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Old Posted Apr 15, 2006, 4:23 PM
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RENAISSANCE CITY: PART 3: PETER SIMON AND ROBERT SIRMAN
The Educators
They've held their top jobs for 15 years -- longer than most people expected, writes JAMES ADAMS. But Robert Sirman says his long tenure has steered the rebirth of the National Ballet School, just as Peter Simon has turned around the Royal Conservatory of Music

JAMES ADAMS
'If making art is hard, making an arts institution work may be harder still.' -- Jed Perl, art critic,

The New Republic

Fifteen years ago, both Peter Simon and Robert Sirman took on jobs that probably only enemies would have wished on them, so daunting were the prospects for success.

On paper, the jobs sounded prestigious, top-of-the-line -- in Simon's case, the presidency of the Royal Conservatory of Music, in Sirman's the administrative directorship of the National Ballet School of Canada, each based in the heart of the country's largest city.

But beneath the fancy-pants titles were organizations in deep trouble, organizations that, for all their aura of permanence and venerability and their crucial positioning at the intersection of Culture Avenue and Education Road, seemed unlikely to make it to the end of the 20th century, let alone into the wee hours of the 21st.

Now, of course, the Royal Conservatory and the National Ballet School seem the very models of forward-looking robustness. This is due in no small part to Simon and Sirman, each of whom has been carefully but steadily steering his institution through an ambitious, multimillion-dollar overhaul to its physical plant -- the conservatory under the rubric "Building National Dreams," the ballet school "Grand Jeté" -- to ensure Canada has Isabel Bayrakdarians and Rex Harringtons for generations to come. At the same time, by skillfully weaving new buildings around old, the overhauls are dramatically transforming Toronto's man-made topography.

It's been a miracle of hard work -- with, of course, serendipitous dollops of luck and good timing.

When a 45-year-old Sirman arrived at the ballet school after 10 years of administration at the Ontario Arts Council, "the organization was in financial crisis, running deficits of $1-million a year," he recalled recently. "It was desperate for what I call a corporate centre, someone to hold the reins. . . . What they needed was institutional vision, institutional enlightenment."

Artistically and curriculum-wise, the school, which had been founded in 1959, seemed fine, educating and training more than 100 full-time students from across Canada and 25 or 30 from around the globe. No less an authority than Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder and general director of the New York City Ballet, had deemed the NBS to be "the equal in essence and potential to the Kirov School in Leningrad and the Royal Ballet School in England. . . . [It] is like an oasis." But it was an oasis that was bailed out by the federal government with a one-time-only investment of $2.34-million.

Peter Simon faced similar circumstances upon his return to the conservatory where he'd been its director of academic studies for three years, starting in 1986. Prior to being picked from a field of five contenders for the RCM head job, he served briefly (just under two years) as president of the Manhattan School of Music.

Started in 1886 as the Toronto Conservatory of Music, the RCM was certainly the best-known private music school in the country and probably the stodgiest, with an estimated one in nine Canadians having received at least some musical training under its auspices. "But from a purely accounting view, it was bankrupt," Simon, 56, said in a recent interview. "We had greater liabilities than assets," and a debt of more than $2-million. "It needed a complete reanimation." Eighteen months after he strolled into his office at RCM Central in decrepit McMaster Hall, he was laying off more than 120 teachers and staff and closing seven suburban branches around Toronto.

Intriguingly, neither Sirman nor Simon planned to be arts administrators or tailored their post-secondary education to such an end. A Toronto native, Sirman studied sociology at the University of Toronto, while the Hungarian-born Simon enrolled in music lessons at the Royal Conservatory in 1959, three years after his family moved to Toronto. He later took piano studies at the Juilliard School in New York and London, and in 1983, earned a doctorate in musical arts from the University of Michigan. For the next couple of years, Simon split his time among performing, teaching at the University of Western Ontario, and serving as artistic director of Toronto's Preview Concerts.

In fact, it was this last job that prompted him to take his one and only course in arts administration, at York University in 1984. "I'd started this concert series and was trying to fill a 300-seat hall with no marketing budget. I knew nothing. I thought I could take a short-cut."

What Simon didn't lack were smarts, drive and dedication. "The reason we [wife Dianne Werner, children Nicole and Justin] bought our house where it is, is because I didn't want to be more than seven minutes away from work." Even now, it's not unusual for Simon to work for two or three hours each week night at his Moore Park Toronto home, often until 1 a.m. Not surprisingly, the RCM is now regarded very much as "Peter's place."

At the NBS, Sirman thinks his undergraduate and graduate degrees in sociology have figured "hugely" in his role at the school. His conversation is peppered with expressions like "reading the institution," "intentional transparency" and "heightening involvement" as well as references to urbanologist Jane Jacobs and her "notions of what constitute comfortable built forms and successful urban space."

"Whatever success I've had is tied, I believe, to a kind of pattern recognition, to seeing patterns within systems, as opposed to having specialized skills in financial management or human resources," he said. Coming to the school, in fact, meant he could "test out many, many years of theory." While Sirman had done policy and research at the Ontario Arts Council, he "hadn't really run any organization on the street, and here was this opportunity -- an organization that didn't know if it was going to survive, and me, who didn't know if I was full of hot air."

Amazingly, given the parlous state of their organizations, both Sirman and Simon opted to dream big, not small, virtually from the start of their jobs. In 1993 Sirman and the NBS's artistic director Mavis Staines struck a panel to look into both improving and expanding the school's physical plant -- a row of overcrowded, deteriorating Victorian buildings anchored by a former Quaker meeting house built in the 1850s. Eventually, it was determined that the school -- which at the time had almost 150 full-time students in Grades 6 through 12, including many living in residence -- needed a campus 2½ times larger than what it had. (In fact, when completed, it will have more than tripled its original square footage.)

Meanwhile, Simon was trying to reposition the conservatory as an autonomous, truly national organization with a thoroughly updated program after having functioned as a division of the University of Toronto since 1921. "I told people, 'We're going to do something important; we're going to do it all; we're going to do it big and we're going to change society.' " Getting McMaster Hall -- a former Baptist college erected in 1881 -- into both functioning and presentable shape was part of the vision. Explained Simon: "We had this extraordinary Victorian building that literally hadn't been changed since it was built. We'd been there since 1963 but we'd had no capital budget to speak of, and the structure needed $10-million in repairs, at least. We couldn't put the air-conditioning on in the summer because it would blow the circuits. I had water coming down the walls in my office. The fire marshal was coming to visit me fairly regularly."

There was, in short, "an inconsistency between the quality of our programs and the physical representation of our building. I said, 'It looks like we don't care very much. So let's go and change it.' What I didn't know," he said with a laugh, "was that it was going to take 15 years!"

Of course, there remain many rivers to cross before the physical plants of the NBS and RCM reach full fruition, not least because the former still has to raise $11-million, much of which will be spent on the school's new dormitories, while the latter's capital campaign is looking for another $21-million to clinch a spring, 2008, completion. But the successes Sirman and Simon have had, especially in the last four years, in leveraging $60-million in federal and provincial money to secure corporate and individual donations and generate increased board support and civic excitement have only intensified their belief that, "Yes, this can be done."

"There's a myth about careers in our field," noted Sirman. "It's the one that says you make your mark in three or four years and move on. But the cultural renaissance that Toronto is experiencing speaks to the strength of commitment that leadership continuity can provide. I mean, Peter Simon and I, we're way beyond the normal career spans that you're supposed to have. But there's something to be said for that continuity of energy and the absolute importance of making it conform to vision."

Of course, as Sirman is fond of pointing out, it's one thing to "create the building," another to "create the winning conditions to sustain it." While he's pleased Ontario's former Conservative government invested $20-million in Grand Jeté in 2002, followed this year by a $5-million top-up from the McGuinty Liberals, he's concerned the province still hasn't restored even a portion of the funding that then-Premier Mike Harris cut off in November, 1995, as part of the so-called Common Sense Revolution. Prior to that, for almost 30 consecutive years, the province had given, on average, just over $800,000 each year -- dollars that sometimes accounted for as much as 20 per cent of the NBS's operating budget. "The deterioration in our relationship with the province came out of left field," Sirman observed, "and it's taking a lot of energy to put us back on the rails."

At the RCM, Peter Simon sees no end to his need for money. Indeed, the conservatory's endowment today stands at a rather paltry $7.2-million whereas that of one of his alma maters, Juilliard -- founded almost 20 years after the RCM -- currently exceeds $1-billion (U.S.). "We will continue to fundraise at a very high level. Forever. Because we need to expand and also to compete with international players, who also have very deep pockets." Given those aims and that pressure, is it any wonder that at least once a week Simon feels the need to go to the piano at his home or the 1920s Steinway in his office to play without interruption for an hour?

Last edited by SSLL; Apr 15, 2006 at 4:30 PM.
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