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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Spohr personified the spirit of pioneer arts builders
We will not see their like again.
The men -- and, yes, they were mostly men -- who built the cultural institutions we label today as Winnipeg's "establishment arts" did what came naturally to them.
Arnold Spohr, the venerated Royal Winnipeg Ballet artistic director who died earlier this week, personified their way of thinking.
Like John Hirsch at Manitoba Theatre Centre and Jack Shapira at Rainbow Stage, Irving Guttman at Manitoba Opera (to name the most obvious), Spohr took it as an article of faith that people in the small population centres of Western Canada could play in the big leagues.
He saw no reason why a classical dance company from Winnipeg couldn't tour to Paris, nurture a ballerina to win a gold medal at Varna, perform in general at the top levels of the art form.
Spohr and his arts contemporaries, some (like Guttman and MTC co-founder Tom Hendry) still kicking in their 80s, had their counterparts in other cities and in other disciplines.
A couple of obvious Winnipeg examples would be the late Izzy Asper and Hartley Richardson's illustrious forebears in business.
As for the great entrepreneurial models, one thinks of the first generation of Hollywood moguls, the Jack Warners and Irving Thalbergs.
Like these men, Spohr was a risk taker in a limited sense. As Bob Dylan sings, "when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."
Also like these men, Spohr was in the right place at the time. The two women (yes, women!) who founded the RWB, Betty Farrally and Gweneth Lloyd, gave him the artistic director's job in 1958 because they had been left in the lurch by the previous one.
He made the most of it, of course, but he also benefited from the culture's great hunger for the civilizing effects of the European arts.
This was the era in which the CBC and the Canada Council for the Arts came into full flower. It was the postwar economic boom in which government money, relatively speaking, fell from the trees.
The RWB, like the other arts groups, invented things as they went along. Their bold leaders took artistic chances. They spent money, sometimes foolishly. But other times, they hit bull's-eyes.
In those days, nobody in the arts got paid a decent wage, so eccentric and mercurial behaviour compensated. Spohr was notorious for screaming at his dancers, often in front of their peers, if he felt they didn't perform up to his exacting standards.
Nobody would get away with that kind of abusive behaviour today. They'd be hauled up before a labour board, their operating grants slashed.
The era was also marked by different sexual politics. Performing arts groups have always been populated by young, beautiful and ambitious people.
But until well into the '80s, they faced fewer impediments to enjoying themselves. Men chased their underlings around the casting couch, and women saw advantages to sleeping with their bosses.
It was a freer time in most ways, but in others not. A gay man, Spohr never really came out of the closet. This seems astonishing, given that the arts have always been a haven to homosexuals.
But he was a product of his time and place. Winnipeg in the 1950s was not New York.
Some of those close to him think Spohr suffered from the self-loathing typical of gays of his era. Others say his strict religious upbringing, and older sisters who babied him well into adulthood, did the real damage.
He was not alone in his reluctance to acknowledge what was obvious to everyone else. Hirsch, also gay, did not want the public to know it was AIDS that killed him in 1989.
With Spohr, in the end, it is his RWB legacy that matters. That legacy seems secure. He resigned in 1988. Again his timing was spot on.
By the 1990s, the RWB and its sister institutions had passed into the control of the chief financial officers who counted the company beans. Erratic creative types caused more trouble than they were worth.
Meanwhile, the establishment arts ceded their dominance in entertainment culture to newer disciplines -- film, TV, pop music, video games -- where the real money lay.
To be sure, 50 years from now, a fossilized journalist will eulogize some Internet social networking guru as the cultural visionary of her era.
And she may well be. But give Spohr his due. We will not see his like again.
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 17, 2010 C7
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