FROM JUNE 2024 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

When I first met Sanjeet Takhar, I was working at Xpace Cultural Centre, where she proposed a really cool and much-needed workshop called “The Art of No,” on setting boundaries in the arts. Later, we collided on the first day of the Intersection Music & Arts Festival and the launch of the augmented reality app A More Beautiful Journey, which maps the audio scores of artists across the city; we were figuring out where to set up a makeshift stage for a pop-up performance series at Humber Loop station. Since then, we’ve run into each other at parties, concerts, at The Music Gallery, where she works as artistic director, and at street festivals like the Geary Art Crawl last summer, where she programmed two community stages with 23 artists in 48 hours. Takhar, who is a curator, producer and DJ, has made it her mission over the past 10 years to bring people together around music in a more deeply connected way.

In the face of slashed cultural funding, small music venue closures and concert tickets becoming unaffordable, I sat down with Takhar to talk about why exactly a DIY mindset is what more art spaces in the city need right now.

You wrote in an open letter last autumn that a healthy city is one that’s willing to dream and empowered to do so. Where does Toronto fall within this?

In Toronto we love living in this scarcity mindset that we never have enough. Yes, we’re in a really expensive city. Yes, artists are really up against it. But I think it’s the willingness of people to share that is scarce.

How so?

We have an IMAX [theatre] at Ontario Place, but we don’t host live shows there. We have so many large outdoor stages, gazebos and public spaces that we pay our taxes toward that could host a free concert or poetry reading, but it doesn’t happen because they don’t permit amplified sound. Look at the High Park Amphitheatre, which gets government funding but only gets used two months a year [by Canadian Stage for Dream in High Park]. Why are the spaces that exist in this city so locked up, when they can be filled with community? Because we are sharing-scarce.

Why do you think that is?

I think the root of it is conservatism, or maybe it’s a fear of damage. People here are always worried about others harming their space. My partner Evan [a.k.a. Emissive] and I have CDJs [specialized digital music players] at home, and if someone needs to come over and we’re not home, we leave a key out. They can just go into our apartment, use the equipment, lock up and leave. We’ve never had a problem, and sometimes these are people we’ve never met, who have one degree of separation.

I love this so much.

I mean, why would somebody who is thankful for something you’re providing them want to damage it? I really believe that damage happens when we enter spaces that are transactional, because if I build actual community, I would never want to harm that space. A really great example of this is the radical arts and community space Unit 2, who define themselves as a DIT (Do It Together) venue. How many people come in and out of there, and how many problems does the founder and producer Rose have? Probably very few, in comparison to the amount of people entering that room.

Thinking we’re scarce makes us feel confined, which makes it very difficult to dream.

Handing your keys to a friend’s friend is such a perfect analogy of how we’re being invited to move toward trust. How do we practise this in cultural spaces, where scarcity is such a systemic issue?

Toronto art spaces, being majorly funded by grants or rich patrons, have ended up creating a tone in which everything has strings, which is ironic because in community, we’re actually so generous with each other. If you talk to anyone in the city who’s not a part of that funding system, any ethnic minority or majority – say, for example, the South Asian community – they just pull themselves up! Someone’s mom makes food, someone else’s friend is the DJ, and suddenly we make an event happen. Often, those thriving at the grant level are upper-middle-class or upper-class people who have been able to get an education and receive the language needed to apply for grants. And when many go on to start institutions, they set a precedent for hoarding, merely out of a need to protect themselves.

Absolutely.

And that’s something that I just didn’t grow up with. For example, The Music Gallery [a performance venue now on Bathurst St. that’s existed since 1976], where I work, has so many resources. Why shouldn’t we be able to just lend out that spare subwoofer, or share our space? We may not have government funding like the symphony orchestra, but what we have, and what we can give, is massive.

And especially now that there’s a call for all these ethnic and Indigenous and Black and queer communities to come into these spaces. We have to break a lot more, and truly rethink the systems and structures that were made to protect a very small portion of the population.

Yes – and reconsider what we perceive as a resource. It’s not only space, materials and equipment, but also relationships and how we connect with each other.

And care structures. Last night we did a show and somebody fainted. We hosted the show in partnership with another organization, and they didn’t even come up! If you throw an event and somebody faints, and you’re not checking on whether that human is okay, or checking in with those who are taking care of them, what the fuck are you doing? You have no care structures, let alone ways of prioritizing those that need help.

I’ve seen this many times with larger cultural institutions. There’s always a knee-jerk reaction when something happens, but rarely a prevention. Suddenly committees are put forth and all of this energy is put into writing policies and pulling documents...

And it’s not in your body. You write a land acknowledgment, but you don’t acknowledge the fact that so many are feeling a way about that right now, that so many people in this city are displaced. Like, what land are you acknowledging? You’re booking BIPOC artists but you’re not actually talking to them. You don’t understand that they have decades of trauma from dealing with institutions like yours. The difference between policy and practice is huge.

A lot of the time, people don’t feel like they have the power to be themselves. But without the art, none of these organizations would exist. So it’s like the power structures are upside down.

Where does music collide with wellness, for you?

I’m Sikh, and in Sikhism, music is how you find God. We listen to music in the temple, our prayers are very musical, our poems are meant to be sung. So for me, there was never a separation between music and spirituality or music and wellness. The temples have had some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. This is why, for me, safety is such an important thing. If you’re in a rave space or concert hall where you feel uncomfortable or not like your full self, it’s a big problem. For the dance floor to be a space of release, which is what people want, you won’t be able to relax unless the situation is safe. And safety is political.

What does this look like for you when you’re putting on an event?

The way we work in artist-run spaces is very different from institutions that are built on gatekeeping. In the DIY realm, you’re in symbiotic relationships with each other. You work together, because if you don’t, your show will fail, you’ll have to pay overtime, your artists and staff will burn out. There’s always an open conversation.

Of course, music is incredible. A really good show will just put you into an amazing space, if you’re ready to go there. But the entire environment is so important. How do we feed people and make them feel welcome? How do we create a crowd that feels like they’re a part of the experience versus merely attending the experience, right? If you feel like you can alter the course of the night, you’re more likely to be in it and make it fun.

There’s a really special magic embedded in Toronto’s artist-run collectives, which goes beyond mere concepts and ‘cool ideas.’

Yes. With BOOT (Best Out Of Town) for example, you have four people who envisioned how they could make space for their community in a way that felt really safe, and went ahead and did it. They made massive communities feel really loved, and gave people their first DJ gigs. They saw the scarcity and said, ‘Let’s fix it.’ There are a lot of other collectives who don’t have a choice but to dream.

It’s pure lung power.

And on the other hand, there are also so many people willing to take the risk of remaining in institutional spaces, to work with organizations that get worried that they’ll need bigger insurance when they see your audience is not all rich white people. It’s not easy, and definitely not for the faint of heart. But if you have your community around, you can all just roll your eyes about it. Dudebox [the iconic Toronto party series founded by Said Yassin and Ahmad Taib] did it for a really long time since throwing their first event at a Chinatown loft in 2007. They got access to the craziest venues in the city, like Honest Ed’s, because they were able to rep themselves as a charity, non-profit organization. They dreamed and demanded it. I think that’s really cool. And I think more people should feel empowered to do that.

Personal and professional limits can become blurry in DIY spaces. How do you respect boundaries while contributing to friends’ and peers’ initiatives in addition to your own?

How do you say no to your mom? [laughs] It’s really difficult to not provide support to the people in your life that need it, especially when you have the resources. Often, if someone needs my help and I don’t have the capacity, I point them to 10 others who do. There’s always someone else who can jump in.

Toronto is so full of resources, and if you share that perspective and give people an opportunity to see the city as such, it changes things. People become empowered and want to give back. Like the concerts in Allan Gardens! That used to be such a crazy possibility, and now it’s happening every week.

We have to stop thinking [resources are] scarce and we have to start demanding more. Maybe that’s figuring out alternative ways to share resources, how to barter instead of just exchanging money. Or maybe that’s looking around your neighbourhood, seeing spots that are underused and asking yourself how that can change, and what you and your friends can do about it.