Do artists need to suffer to make good art? This festival offers another way

There’s a myth in the arts, that somehow suffering and sacrifice makes for better art and better, tougher artists. 

Amanda Lin vehemently disagrees..

“Better art comes from healthier artists,” she says. “Even though there’s a whole narrative around starving artists — that they need to suffer in order to make better art — I think it’s the opposite.” 

Lin is the artistic director of the Paprika Theatre Festival. The festival, which is celebrating its 25th year, started life as a for-youth-by-youth festival that featured the work of high schoolers, run by Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. It’s since evolved to be a launch pad for early career theatre artists of all ages. . 

Many artists, directors and playwrights who are currently shaping Canadian theatre have come through this program, including Sort Of creator Zaiba Baig, Mitchell Cushman, creator of Outside The March and playwright and composer Britta Johnson, whose critically acclaimed show Life After, was originally developed at Paprika. 

Paprika focuses on developing artists who may be brimming with ideas, but lack the resources and connections to bring those to life. The festival and its training programs prioritize BIPOC, queer, and low-income artists and welcome those without formal theatre training

The organization runs on four programs per year: The Playwrights Unit, the Directors Lab, the Indigenous Arts Program, and the newly added Design Lab. In the Director’s Lab, the designers and directors are paired together and they work together to adapt an excerpt from an existing script. This project is later showcased in the festival. 

One of this year’s pairs is Jamaican-Canadian director Nicci Pryce and Ghanaian artist Kobena Ampofo. Pryce says in an industry where fighting to prove your value is a norm, Paprika is a breath of fresh air. “[Directing] is so difficult to break into,” says Pryce. “You really need someone to vouch for you and [if] you don’t have experience, no one really wants to put their neck out for you. Immediately, when Paprika pulls you in, they’re like, ‘we vouch for you.’” 

Ampofo and Pryce are collaborating on an excerpt from the play, Anansi v. God(s) written by Toronto-based playwright and former Paprika participant Paul Smith. It’s a three-part story set in multiple realms including the heavens, liminal spaces, the Earth, and the digital world. It follows Anansi, a trickster figure in West African, African-American, and Caribbean folklore, and places the character in a modern context. 

Ampofo says that having a play set in so many places allows for a lot of opportunity to experiment “The projections that we have in it are not just scenery, sometimes they’re actually .. things that the characters are interacting with.”Pryce adds that they appreciated being able to create in a space that felt safe, and where they weren’t the only Black person. “[In] white dominated spaces … it feels sometimes, you need to hold yourself back, or prove yourself a certain way, or represent all of your identities when you don’t see anyone else in the room that even remotely looks like you,” says Pryce, “And I think that Paprika has given us agency over the story we want to tell, who we want to be on the creative team.”

“I lowkey would do Paprika twice,” says Ampofo, “But I would love more people to be able to also participate in that ecosystem.” 

Last year, Paprika shifted its model from running six programs to three a year to mitigate burnout and allow the cohort and staff to take a pay increase. Lin says the change makes way for artists to create freely and programmers to curate the festival thoughtfully without the pressure of meeting funder expectations. 

“Our entire company is just training these artists,” says Paprika Artistic Producer Amanda Lin, “We don’t have a regular season, like the main thing we do is the festival.” 

Lin adds that she views Paprika as an alternative to traditional theatre training, “Bringing more folks with different perspectives and lived experiences in this place where they’re able to play and fail and try different things,” says Lin, “Coming from an arts background, it’s such a scarce industry, and I think opportunities like these are becoming rarer and harder to get.”

Moving away from the “you’re lucky to even be here” rhetoric that is common in performing arts spaces, Lin says the company is working on getting their staff and artists to a living wage. Meanwhile, they provide artists year-round mentorship, a production budget, technology, marketing, and box office support. 

“I want to see more exciting projects and I feel like that’s so tied to the health of the artist, that people feel safe to take risks,” says Lin, 

Paprika Festival runs May 12 to 16 at Native Earth’s Aki Studio (585 Dundas St E) in Toronto.