How a small Ottawa neighbourhood successfully co-created andstaged a community musical.
A Manual for Enriching Community
In October 2016, when we started thinking about doing a community opera or musical, we reached out to the one organization we knew had done something similar. We were novices at this, after all; we were looking for advice to realize our goal of building community through theatre. We emailed this organization and asked if we could learn from them: what their budget had been, what kind of creative professionals we would need, and so on. We received a reply which, in short, read No, you cannot learn from us and if you copy what we did, we will sue you.
This was a pivotal point in our project, and it led us to make two important decisions:
1. We would do a musical instead of an opera. (Even though we had very little information about their opera project that we could effectively “copy,” we decided to err on the side of caution and do something else entirely, eliminating any risk of a lawsuit.)
2. We would create a manual so that everybody would be able to copy ‒ and improve on — what we were going to do. Mindfully documenting and sharing lessons learned, we felt, was an important way to help make things better beyond our own community. Moreover, because the project was to be assisted by public financing, we felt ethically required to make sure that each dollar benefitted as many people as possible.