Robinson to pursue Ph.D., further study of rural festivals and their community relationships
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
If you’re involved in Huron County’s creative scene, you’re probably familiar with Warren and Eleanor Robinson. Amidst their long careers teaching at Goderich District Collegiate Institute (GDCI) and raising a family, the Robinsons have somehow found the time to engage with their adopted community in countless creative ways. The Robinsons are musicians, playwrights, directors, historians, and so much more. They even founded an internationally respected music festival, now in its 32nd year.
It’s hard to picture what Huron County’s creative scene would look like if the Robinsons hadn’t come to town back in 1967 - that’s how ingrained they’ve become in the local art scene. After spending so much of their lives fostering rural creativity and creating magical moments for their community, Warren thinks it’s finally time to take everything they’ve learned together, put pen to paper, and write something definitive about the impact that festivals have on rural communities. Hopefully, he’ll earn himself a PhD in the process. Warren was kind enough to sit down with The Citizen at his home in Goderich for a discussion about his new scholarly pursuit and what he and Eleanor most value about living the creative life in Huron County.
Warren was out with Eleanor when he decided it was time to further his education. “I was out on a walk with Eleanor a couple months ago, and I was thinking about the fact that both Kingsbridge and the Celtic Festival were, particularly, about community, about working with rural communities. And I thought ‘there’s a thesis in how the arts can help foster, build, and sustain rural communities.” Eleanor encouraged him to go for it.
The main reason he’s decided to write a PhD a bit later in life is a simple one - he wants to share what he’s observed over his lifetime. “I think the information I might come up with might be important to other people,” he explained. While he knows that he’s got something to say on his chosen subject, he’s not sure exactly what the scope of his project should be. “My original idea was to do a hamlet, which is what Kingsbridge is in terms of population, a village - Blyth, with the Blyth Festival, and a town, which is Goderich. And that still might be what I do. Or I might even focus on just one of them.”
Some days he’s into the idea of a narrow field of research, but other days, it feels very tempting to broaden the scope of the project. “On the other hand, we have a friend who lives in Scotland who is very big in the art community, and I could access all kinds of data that he has. And I think I could find someone else in Ireland, if I wanted to do it. And somebody else in England. So that might be a possible focus.” Eleanor has also developed a connection to a cultural movement in Thailand that he’s considering.
So far, he’s been examining the annual budgets of numerous rural municipalities. Warren has found that far more money tends to be earmarked each year for sports than there is for the arts. “The numbers, in terms of how many people are involved, are not that far off. But the difference in the budgets is absolutely ‘ginormous’. It’s true in every municipality. You keep the hockey rink going. You keep the baseball diamond. You keep all the soccer fields going. But the population ages, and you can attend theatre until the day you die.”
Both Warren and Eleanor grew up in Sudbury, five hours north of Goderich. When it came time to seek out a higher education, Warren went to Queen’s University and Eleanor attended Laurentian College. They were wed in 1966, and the two young, newly-minted teachers began looking for a place to build a life together. Eleanor was already familiar with the area, as her father had been raised on a farm in Bruce County. She also had relatives who lived in Goderich, Kincardine and Tiverton. Warren, on the other hand, had never made the trip out to Ontario’s West Coast, and when he finally did make the effort to come, it was a bit of a disaster, as he recalls. “Take-home pay for a teacher at this time was about 380 bucks a month. It was tough.” Warren recalled. One memorable day, the Robinsons decided to splurge for once to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The plan was to actually eat in a restaurant for once, followed by a drive to Goderich. “We had enough money to go out for one meal, and it was a Friday, and we were Catholics, so we couldn’t eat meat. So we had curried shrimp. And we set out from Kingston to go up from Goderich, and stopped at a service centre along the way to get some gas and have the oil checked.” The attendant had already put an unheard-of seven quarts of oil into their vehicle before he asked them if he was on Candid Camera - a popular television show at the time that would ensnare unsuspecting by-standers in fictionalized scenarios for the entertainment of viewers. Four more quarts of oil later, both the attendant and the daytrippers collectively concluded that their vehicle had sprung a leak. “There was no way we were going to Goderich leaking oil, so we turned back. Which was very fortunate, because all four people had food poisoning. And to this day, I can’t have curry. Obviously, it was the shrimp that was bad, but the taste I remember was curry,” he recalled.
After missing their chance to visit Goderich, Warren and Eleanor taught in Leamington for a while. Soon, another opportunity to come to Canada’s Prettiest Town revealed itself in the form of a job offer. “We came in 1967, for three years. That was our expectation. Then, in three years, we said ‘Okay, we’re teachers. We make the same amount of money, no matter where we teach. And we’ll have to pay moving expenses to move somewhere more expensive, that’s not as nice. So, why are we doing this, again?’” And so they stayed.
The Robinsons were both working at Goderich District Collegiate Institute (GDCI) when they first became involved with the town’s historic theatrical institution - The Little Theatre. “We heard they were looking for some people to act. Now, I’ve done all my acting in French up in Sudbury. We didn’t have an English theatre at the high school I went to, even though we were an Anglophone high school... so we went out for a play called The Fantastics, and we both got parts. That was 1968, I believe. And we’ve been involved with The Little Theatre ever since.”
Warren spread his love of theatre to GDCI. “The drama club had six people in it when I took over. I started teaching drama, which I did until I became English Head. Then another fellow came in to teach drama. I started writing plays because the drama club was two thirds female, and plays are 90 per cent male. So I wrote plays as a way of having parts for women. And then I had so many people that I started writing large-cast plays.” One of Warren’s most successful plays was The Great Storm, which was written to mark the 100th anniversary of a devastating natural disaster that struck Lake Huron communities in 1913. The play was just one part of a larger community effort to commemorate local history. “We won the Governor General’s Award for History that year,” he explained. Warren’s three tips for writing a winning play are as follows: have a big cast, make it a musical, and tell a local story. It’s not a guaranteed formula, but it’s worked for him, time and again.
Eventually, the ongoing success of the Little Theatre attracted the attention of a scrappy young upstart theatre out of Kingsbridge. “Marianne Hogan phoned us, and asked to drop by. She’d been in various musical groups we’d been in; because, parallel to this, was the whole folk music thing. And we’ll get back to that in a second. You’re going to be sorry you asked. So, she came over, and she said ‘Warren, will you write us a play, to help bring our community together again?’ It was so fractured after the church had been taken away, and the school, and everything else. She said, ‘we don’t care if we make a dime - we just want to bring our community back together.’ So I asked if I could make it a musical, because I knew they were a real singing community.” Kingsbridge: The Musical ended up being a real hit with the local audience, making close to $20,000 in profit, and he was asked to write another. Eventually, there would be six installments in The Kingsbridge Chronicles. “Every year, people would say ‘I think this is the best one yet,’” he explained. “And then, finally, this year, I said ‘you know why it’s the best one every year? The cast is getting so much more experienced as actors. That’s what’s making it better.’ Now, I’m very proud of it. The first year, I was kind of going ‘Aren’t they just wonderful singers? Now, there’s some really fine acting as well. It’s quite amazing. But they’ve been in six plays now - it makes a difference.” Even though The Kingsbridge Chronicles came to an end earlier this year, Warren is still writing original work for the unique rural theatre. “I’m working with Mary Murdoch, who I’m mentoring, to write next year’s musical, which is called Saving Harmony. It’s the first one in the non-Kingsbridge series.”
Arguably, the Robinsons’ biggest contribution to local culture is the Goderich Celtic Roots Festival (GCRF). The now internationally-recognized annual event was born out of the simple desire to honour one of their fellow teachers, George Young, who died in 1992. “In order to set up a scholarship in his honour, we did a fundraising concert - this was in February of 1993,” he explained. The impromptu Celtic-centric musical event brought in big crowds, which got Warren and Eleanor thinking. “We looked at each other and said ‘Wow - I think we should start a festival!’”
The two already knew what they liked, and didn’t like, about music festivals. “We’d been longtime folk festival goers - we were at the very first Mariposa Folk Festival, way back in the day,” Warren recalled. “And I’d done the folk interviews at the Queen’s radio station. People like The Clancy Brothers, Tommy Makem, a group called The Travellers, one of whom went on to become Papa John of The Mamas and the Papas. Another one, Scott McKenzie, had a big hit called ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco, Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair.’ Groups like that. So, a big interest in folk.” At first, they considered spending a whole year planning. “We laughed at each other, because we’re both Aries - we’re great starters. If we put it off, it’s not going to happen.” The Robinsons jumped right in, and Goderich’s first Celtic music festival went ahead later that same year.
They were hoping for 500 people, but over 3,500 showed up. “Were we scrambling? Oh my God!”
That first year, all of the performers hailed from Ontario, and were compensated with gas money, a place to crash, and a promise that any profits made would be shared. “They all came, because there wasn’t much happening, and all were very surprised when each person got $250, which was pretty good... from there, it just built... by the third year, we were getting international stars, and by the fourth year, we committed to spending a lot of money on sound.”
Besides the excellent sound quality, one of the unique things about the GCRF is the way all the artists and audiences are integrated together over the course of the festival - a feature that was essential to the concept of the Robinsons’ perfect community event. “I always got frustrated at festivals, because the so-called ‘workshops’ were just little mini-performances,” Warren admitted. A desire for a real educational workshop led to the founding of the Celtic College - an immersive musical school that happens annually every year at GDCI in the week leading up to the festival. The college gained popularity every year, and a youth-oriented Kids College was also added. “It now has the largest music staff of any one-week college in North America,” Warren boasted.
Having artists mingle with students and audiences also means that everybody is on the same level. “We have no patience for ‘Star Syndrome’. And we’ve had some big stars - in fact, there’s very few of the top level Irish or Scottish artists and bands that we haven’t had over the years. And for the most part, they’re just wonderful human beings. They love coming here because usually, they fly into a festival, play one day of the festival, and then fly off to another festival. Here, they have eight days, because they teach at the college as well. They teach with their peers, play the evening sessions, and have supper and lunch together. There are all kinds of CDs out there where people are guesting on each other’s CDs because they met here. And several other music camps have come from here.” Some of the early Celtic College teachers went on to form AlgomaTrad - a school focused on Canadian traditional culture located in northern Ontario.
As part of the annual search for new musical acts, Warren became the president of the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals, which is now known as Folk Music Ontario. He was also the vice-president of the North American Folk Alliance for three years, which is now Folk Alliance International.
The Robinsons won’t be satisfied with just creating a great festival, however - they also want to ensure its ongoing success after they’re gone. That means choosing the right replacements, and writing everything down. “So many festivals, once the founders retire, are gone the year later. One of the biggest ones, the Festival of Friends in Hamilton, was huge. Gone after two years. So I thought, ‘well, if I step back now, while I’m still around to advise who takes over, it’s going to work. We were also one of the very first festivals to come up with a procedures manual,” he explained. “Once people found out about it, it spread all over North America. We’d give people a hard copy, but we wouldn’t give them an electronic copy, because we knew what would happen. Remove ‘Goderich Celtic Roots Festival’, replace with ‘Name of Festival’.
Under the direction of the Robinsons, the GCRF always strove to bring the world of Celtic music to Goderich. Current Artistic Director Cheryl Prashker has chosen to honour their tireless effort by creating the Warren and Eleanor Robinson Emerging Artist Showcase, which, in a few short years, has already shone a light on fantastic musical acts from Ireland, Japan and Australia.
But, why Celtic music? There’s just something about it. “It’s not like pop music. No one is going to get filthy rich in folk music. Well, I shouldn’t say that - most people don’t. Gordon Lightfoot probably did alright. But he had to cross over into the pop realm to do that.”
Beyond making a solid case for rural festivals, Warren also admits he has something personal to prove by pursuing his PhD. “When I was at Queen’s, I was having a good time. And my marks were not what you'd call stellar. But I always thought to myself that I could have done well if I’d really tried. I never said that - that’s a real cop-out. I coulda been a contender - no. You either did or you didn’t. So, when I went back, it was important for me to do well.”
However he decides to approach his thesis paper, Warren knows it all comes back to one thing: “The Sticky Factor - what keeps people in small, rural environments? That is the question.
“To me, the Kingsbridge area is one of the stickiest I can think of. So many of the people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s are still in that area. In families that have five kids, four of them are still in the area. Sometimes they have to work outside the area, but they live there. They’ll travel 30, 40 miles to work because they want to live in the area. There’s a very, very strong sense of community. And I think having the Kingsbridge Centre, and being in the plays, has really helped that.” Marianne Hogan alone had a sister, two brothers, a nephew, two daughters, and five grandchildren in a single production. “It’s very much a family, community, thing…. You’ll see brothers who, in the general course of things, are farmers. They don’t have a lot of time to hang out, but they’ll come to rehearsal, and when they’re not on, they’ll sit and chat.”