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Big talent from a small town

Four emerging artists credit their Whistler roots for inspiration
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Small towns breed big talent. Meet four young women whose success in the performing arts was nurtured in Whistler.

At the age of 10 Ali Milner didn’t know she had talent as a singer, but she was determined to join the Moving Chords Show Choir. She wowed the choir directors with her voice, well-rehearsed show tune and choreography, and was invited to join the choir, even though she was a year too young.

Milner may not have known she had talent back then, but her ability to perform wasn’t hiding far beneath the surface.

Cut forward six years. Milner released her first self-title CD in September 2006 and in November she performed in front of an audience of 60,000 at the Guandong International Tourism and Culture Festival as part of a contingent of performers from B.C. She took the stage right after film star Jackie Chan.

“It was so much fun,” Milner says. “I made friends with people from other nations. I was running on very little sleep the whole time, but I didn’t feel tired while I was there.”

Her Thursday night gig at the Four Seasons Resort Whistler, Après with Ali, attracts a regular crowd. “It’s a good gig,” she says. “I like chatting with people, and it’s good for my piano skills. It’s awkward when people don’t laugh at my jokes, though.”

This is a kid who is going places.

And what role did Whistler play in all of this success?

“It is a good base for learning artistically,” Milner says. “People stick by you. You know people will root for you. There’s a good vibe in this town.”

However, coming from a small town that is more focused on sport than arts has its challenges. Once she and her parents realized her musical talent, Milner wanted to take her singing further. In order to do that, she had to travel to Vancouver. She auditioned for the Vancouver Children’s Choir, and was accepted into the Chamber Choir. For three years she traveled to Vancouver each week. “It was a great experience,” she says. “I learned to sight read music, and to harmonize with other singers.”

By the age of 13 she had met her current agent, Zack Werner, best known as the mean judge on Canadian Idol. She began working on her CD. A year later she traveled to Toronto and worked with songwriter James Robinson to write the songs for the CD.

She continues to travel to Vancouver for jazz piano lessons with Bob Murch and vocal lessons with Joanie Taylor. “Mostly I work on my performance skills, interpretation of lyrics, and interacting with the audience.”

All the traveling, both for performances and lessons, takes its toll. Milner isn’t able to keep up with regular school classes and takes most of her courses online. Luckily for her, with so many elite athletes in town, Whistler Secondary School is well set up to deal with students who can’t follow the regular school schedule.

Abigail Winter-Culliford knows all about schooling on an alternative schedule. The 11 year old is about to leave for Stratford, Ontario, where she will spend the next nine months rehearsing for and performing in her role as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird at the renowned Stratford Festival of Canada. While she is there she will home-school with her mother, Sadie Culliford, something she has done in the past during her stints on the stage.

Winter-Culliford lived in Whistler for the first nine years of her life, and moved to Vancouver two years ago. Her mother remembers when she first realized Abbey’s talent. “I was directing a performance of Moving Chords with Norman Foote, and learned afterward that Abbey, who was three, was standing behind me doing all the moves in time to the beat.”

At age six Winter-Culliford joined the show choir as an official member and soon after she began making regular trips to Vancouver for dance and gymnastics practice.

“Abbey used to love listening to Ali Milner sing and she’d been watching me teach music at the school, too. She showed a real interest in it. Ali and her mom tipped us off to an audition for Gretl in the Sound of Music with the Royal City Musical Theatre.” Abbey got the role, and stole the show. Two years later she was back again with RCMT, performing as Amaryllus in The Music Man. She impressed the director, Ed Harrington, and he recommended her to the Stratford Festival for the role of Scout. Her experience playing Chip in Beauty in the Beast in 2005 and 2006, as well as the starring role in Mr. God, This is Anna also helped her along the journey to Stratford.

Winter-Culliford and her mom depart for Ontario Feb. 14 th to begin rehearsals for the play, which will run from May until October. She will rehearse six days a week from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. “I’m really excited to go for 10 months,” says Winter-Culliford. “It will be good to step out of my usual routines.” She and her mom plan to do school work together in the morning before beginning rehearsals. “There will be some sitting around, too. I’ll do more schoolwork, or my mom will take me outside to run around a bit.”

When asked if she gets nervous on stage, Winter-Culliford replies, “For the first couple shows I am. Then I feel I am the part.”

The Cullifords moved to Vancouver partly because of Abbey’s gymnastics, which she has since stopped, and because of the many shows and programs in which she performed or took part. She enjoys being in the shows, “but I really miss Whistler.”

“The teachers at Myrtle Philip were very supportive when I left to do Sound of Music . They let me come back in and be with the rest of the class and didn’t make me do extra work.”

Her mom concurs about the support shown by friends and community members in Whistler. “The newspapers were hugely supportive. When Abbey got the role of Gretl they were very interested in what she was doing.”

She wishes that there had been a dance program, such as that at Soul Funktion, when Abbey started dancing at a high level. “We started going to Vancouver, and then because we made connections there we kept going.”

Shay Saver and Stephanie Moody are two dancers in Whistler who are very glad that Soul Funktion exists.

Saver, age 10, has been accepted to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Summer School, which is essentially a month-long audition for the school program. “I’m very excited,” says the soft-spoken Saver. “I loved the audition.”

Saver moved to Whistler three years ago. She saw the Soul Funktion show, loved what she saw, attended the summer camp, and then signed up for a full year of classes. She now takes 12 classes each week, in a range of disciplines including jazz, tap and ballet. She also assists in the Grade 2 ballet class in order to get more practice herself and be a role model for the younger children.

Once again, Saver comments on how supportive the community is, especially her instructors, Codi Dalen and Heather Stremlaw. Her mother, Nancy Saver, echoes her words. “Codi is always looking for ways to showcase our dancers, and give back to the community.” Dalen has made a point of telling Saver about upcoming auditions, even if it is just to practise auditioning. She also gives the dancers opportunities to work with different instructors through workshops.

Says Nancy, “I think the community has a lot of opportunity for children to be involved in the performing arts with the dance academy, skating club, choir, and musical theatre at the high school. Coming from a large city (they moved from California three years ago), we were very impressed by the opportunities given to Shay.”

She also says, “how fortunate the community is to have Heather Stremlaw. She brings an impressive professional choreography background that competes with any large city. She has brought to the studio a level of expertise that cannot be compared.”

Stephanie Moody has been working closely with Dalen and Stremlaw since Soul Funktion opened three years ago. Prior to that she danced with the Whistler Dance Academy and the Whistler Gymnastics Club. After three years of dancing competitively she is now a student teacher at the studio. Currently in Grade 11, Moody is unsure what she wants to do in the future, but is using the opportunity to get a feel for teaching. “I’d like to take some time off before university. I might try dancing on a cruise ship or teaching dance.”

Moody danced a leading role in Time After Time, a Soul Funktion production at Millennium Place in November, 2006. She credits Dalen and Stremlaw, her parents and her friends for their support in her success in dance.

She does wish she had access to different styles of dance. The challenge of being in a small town is that there are limited dance companies and instructors here, and not so many chances to see and experience different instructors and styles. “That will come in time,” she says.

Nancy Saver would agree. “In the three years since we’ve been here I’ve seen the town evolve tremendously in recognizing itself as an arts community.”

Doti Niedermayer, executive director of the Whistler Arts Council, concurs. She has seen a rise in the number of arts related programs and events in the past few years. In particular, the number of performances in the community has increased since the creation of Maurice Young Millennium Place. Niedermayer credits many of the smaller groups in town, such as the Whistler Theatre Project, the Whistler Writer’s Group and the Public Art Committee for their commitment to bringing the arts to Whistler.

She also says that the Whistler Arts Council has been working with other, larger groups on projects like Celebration 2010 and the unveiling of the Paralympic Logo to incorporate the arts into events that might otherwise only be about outdoor recreation.

“There’s a real desire in town to integrate arts and culture into sports and recreation,” she says. Events such as the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival and Crankworx have made it part of their mandate to include performance, visual and written arts. And the WAC is working with the municipality to create a strategic plan for arts, culture and heritage.

However, there is still a limit to the opportunities for those seeking to take their art to a professional level. “Local performers are incorporated in performances when they are at a level to perform publicly,” Niedermayer says. Getting to that level while living in Whistler can be a challenge.

“It’s a problem with every small town. Once people reach a certain level, they have to move to an urban setting to make a name for themselves, and then they can come back and perform.”

The next step would be to open a school for the arts in Whistler, which would take money to run and potentially a larger population base to make it feasible. “There is a will,” says Nidermayer, “but it’s about finding the funding.”

Until that happens, young performers like Milner, Winter-Culliford, Saver and Moody will reap the benefits of the high quality instruction that does exist in Whistler, travel elsewhere for what they can’t get here, and know that they have a whole town pulling for them as they strive to succeed in the big wide world of entertainment.

Because as Milner’s dad, Ted says, “There are lots of talented kids who don’t get the support and don’t go anywhere.” With the encouragement these four are getting, we can expect big things in the future.



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