbeck version because there’s one copy of it, and it’s kept in the John Steinbeck part of the library in San Francisco. I’ve read things that people have written about it, so I know what his complaints about the film are. But even before I knew that part, I had seen the film and was like, this is a fantastic premise, but it’s ridiculous.
Even for Hitchcock, it’s pretty ridiculous. The basic plot is it’s the Second World War, and a civilian ship goes down, and so an odd group of people end up in a lifeboat together. The oddest of them being a German, who they pull out of the water, and some of them right away want to get rid of them, and there’s a brief thing of like, no war crimes, and he’s a human, and stuff.
But then ultimately, really why they keep him is they realize he’s the only one that’s got any navigational experience, and they don’t know where they are, and they are doomed if they don’t use them. It’s a great little character piece because it’s just in this freaking lifeboat. I love those things.
We always do chamber dramas, partly because they’re so much easier to stage, but also because that’s what interests me, is the people more than the plot. I really like stuff that can be in real time, because I just think if you can get the timing of that right for suspense, there’s nothing more suspenseful. Lifeboat won’t be quite in real time.
We’ll have to pass over, but that’s part of it too, is that you start to lose track of time. The thing that’ll be interesting with it is we’re going to have projection for the water, but it’s going to be more than just projecting an image of water. There’s this technology that it’s basically like cameras will track your movement, and so then it’s responsive.
If I go like that, the water will splash. My plan has always been to have it somewhere where the audience is sitting kind of in the water, so if they kick their feet, the water is going to splash. When one of the actors does something, and then in addition to have some actual water, because I think it would be really weird to have them be dry, I’m going to make some sort of wave-shaped things that’ll have pools of actual water, so they can reach in, get water, the projections will react, would get wet.
It’s going to be cool. For that to work, really, it should be not fully in the round. I won’t give away the end, but I need to have something.
I can hide some things behind, but basically a thrust. And we had talked to, I really wanted to do it this past year, when it was the 80th anniversary of the end of the War in the Pacific, and we’ve been talking to a museum about doing it, but then the people in charge, they shifted around jobs and stuff, and the new person we started talking to was like, yeah, you could rent out our theatre. I’m like, that’s not the point.
We’ve been talking about a partnership, and I want it in the room with all the artifact. There’s no way I’m going to go to Ottawa to rent a theatre. We’re still trying to find a space.
We are going to start workshopping the other stuff, because the hope for it, too, is to have something that everything will be built and designed on things that are movable, so we could take it to different locations. But what I, in an ideal world, would have is in a museum space, a kind of war museum, so that during the day, when the show isn’t on, there will be different mini-exhibits that will relate to it in some way that people will be able to go and interact with, and then they can come and see the show. And that’s part of what our new program that we just launched, our Immersive Digital Theatre program, we got a very trillion grant to get some equipment, so we got about $45,000 worth of equipment.
It’s really exciting. We need to find somewhere and use it all now, but we’re launching, and this program is still happening, we will have to find a different location, but I’m not too concerned about that, so people should still apply. It is still happening, and it’s going to be five artists that will be chosen to work with a bunch of industry professionals, and they’re going to learn stuff like projection mapping, coding, all of these things, and it’s going to culminate in them making their own little, they’ll work on some of the water projection, and then they’ll also get to do their own design that will be exhibited in our year-end thing, and that potentially will be something that will be part of the show. And if it’s part of that, then we’ll get funding, and we’ll license it from them, or we’ll hire them to do that, but they’ll get kind of a test run of it.
So it’s cool, because there’s nothing like that. You see the word immersive thrown around a lot, and it usually means flowers projected on the wall, and you can walk in front of it, and look, now the projection is on you. That’s not immersive.
It’s also not immersive to just walk around and listen to a play. I think there’s so much you can do, and I also think that people sometimes kind of shy away from tech and theatre, but again, with the recordability thing, we couldn’t have done this without Petroleum Grant. It’s very exciting to have the equipment, but we still made a point of getting the best, cheapest things.
When we did the yellow wallpaper a few years ago, it was sort of like a testing for this, and we used $3 webcams to record things. It was because we wanted to show that you could put on something at a larger scale with inexpensive equipment. A lot of people with that said to us, why didn’t you just film it?
Why was she doing it live? And it was because it was an experiment. That was part of it.
It was like, yes, we could have filmed her and just projected it, but then it’s not theatre. She was doing it live, and I was switching live, and we wanted to show that it was something. I hadn’t done anything like that since high school, but I could learn how to use the Atom switcher and stuff, and it was to show this is a thing.
Artists, you can learn how to do, and that’s what we’re trying to do with this as well, is to show that you don’t have to be Robert Okaj to have great tech, and I think people expecting more and more out of their experiences when they go out. It looks really flashy, and you get great pictures if you go to an immersive Van Gogh kind of thing. Instead of just getting angry about that, I think we can meet them in the middle and be like, hey, you can get really cool pictures at the beginning of the show here too.
You can come and play and splash around in the water, and you can also learn something about it, and then you can watch a show. We’ll also teach artists how to do this themselves, so they can do their own things with it. A thing I also really want to do to just wrap that up in there is, I think if we have some more things where people who do projection art and stuff can make something that then they can license after, depending on your contract, a lot of the time you do the work and it’s now owned by the company or the theatre or something.
A thing I really want to do is I want our land acknowledgement to be some kind of visual thing, and that’s something that then whatever artist designs that, then they can take that anywhere where the land acknowledgement is relevant. They can go license that to other theatres and do stuff with it. Another thing we’re always trying to do is, how can we either teach you how to do something you can easily take somewhere where people have more money than could pay you to do it, or you can keep using that same thing, because all of us spend so much time and energy to put on this short little thing and it’s done.
That’s my hope.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.
Thank you for talking to me about Bygone and The Bridge, and I look forward to seeing what happens in the future. Thank you for listening to this episode of Stageworthy. Before I get into who my guest is next week, I would like to talk about Patreon.
I can’t do this show without the backers who’ve chosen to support me on Patreon. They are the reason I’m able to do this show, because while I give you this podcast for free, it’s not free to make. There are costs involved, like hosting for a website, hosting for the files, distribution of the podcast to all of the podcast services, editing software, and much more.
I don’t do advertising, so the only way that I get any kind of support is through Patreon. Patrons get early access to episodes, as well as conversations about issues, things that are coming up. And if there are things, topics that I want to cover, I always go to the patrons first.
So if you want to help me to make this show, go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a backer of this show. My guest next week is Stephen Hao. Stephen is an actor and a director. And we talked about his time at Stratford.
I really enjoyed the conversation with Stephen and you’ll be able to listen to that next week when Stephen Hao is my guest.
