Farrah Fernando, of the Collective of Black Artists, teaches a group of children hip hop dance moves at the Daniels Spectrum building in Toronto on March 24. The group has supported a company of adult dancers and a popular children’s dance and drumming school.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
It was an exciting 20th-birthday gift when the Collective of Black Artists (COBA) was accepted as an anchor tenant at the Daniels Spectrum building in Regent Park. In 2012, the small dance company moved into the brand-new Toronto arts and culture centre with the sense that it had finally come home.
The group had supported a company of adult dancers, as well as a popular children’s dance and drumming school, through decades of unreliable funding and multiple moves. Permanence seemed unthinkable.
“It was just sort of surreal, it was one of our biggest dreams to be able to have our own space,” co-founder BaKari Lindsay says of winning the lease for studio space in the building run by Artscape, which operates multitenant arts buildings around the city. “We had very lofty ideas.”
Today, COBA’s professional dance company is on hiatus and its school has become a subletter in the Spectrum, where it has an uncertain future. It’s a frustrating story of the trials of a non-profit arts company in an expensive city, but also a hopeful one, about deep support for an organization that provides black children and families with crucial community space.
“A lot of people who come here, the minute they walk in the door, they feel it,” Mr. Lindsay said. “It’s family.”
Mr. Lindsay and co-artistic director Charmaine Headley created COBA in the early 1990s, with the goal of performing dances of the African diaspora, including the Caribbean. Then a member of the now-defunct Danny Grossman Dance Company, Mr. Lindsay felt unchallenged and had a longing to do dances that spoke to him more personally.
And while he had never lacked for work, he also knew Toronto’s dance scene was much less welcoming to black female colleagues, such as Ms. Headley. The founders, some of whom have since left, wanted to provide black dancers with meaningful opportunities and the time seemed right.
“Multiculturalism was a big thing, it was the buzz thing at the time, and dance was shifting,” Mr. Lindsay says of the era. “People were creating work that had a lot more contemporary feel, addressing social issues that were pertinent to them and their communities.” COBA’s first gig was a Black History Month presentation at a public school, which paid $500.
The next two decades were successful, if shoestring: COBA continually choreographed and performed new work, occasionally mounting full seasons. It launched a school for adult dancers – in part because of a need for performers with adequate training – then added youth classes, to ensure black children could access good dance education regardless of racism or financial need.
“One of the goals was to let them know that their situation should not bar them from being excellent or accessing excellence,” Mr. Lindsay says.
Black-focused family programs can be hard to find in Toronto and the children’s classes became immensely popular.
“Chinese schools are a dime a dozen, you can find one on every corner of the city,” says Jing Kao-Beserve, who is of Taiwanese descent. Her husband’s parents are from Guyana and Sierra Leone. “But a black-centric institution where kids can really learn about that side of their heritage, COBA is really unique for that,” she says.
Ms. Kao-Beserve and her husband signed their oldest daughter up for lessons about four years ago.
“When Amira was in junior kindergarten, she became very aware that she was the only black girl in the class,” Ms. Kao-Beserve says. “She started expressing self-hatred, you know, ‘I don’t like myself.’ It was really distressing as parents.”
Someone had once mentioned COBA to her and the couple searched the internet to remind themselves about the school. They enrolled Amira as soon as possible, “and we found an immediate shift in her mindset,”Ms. Kao-Beserve says.
“She needs to know that being black is not just brown skin and curly hair, there’s a whole history, there’s a whole culture,” said Ms. Kao-Beserve, whose youngest daughter studies at COBA now as well. “You can only buy so many black Barbies and dolls, it’s not going to do it, you need real-life people.”
These sentiments are shared: As their kids practised on a busy recent Saturday, white parents of black adoptees spoke about the sense of community COBA gives their children. Black parents appreciated pan-African history taught through dance and music, rather than lectures that might bore little minds.
The Kao-Beserve family now travels to the Spectrum from the Christie Pits neighbourhood every weekend. They’re a success story about the revitalization of Regent Park, since social inclusion was the ultimate goal of the multidecade project centred around rebuilding community housing.
But Mr. Lindsay worries that continuing construction and relocation of residents has displaced other people who might be his potential students and audience, the low-income families with roots in the area.
In 2000, while choreographing a gun-violence piece called Griot’s Jive, he spent time in Regent Park gathering testimony from mothers of victims. “I was in this community for quite a while, so I had a pulse on the kind of communities that lived here,” Mr. Lindsay said. “And I don’t see any of those people. The community we predicted is not here.”
Artscape rents are purposely lower than market value, and when the Spectrum opened, rent was $8.31 a square foot. This was in part due to a “transition fund” that tenants were told would help lower their costs for two years.
Subsidies are still available, but by 2016, rent had risen significantly, to $15.56 a square foot, in part because of rising property-tax rates. That’s still much lower than market rent, which would be about $40 a square foot in the neighbourhood. But it’s a big jump for a small arts organization that tries to keep fees and ticket prices low.
By early 2017, it was clear that COBA could no longer afford the Spectrum.
Parents quickly organized to pay immediate rent, then solidified into an Action Committee dedicated to cash flow: They threw a sold-out fundraiser this past February and are planning another for June. Meanwhile, needing to pay its own bills, Artscape began to look for a new tenant.
It isn’t abandoning COBA, said LoriAnn Girvan, the organization’s chief operating officer. New Spectrum applicants were told they had to be open to other groups subletting their space. When Centennial College won the bid for a new performing-arts program, it committed to leasing studios to COBA outside of school hours.
“It’s really been a win-win,” Ms. Girvan said.
It’s a reprieve for now, but an imperfect one – it’s been a year since COBA put on shows with professional adult dancers and will likely be another year until it can do so again. It’s also not permanent: Centennial’s program currently has just 100 students and school administrators say they would like to outgrow the Spectrum space in about three years, at which point COBA will have to negotiate with another new landlord.
“What’s going to happen to our history and our legacy?” Mr. Lindsay said. “You know, at this point, it’s wait and see.”