I Am YEG Arts: Mac Brock

As a playwright and producer Mac Brock is endlessly inspired by how simultaneously wonderful and hard being a queer person on the prairies can be. As the managing producer for Common Ground Arts Society, he helps create opportunities for other artists to explore their own distinct and innovative pathways to delivering groundbreaking theatre. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts story, Mac tells us about how his love for numbers and words gave him an entryway into theatre, why he chose Edmonton as his creative base and his plans for taking his play Boy Trouble onto the road. 

How did you get your start in theatre? Were you always interested in the playwriting and producing side, or were you a performer first? 

I grew up in Regina and as a teenager, I did classes at the Globe Theatre and their theatre education is built around devised theatre, it wasn’t acting classes, it was like show up and we’re making things together and we’re learning about different aspects of design and tech and collaboration. That was so much fun and so exciting to me. I tried university for theatre and quickly knew it was not how I wanted to work. So, I left and started doing some work in arts education. I wrote my first play in Regina as a part of the Fringe Festival out there. And then at around 20 or 21, I moved to Edmonton to do the Arts and Cultural Management Program at MacEwan and haven’t really looked back. 

I’ve always loved being an artist and creating new things, but I also have the double-edged sword of the gift and the curse of also loving math, spreadsheets and administrative work. I got into a lot of my first roles in theatre by volunteering to do admin work. Like writing grants for other artists, and through that, learning how those artists do their work and how they approach their storytelling, build a project and a team. Because I love doing the work that a lot of people really hate doing in the arts, it really opened a lot of doors for me to get a lot of different perspectives on how a lot of different people make art. 

I love that I get to approach every project on ​“How does this group of artists work?” There is no one way to make theatre. All of my favourite theatre that I’ve ever got to work on has been totally built around, ​“Here’s what this group of people needs to do their best work.”

As a storyteller, what narrative or inspiration do you find yourself returning to time and time again? 

I love being an artist on the prairies. I think it fuels everything that I do as a playwright and as a producer. I think there is nowhere in Canada like the prairies. There are a lot of challenges to working here the way that there are working everywhere else but what I think is so special about being able to work here is that everyone relies on each other in ways that you don’t find in other places. There’s a base level community in that we need each other, and I think that fuels the way a lot of people make art in this place. I’m just really inspired by the aesthetics of the prairies and seeing the horizon line and just having space. 

I think there’s a real pride in working on the prairies that you don’t find in other places. Particularly in theatre right now there’s this big resurgence that is making this feel like the most beautiful place and time to work with artists who are really working hard to build opportunities for artists that don’t feel proud to be on the prairies. And who don’t feel proud to be in the place that we are when it is getting harder and harder for queer and trans youth, particularly for example trans youth of colour. There’s this incredible group of artists right now that are all really putting their foot on the gas to make opportunities, to remind all of us why we are here, why we choose to live here, why we choose every day not to move somewhere else and try to make this place better for folks who are coming up alongside us. So that I think is always the biggest inspiration for me: what it is like to be a queer person on the prairies, that it’s simultaneously so awesome and so hard. And because of that shared experience, there’s so much community here.

Tell us about your work at Common Ground Arts Society and what makes it special to you and the city? 

I love Common Ground! I’ve been with Common Ground for about four years now and our basic philosophy is creating new pathways to professional arts and arts work for artists, for audiences, for arts workers, for all sorts of people. Common Ground creates new opportunities for folks and really focuses our efforts around not telling people how to do work, but giving people a bunch of tools and a big safety net to do the work the way that they need to do it. We work with many neurodivergent artists, from different language backgrounds, and many artists with disabilities. Artists that have been told many, many times that because of these different linguistic, physical or cultural barriers in the way they work that they’re not going to find their platform in these different institutions or in existing pathways. What Common Ground really gets to do is go, ​“This platform is just for you, what do you need it to look like? What supports do you need it to have? What extra tools do you need in your toolkit to be able to do the thing that you want to do?”

When you come to a Common Ground show I can pretty much guarantee regardless of what it is or where it is, you’re going to see something that you haven’t seen on stage before. I think a promise that we can make pretty consistently across all of our programming is that we’re a sandbox, a laboratory. We’re an opportunity for artists to go, ​“No, I actually am capable of doing this if someone will just give me a little bit of time to figure it out.”

We just closed Found Festival, it was our biggest festival ever and our most successful festival to date, which was really magical. 

We also have RISER Edmonton, a newer program. Basically, we pick four or five artists or companies every year based on the criteria: do they have the potential to create work that is going to have an impact in the city? And are they facing a barrier to being able to get it done? Then our job is to work with them for two years and we’re now partnered with a bunch of different theatre festivals — SkirtsAfire, Expanse Festival, Fringe Festival — to basically be the bridge and give these artists presenting opportunities at those festivals and work with them every step of the way to get the show that they want to get out. 

It has been the privilege of my life to have this role with Common Ground. We have artists who do their first professional work through RISER and then come back two years later as a mentor or as a collaborator for a new artist. We can see the impact in real time of how independent artists are building their own platforms and then build platforms for other people and broaden who has access to professional artworks in the city. 

Congratulations on recently being recognized with a Sterling Award for your outstanding contribution to theatre in Edmonton. What does this recognition mean to you? 

That was a gigantic surprise. Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot is that being a producer doesn’t feel like being an artist. It’s not perceived as an artistic practice, so that was something meaningful to me about receiving that. It feels like a recognition that, ​“This work is art.” I do believe that it is. It requires a huge amount of creativity and collaboration to be a producer and to be making theatre and arts opportunities. So, that was meaningful to see that value placed on it. 

Also, as somebody who wasn’t raised here, Edmonton is extraordinary in its arts community. I love everything on the prairies, but there is something special in Edmonton, particularly in Edmonton theatre. My first two years of living here was just cold calling every producer and artist going, ​“Hey, can we go for coffee. I want to know about how you work and what is going on here.” Everyone said yes and was so lovely, generous and genuinely in love with what they do and with doing it here. Every year I’ve only fallen more deeply in love with this community. Because it feels like whatever your practice is, there is someone here who is going to be excited about it. Look at the Fringe and we have artists creating the most personal, most intimate or most bizarre shows as possible, and finding an audience and a community around them. That’s special; that’s extraordinary. I just want to keep finding out what else is possible here. 

What’s a production or project that you felt was pivotal to your career? 

A production that was pivotal for me was a show called Tracks that was developed at Nextfest at Theatre Network and then we got an opportunity to do it again on a bigger scale and to present it in April 2020. It was supposed to be this ambulatory show where the audience was walking around and exploring all of this different stuff happening simultaneously around the theatre. We had this ensemble of eight artists that all were creating their own work and was centered around some of my writing. And then some stuff happened, and we couldn’t do the show in person. And our director, Beth Dart, who’s one of my all-time biggest mentors that I’ve ever had and one of my favourite artists that I’ve ever had the privilege of working with was like, ​“Oh, we’re still doing it. We’re just gonna build something completely different.” We hired Bradley King, who is an absolute genius and wizard of a person who created a custom website. And we did this show that was all nine of us performing simultaneously in our houses with camera setups that teams had to drop off and give instructions on how to set up, and sets that were dropped off to build backdrops and different props and things. We ran for two weeks in May 2020, and it was so weird and so hard and so truly hair pulling to figure out how to do it, but it was also just like a miracle. It felt like being in a miracle in that all of us had this work and opportunity to fill our time and work as artists in a challenging time. 

But also, it was such an eye-opening experience for me. Being a part of this process, everyone brought so much of themselves into that, and I think that has really motivated a lot of how I do things now. There’s not one artist that was a part of that show that I haven’t worked with since. It was such a cool opportunity to meet so many of these grassroots indie artists who have entirely different practices and perspectives. It was weird, it was challenging, and it was far from a perfect project, but it influenced so much of what I’d like to see more of in the city — people getting together and figuring out. 

Tell us a little bit about what you’re currently working on or what you hope to work on next. 

We are in the process of getting ready for our fourth development phase of my play Boy Trouble, that we’ve been working on for almost 10 years now. I feel unbelievably lucky to get that many kicks at the can at finessing a project. I developed this show right when I moved to Edmonton for Nextfest and then we did a production of it at the Fringe. The show means the world to me because it’s about growing up as a queer person on the prairies and all of the different intersections of how that is such a special and also challenging experience and how we all have responsibilities to make that experience better for people who are growing up on the prairies now and feeling hopeless and like we are regressing (and we legitimately are going back in so many ways.) 

It started as a solo show, and then we got a chance to feature it in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season last year. We’re now working towards going on tour in the next few years outside of Alberta. I think good art takes so much time, and often we are put in a position of having to rush through it. As a producer one of the biggest things I’ve learned is the only limit to how much time you have to develop something is how long you’re willing to work on it. 

At the same time, I am working on a commission with the Citadel Theatre for a play for a group of young artists that is also about being a young person on the prairies. That has been like an extraordinary opportunity to get to write for a large cast and get to work with a group of young people. 

We are very close to announcing that after close to 15 years of operating, Common Ground will have its first full season of programming. It’s a series of shows that I think are extraordinarily challenging and are doing things that I haven’t seen artists do before. 

Tell us a little bit about your approach to figuring things out as you go. 

What I know as an artist and what I know as a producer is based on the fact that I have failed so many times. I have been given the grace to make mistakes and learn from them. Having that willingness to fail over and over again makes your art better. It makes your work as a collaborator better and I think it makes you enjoy it more. If you’re terrified of failure, tough luck, you’re going to fail so many times. If you are excited about the possibility of failing and knowing that it’s a huge gift and opportunity to find something new that you didn’t expect, then boy howdy, are you in the right industry!

About Mac Brock 

Mac Brock (he/​him) is your friendly neighbourhood queer prairie playwright and producer. He loves big events and wild ideas: Mac has been the Events & Production Coordinator for Nuit Blanche Edmonton, the Market Director for Edmonton Christmas Market, and an Event Producer for Regina’s Cathedral Village Arts Festival alongside his own personal theatre work. As an administrator and consultant he has supported organizations like Edmonton Fringe Theatre, Rapid Fire Theatre, the Edmonton Heritage Council, Concrete Theatre, and more. 

His play Boy Trouble was nominated for Outstanding Fringe Production and Outstanding Independent Production at the Sterling Awards, he is currently working on a love letter to prairie queers in a new commission from the Citadel Theatre, and he’s written a bunch of other gay nonsense too. He has written public art tours, produced podcasts, curated cabarets, and many weird jobs in between. Basically, he’s a big words and numbers (and lists) guy.