CINARS - International Exchange for the Performing Arts in Canada

The annual CINARS conference took place in November in Montreal. The little-known trade show has a very important function in Canada's performing arts world.

CINARS goes way beyond politics and rather farther afield than just Quebec workshops are about getting into the South American and Mexican markets. CINARS (it's the French acronym for the International Exchange for the Performing Arts) brings together performers and presenters to sell their services to each other.

It goes on for four days - an awful lot of promoting, publicizing, negotiating, and then in the evenings a whole range of checking out of shows, official and off-CINARS, put on by fellow actors, dancers, singers, and other performers.

CINARS takes over not just one Grand Salon but both in le Reine Elizabeth. This plush central hotel (masculine in French, which is why the Q.E. is 'le') has an ever-growing 'contact room' where 150 companies and agencies from 20 countries do business totalling almost $10 million.

A marketplace is about exchange, of course. Performers and presenters need facilitators and coordinators. At lunchtime Gregory Nash, the British Council's dance and drama projects manager, talked on how touring companies can get governments involved and investors interested in helping them visit Britain. Representatives from the Welsh Arts Council, Queer Up North, and other British arts groups are taking part.

The province of Quebec has a quasi-embassy in London: la Maison du Quebec is well-situated on Pall Mall. A regular CINARS attendee from there, its cultural attache, Colin Hicks, has for some years helped the two-way flow of various arts groups between the UK and here. Quebec dance ensembles go to the UK, dance groups from there, such as Kultyer, performed in Ottawa and Montreal earlier this year.

Duncan Low, also a regular CINARS visitor, now runs one of Vancouver's main arts organizations. Previously he was one of the co-founders of the Scottish International Children's Festival in Edinburgh, where a Scottish company and the giant puppets of Montreal's Theatre sans Fil premiered their co-production Crown of Destiny in 1995. Serge Pare, of Bottine Souriante, a Quebec group which plays both traditional and world-music around the world (and visited Glasgow's Celtic Festival this January) uses CINARS to establish and maintain the necessary contacts.

CINARS has helped put all sorts of acts on the road to success, including one of this country's top comedians, Lorne Elliott, (who understands the cause of Quebec independence because "I too can't stand another of these Canadian winters")

Quebec artistic links at the level of highly popular playwrights such as Michel Tremblay and Robert Lepage need little or no support at the British Council or CINARS level. Others do, however - the British Council assisted, for instance, in bringing over Glasgow-based videographers Mandy McIntosh and Holger Mohaupt. The Council also helped Dumfries-based ecological sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who recently installed a large sandstone arch at the headquarters here of the immensely successful Cirque du Soleil.

"You impoverish every sector when you impoverish culture." So said Lucien Bouchard, when he was in transition between being Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa and Premier of Quebec. He was speaking to the Union des Artistes of Quebec in 1996. Every minister, he went on, has a duty to culture.

Margie Gillis, the celebrated dancer, was Spokesperson for CINARS 1998. "To grow in our Art," she says, "is to share with, and to touch new audiences: to see how our ideals connect and respond to a larger world."

Alexander Craig is a free-lance writer based in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Performing Arts and Entertainment in Canada
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