Working the Dead Beat (22 page)

At the same time as Houston was turning images of the North into paintings, drawings, and glass sculptures, he was rising every morning at six to spin his life experience into stories for young people, most of which he also illustrated. A prolific and dramatic storyteller, he wrote screenplays, produced documentary films and animated shorts, and wrote some thirty books, of which the most famous is
The White Dawn.
It was published in eleven languages and later made into a film. The royalties enabled him to cut back on his design work for Steuben, spend more time at his country house in Connecticut, and concentrate on his own projects, especially his burgeoning preoccupation with West Coast Native art. Beginning in the late 1970s, the Houstons spent summers in Haida Gwaii and winters in Stonington, Connecticut. That's where he died from heart disease in a nearby hospital on April 17, 2005, at age eighty-four.

WHILE HOUSTON WAS
popularizing the North in stories, films, and glass sculptures, Kananginak was living in the North and finding his way as an artist. Although he had been represented in almost every print release from Cape Dorset since 1959, it wasn't until the early 1970s, when he was in his mid-thirties, that he had the confidence to give up his job in the studio and work full-time on his own art. Once unleashed, he was prolific, making carvings, drawings, and prints and showing his work in museums and commercial galleries.

Unlike other early Cape Dorset artists, such as Kenojuak Ashevak, who are more imaginative and overtly spiritual, Kananginak belongs to a naturalistic and narrative style. He inherited his father's love of drawing and the documentary skills of his paternal uncle, the photographer and historian Peter Pitseolak. He recorded the material culture of the past in detailed drawings of weapons, clothing, and tools, and he chronicled the transition from ancient to modern and the effect of southern communications, travel modes, and social influences on the traditional Inuit way of life. Using a narrative form, he told stories in images of Inuit hunting and fishing, watching television, surfing the Internet, riding snowmobiles, and consuming drugs and alcohol.

As a hunter and a butcher, he understood the anatomy of the creatures that he killed to feed his family; as an artist, he had the ability to transform that appreciation of sinew and muscle into drawings and carvings that captured an animal's essence. Often called the “Audubon of the North,” he was particularly good at birds and owls, depicting them so realistically and yet so intuitively that they seem to be staring back at the viewer with a knowing if wary regard. Like the wildlife artist Fenwick Lansdowne, Kananginak captured the essence as well as the form of the creatures he depicted.

From his earliest work, in the initial 1959 release of Cape Dorset prints, to the mural-sized coloured drawings of caribou that he made in the last few years of his life, Kananginak was inspired by both the world around him and the one he carried inside his head. In 1977 the World Wildlife Commission released a limited-edition portfolio of works that included four of his images, and in 1980 he was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Governor General Roméo LeBlanc commissioned him to build a nearly six-foot-tall inukshuk in Cape Dorset in 1997, which was then disassembled and shipped to Ottawa, where Kananginak and his son Johnny put it back together again on the grounds of Rideau Hall. He travelled to Vancouver for the Olympics in February 2010, attended the opening of a solo exhibition of his drawings at the Marion Scott Gallery, received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for the Arts later in the spring, and had another solo exhibition at the Museum of Inuit Art in Toronto from February through May 2010.

Usually Kananginak worked at home, but after he turned seventy he began finding it more physically difficult to carve and decided to work in the Kinngait Studios, where he had toiled as an apprentice more than half a century earlier. Studio manager Bill Ritchie thought he also wanted to spend more time with the art community in town because he had things to say to them. “He was a real gentle soul, always settling disputes, just one of those guys who was always there to help out.” The younger artists flocked around him in the studio when he took a break from his own work, according to Ritchie. “Even then he was teaching people how to get along and how to work in groups and not to be isolated and sit by yourself, as so many drawers do,” said Ritchie. “It was a real communal experience when he was around.”

Much as he gave to the younger artists, he also gained something: the impulse to work on large-scale drawings, as they were doing. These huge pieces represent Kananginak's final artistic flowering. His last, unfinished drawing was a huge depiction of his father's diesel-powered Peterhead, a wooden boat with two masts that was used for hauling soapstone and walrus and whale carcasses. While he was working on it, he was so racked by coughing spells that he often had to stop and hold his chest. He guessed he had lung cancer, and he was correct.

Even when Kananginak was old and sick, he was not only moving in new artistic directions, he was trying to help his people prepare for a future without him. In his most fervent messages he beseeched the Inuit to preserve the Inuktitut language and to keep working together in the co-op. He also warned that if the market for Inuit art looked as though it was going to collapse, they needed to look ahead at what else was out there and plan for the future.

In 2010 he and his wife, Shooyoo, went to Ottawa and moved into Larga Baffin, a facility that houses Inuit people who have come south for medical treatment. He underwent surgery in October, but he never recovered from the operation and he died on November 23, 2010. He was seventy-five.

 

Celia Franca

Dancer and Founder of the National Ballet
of Canada

June 25, 1921 – February 19, 2007

F
EBRUARY IS A
cruel month, especially in Canada, but neither the howling winds nor the icy snowbanks dissuaded Celia Franca from mounting the biggest performance of her life: the National Ballet of Canada. In February 1951, when Franca stepped onto the tarmac at Toronto's Malton Airport in her Persian lamb coat, she was a twenty-nine-year-old raven-haired British ballerina and choreographer. Along with a suitcase or two she had a reputation as a powerful personality, a dramatic dancer, and a demanding teacher.

What really mattered was less obvious: the delicate, aquiline-nosed, 110-pound, five-foot-four Franca was a risk-taker with steely determination and stratospheric standards. At the time there were only two ballet companies in Canada, the flamboyant and Russian-influenced Volkoff Canadian Ballet and the still largely amateur Winnipeg Ballet. Franca was not impressed by either and chose to model her company on the ones she knew best, Ballet Rambert and the Sadler's Wells Ballet in London.

Luckily for Franca, she arrived at a propitious time. The shoots of a cultural spring were germinating across the country. Canada had helped win the war, our cities had not been bombed, and the men and women who had survived the conflagration overseas had come home buoyed by exposure to European cultural institutions. Many veterans returned with sophisticated ideas to a country that was confident about itself and the future and eager to nurture homegrown talent. Besides the National Ballet, which premiered in 1951,
CBC
Television launched in 1952, the Stratford Festival and the National Library in 1953, and the Canada Council in 1957.

Franca had barely unpacked before beginning an arduous regimen of recruiting and training dancers, staging promotional promenade concerts, organizing a summer school, and setting off on a national audition tour. All that activity was essential if she was going to whip her uneven but enthusiastic new company into shape for its opening a scant nine months later, on November 12, 1951, at Toronto's Eaton Auditorium.

Word of Franca and the fledgling ballet company spread quickly; there were news reports of four Yugoslavian dancers who had defected with their ballet shoes from behind the recently hung Iron Curtain and stories of British ballerinas who had come here as war brides, wanting to audition for Franca. Her principal male dancer was David Adams, a Canadian whose work she knew from London. He insisted that his wife, Lois Smith, be part of the package. Together Adams and Smith became the stars of the new company — until his roving feet and wandering eye broke up the marriage and he left the company to dance again in England.

The company's debut program at the Eaton Auditorium featured an abundance of Franca, as dancer, choreographer, and artistic director. Writing in the
Globe and Mail
, an ecstatic Herbert Whittaker concluded: “A rousing stamping performance of Kokine's Prince Igor brought to a conclusion the first full-fledged Canadian National Ballet and one left Eaton's auditorium with a happy feeling that Celia Franca had got her dancers off to a strong start.” He went on to extol the “quality of the music” that she “had managed to instill in the young dancers from Winnipeg, Edmonton, London, Vancouver, Toronto, and elsewhere west and east. This is a national ballet in those points of origin, and it behaved itself like one last night.”

CELIA FRANKS WAS
born on June 25, 1921, in the East End of London, England, the second child and only daughter of two Jewish Polish immigrants, Solomon Frankelstein and his wife, Gertrude (née Morris). Her father, who anglicized his name to Franks, made his living as a shoe salesman and then a tailor. His daughter also changed her name — to the more Italian-sounding Franca — shortly after Germany and Britain went to war in 1939.

Even as a small child, Celia wanted to dance, gripping her mother's hand at the cinema when she was “just a tiny tot” and pleading to go on the stage. At a reception for her aunt's wedding, four-year-old Celia made such a nuisance of herself dancing around the tables that the bandleader told her mother to organize ballet lessons — the first time, Franca said later, she had heard the word that would encompass her life's work.

Her mother followed the bandleader's advice and took Celia to the Guildhall School of Music in London's East End, where she was admitted to study music, dance, theatre, and elocution. As well she absorbed heavy doses of self-discipline and a respect for excellence. She won a scholarship in dancing at six and another in piano when she was eleven, the same year she was awarded a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Dance.

Her father despaired that she would never be able to support herself through dancing, a skepticism that brought out the Franca steel — the same determination she would call upon so many times during her tenure with the National Ballet of Canada. Having heard about
Spread It Abroad
, a musical starring Dorothy Dickson, Hermione Gingold, and Michael Wilding, she showed up at the auditions for chorus girls. She scarcely looked the part, with her straight, dark hair cut in a bob with bangs across her forehead, dressed in her school uniform, her ballet bag slung over her shoulder.

The directors were looking for tap dancers, a skill she had never been taught. Undaunted, she told the pianist to play the same music that the previous applicant had requested — Jerome Kern's “I Won't Dance,” from the 1933 musical
Roberta
— and “I just improvised.” She got the job, mainly because the choreographer, bored by all the dyed blondes he'd auditioned, looked at her feet instead of her face.

Spread It Abroad
, which marked her first appearance at the Saville Theatre, also let her hone her teaching skills by coaching one of the principal actors, who'd been given a little dance number to execute. Her doubting father changed his tune when he learned that his dancing daughter was adding three pounds a week to the family coffers.

She joined the corps de ballet of Ballet Rambert (now the Rambert Dance Company) in early 1937. Founded in 1926, it is the oldest dance company in Britain. She was a soloist and the company's leading dramatic dancer when she joined the Three Arts Ballet in 1939, although she continued to dance for Rambert in their lunchtime ballets during the Blitz. When German planes were spotted over London, the management would hold air-raid warning signs above the orchestra pit. “It was always so satisfying to find that nobody in that audience ever got up to go to the shelter,” she said in a
CBC
interview in 1974. “I can remember saying at that time that I am so glad to have chosen this profession because all you can do is give pleasure to people. You can't kill anybody by dancing on the stage.”

In 1941 she became a member of Ninette de Valois's Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet), where she excelled as a dramatic ballerina in roles such as the Queen in
Hamlet
, the prostitute in
Miracle in the Gorbals
, the Queen of the Wilis in
Giselle
, the spider in
The Spider's Banquet
, and the Prelude in
Les Sylphides
.

After the war she joined Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet as a choreographer and achieved acclaim by creating the ballet
Khadra
, with an Oriental setting to music by Jean Sibelius. The next year she presented
Bailemos
, with a Spanish motif, and joined Ballets Jooss for its last tour of the European continent, teaching ballet in exchange for training in modern dance. Then she joined the short-lived Metropolitan Ballet Company as a soloist and ballet mistress. It was there that she began choreographing for television, creating the first two ballets —
Eve of St. Agnes
and
Dance of Salomé
— that were ever commissioned by the
BBC
.

Chance intervened in 1950 when a trio of Canadian balletomanes — Eileen Woods, Sydney Mulqueen, and Pearl Whitehead — sent an envoy to England to ask de Valois's advice on starting a Canadian classical company. She urged them to speak with Franca, describing her as “probably the finest dramatic dancer the ‘Wells' ever had.” Although some have suggested that de Valois was hoping to rid herself of a potential rival, Franca snapped up the all-expenses-paid invitation to attend the Third Annual Canadian Ballet Festival in November 1950. Three months later she was back in Canada, having left behind a career, a former husband — the dancer and choreographer Leo Kersley — and a devastated postwar Britain. In a leap worthy of a prima ballerina's jeté she embraced the unknown and the chance to create something new in a barren cultural landscape.

Franca got a job as a file clerk at Eaton's to support herself and briefly married Bert Anderson, a keyboard musician and manager of the box office at the Eaton Auditorium. She also forged an alliance with Betty Oliphant, a British war bride, who was the proprietor of a small dance school and a founding member of the Canadian Dance Teachers' Association.

In the company's second season, Franca hired Oliphant as ballet mistress, the beginning of a long and often fractious association. Franca trained her dancers by her own example and in annual summer-school sessions, but she longed for a more intensive training program and argued for the creation of a permanent ballet school at the 1958 annual general meeting. She was supported by the late Eddie Goodman, who had been dragooned onto the board and had chaired the management committee (which usually meant staving off creditors and hitting up his friends for financial contributions) since the ballet's founding. “Without Eddie Goodman, there would be no National Ballet [Company],” Franca said in a 2005 interview.

Even before the school opened its doors in 1959 in a former Quaker meeting house, Goodman recognized that the school and the company should be separate entities, although they were linked through the working relationship between Oliphant, the school's principal, and Franca as the founding director of the school and founder of the company. Today there are still debates about which was the more significant achievement, the school that trained the likes of Karen Kain and Veronica Tennant or the company that cultivated and showcased their talent across the country and in international venues. “Celia Franca had a dream, but I made it a reality,” Oliphant sniffed in an interview in 1984, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the school's founding.

During her twenty-three-year tenure as artistic director, Franca danced leading roles herself and brought in guest artists including Lynn Seymour, Erik Bruhn, and Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev's lavish $400,000
The Sleeping Beauty
in 1972 threatened to bankrupt the company, but it attracted international attention, made a star of Karen Kain, the young dancer Nureyev picked to be one of his Auroras, and eventually put the company in the black.

Franca relied on the classics she had learned during her dance career in England, and called up on the choreographic talents of her English friends, such as John Cranko and Antony Tudor. She presented his
Offenbach in the Underworld
, calculating that the racy cancan dance would draw in men who wouldn't normally attend the ballet. She even created ballets herself (
Cinderella
and
The Nutcracker
). In 1973, she and Bruhn collaborated on the National Ballet's classic production of
Les Sylphides.

The National Ballet nabbed international headlines in the news rather than the arts pages in June 1974, when Mikhail Baryshnikov, the star of the Kirov Ballet, defected in Toronto while on a North American tour. After receiving political asylum, he came out of seclusion to dance
La Sylphide
with Veronica Tenant for the National Ballet. He then moved to the United States, where he joined the American Ballet Theatre.

By then Franca was worrying about defections of a different sort. She had leapt from one financial crisis to another and admitted that she could be a “tyrant.” But throughout her time as artistic director, she stressed the importance of developing Canadian choreography, taking more than thirty Canadian ballets into the repertoire and starting the National Ballet's choreographic workshops. She served on the jury of the Fifth International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1970 and in the same capacity at the Second International Ballet Competition in Moscow three years later.

Franca also took the company across Canada and the United States and to Mexico, Japan, and Europe, simultaneously creating a strong international reputation and seeing that the company remained worthy of its fame. Performing in the 1970s in London, her old jeté ground, was the highlight of her travels with the company, because it meant that “we have been accepted as an established ballet company and we don't have to run around proving it.”

While she had built a company of stellar dancers, she had not created a choreographer of equal merit — a point U.S. critic Clive Barnes made pointedly in 1971 when he opined that the company lacked a “genuine creative spark” and needed “a choreographer as badly as the Sahara needs rain.” In retrospect it was obvious that the spark was there in James Kudelka, who arrived at the ballet school as an eleven-year-old boy, danced as a member of the company, left to expand his choreographic opportunities, and then returned as artistic director from 1996 to 2005 — a tenure that saw him mount several of his own ballets, including
The Contract
,
An Italian Straw Hat
,
The Actress
,
and
The Firebird
, as well as new interpretations of
Swan Lake
,
The Nutcracker
, and
Cinderella
.

After more than twenty years at the helm, Franca decided to share the artistic directorship with arts administrator David Haber for the 1973–74 season and then to step down, although she insisted later that she had merely wanted a sabbatical. With Franca gone, Oliphant quarrelled with Haber and resigned her position as associate director, which led the board to fire Haber after only a year as artistic director. Franca stepped back into the breach temporarily as artistic director and then stayed on as a teacher and coach until Alexander Grant was appointed to the position in 1976.