Education as Arts Talk? Canada’s National Arts Centre and Praxis Theatre’s SpiderWebShow

Abstract

This chapter focuses on SpiderWebShow, a collaboration between Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa and a Toronto-based theatre company, Praxis Theatre. SpiderWebShow is part blog, part place of theatrical experiment, and part social networking site with an ambition of becoming a space for a national conversation on Canadian theatre. The authors think through how SpiderWebShow is implicated in the evolution of a national theatre’s relationship to public education, a shift specifically from a patronizing attitude of bringing culture to the masses, toward one of being a facilitator of artistic development and critical conversation locally and regionally.