When Belonging Is Something You Grow, Not Something You Are Granted: why is it hard for independent artists to teach in BC

Where Culture Begins: Artist First or Institution First

I did not expect to feel foreign in an arts community inside my own country. Quebec shaped me in a landscape where culture begins with people, not policy. I became an artist inside a system where you create the space first and the belonging follows. You build the doorway, and community steps through it because they feel something forming there.

In Quebec, the artist is treated as the root from which culture grows. Institutions do not create culture and then go looking for artists to fill it. They take shape around what is already alive. Practice comes first. Relationship comes first. The structure is the echo, not the origin.

I did not simply teach in that environment. I helped shape it. At the time I saw myself as creating classes, rehearsals, shared spaces. But in hindsight I can see that I was building the conditions for something larger than myself to grow. I brought people together around a practice, and what formed between them became culture.

One of the clearest places I can see this now is in the middle eastern drumming program that emerged around my desire to learn rhythm to improve my dance practice and cultural knowledge. I did not join a scene. I created the conditions for one to exist, and then the people who entered that room helped shape it into something living. I opened the door, but the culture that formed inside it belonged to everyone who stepped through. In Quebec, authorship is shared. The person who seeds the space is not its owner, but its beginning.

The same was true of the section of the dance world I helped anchor. I stood at a crossroads between styles, and that crossroads became a meeting ground. Students who did not see themselves reflected in existing lanes formed a new lane together. The vocabulary that emerged was not mine alone. It came from the way everyone shaped it once the space existed. I was the starting point, but I was not the center. The ecosystem was co-created.

Why it is hard for independent artists to teach in BC

British Columbia moves from a different premise. Here, the institution is the starting point. The artist enters after. The structure is built before the relationship. Access comes before participation. The doorway is granted, not grown.

I have also had to recognize why the system here evolved this way. It has become clear to me that this structure exists partly because of the economic reality in BC. Independent space is difficult to sustain here. Rent, zoning, and real estate pressures make it nearly impossible for most artists to hold a room of their own, the way they might in Quebec. Institutions become the only stable place where the arts can physically live. They are carrying something that individual artists cannot realistically shoulder alone in this landscape, and that makes them necessary in a way Quebec does not require.

I notice the difference not only in philosophy but in geography. In Quebec, culture lived at walking distance, stitched into daily life. Here, the spaces I am directed toward are often across town, outside the neighbourhood where I actually live, and before any relationship has formed. The distance is measured not just in time, but in roots.

Independence also holds a different meaning here. In Quebec, autonomy is simply how culture is generated. In BC, autonomy sits outside the official structure. For someone who has always built belonging through authorship, this feels like a shift in where creative life is allowed to begin.

There is also a deeper layer beneath the practical one. I built safety, dignity, and cultural identity through being able to form ecosystems at the level of community. When the only doorway is one I must apply through, to someone I have never met, in order to reach people I have not yet been allowed to stand beside, it changes the very shape of belonging. It is not shared authorship. It is permission before connection.

I am still learning how to translate my way of building culture into a system that begins from a different foundation. I am not resisting it. I am learning how to stand inside it without losing the instinct to grow something living from the ground outward.

I do not yet know what my truest place in this landscape will be. But I know I am not arriving empty. I carry proof that I can build what does not yet exist, and that when I build it, people gather and something continues beyond me. Belonging, for me, may come not from being offered a doorway, but from finding the place where that doorway can open outward again.

For now, I am listening for that place, and learning the rhythm of how culture moves here. I am still arriving, and I am still finding where I can grow something that feels like home.