...AND COUNTING! by Tony Nardi
May 27, 2008
Keith Garebian
Tony Nardi is a rare creature in Canadian theatre—one
willing to stick his neck out to be chopped off by bureaucrats
(non-artists, for the most part) who control the purse strings
in the arts, directors, artistic directors, critics, academics,
the media, cultural czars, politicians, and even certain community
leaders (including his own ethnic Italian ones). A few years
ago, he wiped out his own RRSP savings in order to create his
passionate theatre polemics against the dullards, incompetents,
and mediocrities who control the cultural wasteland in Canada,
which I call a large country with a small mind. His critics
consider him a chronic malcontent, even a posturing, self-promoting
martyr to his cause, but the fact remains that Nardi is the
sole voice in Canadian theatre with the courage and the convictions
to sustain his vehement attack on members of his profession
and representatives of Canadian culture.
...And Counting is the third part of what may become a long
serial J’accuse. Each of the three parts (taking the form
of letters) has been provoked by personal experience: Letter
One by a television producer who subscribed to invidious and
insidious cultural stereotypes of Italians; Letter Two by two
inept Toronto newspaper reviews of an inept professional production
of Goldoni’s The Amorous Servant, which showed that the
critics were as ignorant of commedia dell’arte as was
the show’s director; and now Letter Three by the rejection
of two of his theatre projects by various government grant-giving
bodies, particularly the Ontario Arts Council whose buzz words
are “impact” and “criteria,” provoking
Nardi’s prickly rhetorical question: “Is it better
to be an artist in Canada or to work for an art council?”
Using nothing other than a laptop computer with his “script”
and his own dynamic resources as an actor, Nardi has volcanic
force as he erupts in a fulsome attack on those he deems responsible
for burying alive some of the very best potential of Canadian
culture. Drawing a parallel (albeit a rather far-fetched one)
between the High Renaissance custom of torture and Canadian
culture’s “buried alive” syndrome, he points
out that Dante (whose hell in his Divine Comedy was the reality
in his homeland) had official funding—unlike so many worthy
artists, I suspect, who are compelled to submit to bureaucratic
arts councils led by those who shouldn’t really loiter
near the arts. Having had personal experience with these councils,
whose juries are often stacked by those with palpable ties to
individuals and organizations to whom they award grants and
honours (think the Doras, for instance, or the hilariously embarrassing
decisions of the Canada Council, Toronto Arts Council, and OAC
when it comes to theatre, multi-disciplinary projects, literature,
and almost any genre, as a matter of fact). Applying for an
arts grant to one of these bodies is (as Nardi puts it so eloquently)
like submitting to a colonoscopy without lubricant. Competition
is healthy, but I would prefer blind judging done by non-Canadians.
Why not? I would rather trust the Pulitzer committees and the
National Book Award judges than almost any Canadian jury. Not
because we lack good judges or excellent critics, but because
our council juries are usually laden with academics with vested
interests, editors with favoured stables, and poets, actors,
directors, and whatnot with long term or short term grudges.
Or by a young generation with huge gaps in their cultural knowledge
and who wouldn’t know a Jennifer Dale from a Claudia Moore—which
is rather alike the comedians at the head of the CBC who run
interference (and I mean major interference) in documentary
film that they treat rather like a template for their own bland,
grey, vapid sensibilities. The Gillers? A great night out at
Jack Rabinovitch’s expense for a select few—selected,
I suspect, by Jack. The awards themselves: well, how to account
for the fact that Vassanji has won the same number of times
as the great Alice Munro? And wasn’t the most recent competition
evidence enough that the prize can be taken as a sympathy vote
rather than a real literary honour for the best novel of the
year? The GG’s? Don’t make me laugh. They overlooked
Munro altogether one year when she had won just about every
other major award. To accept the list of GG nominations in Drama,
alone, is an exercise in ironic satire, and the comedy continues
annually. The Griffin? Another instance of expensive glitter
to camouflage some real poverty of taste, or, alternatively,
an earnest attempt to seem au courant and cutting edge (which
is to say, trendy). Of course, it is wonderful to have arts
awards, but it would be better if the criteria and jurors had
some real relationship to art and not to bureaucratic politics.
Knowing that arts juries are crap-shoots where the crap often
floats to the top, I well understand Nardi’s rage. He
is a provocative artist who thunders against a nation that doesn’t
promote its own culture. He generates side- splitting satire
of theatre officers and ministers of culture. Though he goes
on too long at times, repeating the same point at the same intense
pitch, he takes no prisoners, in fact, comically exploding the
grotesque excuses of businessmen, community leaders, government
officials, academics, et cetera who would rather pass the buck
than confront their own vapidities, and he makes a persuasive
case for the self-reliance of the artist. He destroys the canard
that for an artist to knock on many doors indicates a lack of
quality. He argues that talent should have funding knocking
at its door. He knows, as every genuine artist knows, that silence
is the symptom of classic Canadian indifference. The typical
Canadian, in Nardi’s view, is one who doesn’t hate
things enough to kill them, but who doesn’t love them
enough to let them live fully.
What is wrong with taking the theatre or arts community to
task? Using his wide cultural references (to Shakespeare, Dante,
St. Teresa, Nathan Cohen, Macchiavelli, Galileo, et al), he
repeats Goethe’s belief that he who strives for perfection
is saved. This makes him an optimist rather than a pessimist,
though, of course, he also repeats the Calabrian proverb (being
Calabrian- born himself): “Today you get fucked—and
tomorrow again!”
