Montreal choreographer Jean-Pierre Perreault, creator of the post-modern dance sensation Joe, only watches television in hotels. ‘I look at television and I think, God! What poverty! How much Oprah Winfrey can they watch?’

Lots, apparently. While both Canadian nominees for Banff’s performance special award agree that performing arts on television, particularly dance, is getting better and better, it’s pretty obvious that it won’t be dominating the primetime airwaves anytime soon.

‘Even a few years ago,’ says Barbara Willis Sweete, director of Rhombus Media’s danced opera Dido and AEneas, ‘it was possible that someone would buy a product of high quality even if it had no big names, maybe a totally Canadian dance production or something. Now that isn’t happening. People have more commercial tastes and there’s less money.’

Despite the universal cry of ‘less money,’ Canada’s performing arts productions are exceptionally well represented in Banff this year, holding two of the four nominations. Joe, a coproduction between Radio-Canada and Montreal’s Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, is thoroughly homegrown while Rhombus’ Dido and AEneas is an international cocktail, produced in association with Bravo!, the u.k.’s Channel 4, rtp in Portugal, Germany’s zdf, the cbc, and ncrv in the Netherlands.

Dido was a project born within a project. While Sweete was working with the Mark Morris Dance Group of New York on another celebrated dance film, Falling Down Stairs, Channel 4 initiated contact with Morris on a project to celebrate the 300th anniversary of British composer Henry Purcell. Morris had created the danced version of Purcell’s Dido in the mid-’80s to critical acclaim, and his positive experience with Rhombus lent itself to another collaboration. The trick was to recreate it well.

‘It’s a very powerful live work,’ says Sweete, ‘and the question was how to keep that power and still make it powerful for television. But Mark, when he conceived it in the first place, always imagined it would be a really good film, so he was very open to ideas.’

Joe choreographer Perreault also felt the pull when adapting his work for tv. As a performance involving 32 dancers creating their own percussion through their footwork, it’s essential for the audience to see the movement patterns and understand the space around the dancers. But 56 minutes of long shots is tv suicide.

‘What we had to do is create a balance between those long shots, making sure the audience could see the logic of where the dancers were, but flowing into medium shots and even close-ups. Joe is 56 minutes non-stop, and I wanted people to stay there until the end and to actually feel something.’

While Joe went on to become a success, in the eyes of its creators, audiences and now the Banff judges, Perreault cautions against those who would remount each and every successful theater production for the small screen.

‘It requires an enormous amount of work to adapt to the medium,’ he admits, ‘to make sure the medium doesn’t work against you. Not everything is transferable and we have to be careful what we try to put on the tv.’

As a company for which the performing arts, especially dance, is its bread and butter, Rhombus agrees wholeheartedly. As the market has changed, so have the ideals behind the productions. Accessibility is the name of the game, particularly when you have a long international roster of investors as Rhombus often does.

However, Sheena Macdonald, head of Rhombus’ distribution arm, says tight belts at public broadcasters, the traditional buyers of arts programming, have created a few new opportunities for companies like hers.

‘In some ways, the budget cuts have made doing coproductions more attractive for public broadcasters. Where once they might have financed their own programs, now they’re looking more to source programs as acquisitions or copros because then we can cobble together a decent budget.’

While the new culturally focused specialty channels popping up around the globe represent new opportunities for companies with a catalogue of programs, Macdonald says these smaller entities aren’t likely to be chipping in much for production. ‘They’ll take things non-exclusively, so having a catalogue is valuable, but they don’t have money for coproductions. Absolutely not.’

Hope springs eternal

But hope springs eternal, especially among artists. Perreault believes that television audiences will eventually turn to the performing arts as they grow bored with traditional and increasingly low-budget tv fare. ‘The new stations will need new programming with diversity. Dance is one of the areas available to fill in those gaps.’

Since the original stage production in 1983 as a student work at the University of Quebec, Joe has toured extensively in Canada, the u.s. and in Europe, but it was the televised version, says Perreault, that generated excitement among the uninitiated. He hopes that good work broadcast for the masses will create a demand for good work from the masses.

‘My work usually has the type of audience which would come to see my live work, it’s not commercial at all. But the effect of Joe on television was incredible. Even where I have my cottage in the country, I go to the grocery store and I’m assailed by people who would never have gone into a theater to see my live performances.’

Perhaps more realistically, Sweete believes there’s still much room for improvement in the genre, and it won’t come cheap. ‘Turning it into good television is an expensive and labor-intensive process,’ she says. ‘You have to find the nucleus, the heart of what it is, and build it up again in a television way.’

A tricky thing to do, especially with Oprah in the way.