Opinion: Rethinking Calgary's cultural exodus: A name for native creative retention

Calgary is a metropolis wealthy with expertise, significantly inside the performing arts. But, our metropolis has lengthy suffered from an unlucky development: the exodus of its high-level performing artists searching for larger alternative in bigger cities as soon as they’ve aged out of the unbelievable applications supplied all through town.

The shortage {of professional} coaching and alternatives has led many to enterprise to locations equivalent to Vancouver, Toronto, New York and L.A., the place performers have entry to a wider array of potentialities with each coaching and efficiency.

The query we should ask is: How can Calgary retain its gifted performers and proceed to reinforce its native cultural panorama?

If Calgary aspires to thrive culturally, it should put money into nurturing native expertise. We have to domesticate an surroundings the place artists not solely study and develop but additionally envision a future for themselves inside our metropolis.

This doesn’t imply blocking the pure migration of expertise — artists ought to at all times be free to hunt alternatives wherever they come up. Nonetheless, the emphasis is on guaranteeing that their departure is just not the results of a scarcity of native prospects.