Oh, the memories

A Magical Time: The Early Days of the Arts at Simon Fraser University
by the Simon Fraser University Retirees Association

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$38.95 / 9781998526062

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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When I arrived at Burnaby’s Simon Fraser University in the spring of 1970, the dust had barely settled on the previous five years of growing pains. A Magical Time took me back to the many exciting moments that would leave a lasting impression on members of my student cohort for better or worse.

The 1967 student strike in support of ten fired professors (the PSA 10) in the experimental and ill-fated Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology Department was still simmering. Classrooms were still being influenced by the rebellious spirit of the new university. In a large lecture theatre, for example, a political science professor appeared at the podium, then withdrew as the sounds of bombardment blasted through the theatre speakers, while students dressed as soldiers marched through the aisles brandishing high-powered weapons.

As dance critic Max Wyman put it in his introduction, SFU “the upstart newcomer with the sheen of youth on its face and the spirit of intelligent creative inquiry infusing its being, was at the pulsing, chaotic centre of it all.” Author Francis Mansbridge called it “a mountaintop Eden, a place where there could be a fresh start, transcending the stale forms that had encrusted education elsewhere.” Her essay was the first of several that guided readers through the various art forms that are the focus of the book.

Academically, it was a place that encouraged creativity as it had done through the non-credit programs under the Centre for Communications and the Arts (CCA). I got through Geography 101, earning an A for a term project that featured a videotape of me baking bread. Instructors were wide open to experimentation like that and they welcomed initiatives that were attuned to the rebellious, anti-establishment nature of the campus and the times.

With the 1970s came a call for credit programs leading to degrees, but the sense of freedom and rebellion that was planted in the first five years remained instilled for the next five. A Magical Time captures the sentiments and intentions of those times assisted by photographs and other images.

The non-credit theatre program epitomized that rebellion with iconoclasts like John Juliani and later by Jim Gerrard stirring young charges to act with all their being. These innovators were not interested in standard theatrical productions, so audiences were entertained by, or subjected to, weekly experimental productions. As author Christine Hearn recalls in her essay on Juliani’s Savage God series, he “transformed our hidebound ideas of theatre from something pretty and entertaining into something to feel uncomfortable about, something to think about.”

Juliani himself put it this way: “Theatre should not be dead from the neck down.” He got help from a group of dedicated student actors that included the late Jackie Crossland. She later appeared in the BC-located Robert Altman film McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the long-running CBC series The Beachcombers.

Dance was also part of the “interdisciplinarity” of the early years, with the arrival of Max and Anna Wyman in 1967. She founded the Anna Wyman Dance Theatre, while Iris Garland, “the driving force behind dance at SFU,” cultivated a crop of dancers in the SFU Dance Workshop. As Tessa Perkins Deneault explains in her essay, “it didn’t matter if you had any prior dance training; all students needed was a desire to learn and a passion for movement.”

This view infused much of the arts community on Burnaby Mountain and nowhere more so that in music as represented by R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project. By creating a “rich aural environment,” Schafer “contributed significantly to the vitality and social ambience of campus life” and “SFU’s avant-garde identity.” Author Barry Truax notes that SFU is “recognized for its pioneering role in acoustic ecology.”

Mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, world-renowned flautist Paul Horn, the Purcell String Quartet, the SFU Pipe Band, the Madrigal Singers and others joined Schafer in influencing how we hear sound. Paul Kennedy of CBC Radio’s Ideas dedicated a program to “how opening our ears can open our minds.” He was referring to Hildegard Westerkamp and other founders of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Westerkamp is pictured recording the sounds of a camel. 

Acclaimed filmmaker Sandy Wilson is an SFU graduate who went on to make the acclaimed movie My American Cousin and other films. In her essay for the book, Wilson recalls pitching a film idea to a credit course in urban studies. “I proposed making a film about garbage and finally someone in authority said, ‘Go ahead. Show us a film about garbage and you’ll get your five credits’ . . . and so I did.”

Tony Westman, who began his time on campus as a photographer for the student newspaper The Peak, soon graduated to filmmaking and participated in the shooting of Noohalk, “a sensitive documentary in which the indigenous people [Bella Coola First Nation] were able to voice their concerns over threats to their culture.”

Poetry was in the vanguard of SFU artforms in the 1960s influenced by Black Mountain poet Charles Olson and San Francisco poet and SFU English professor Robin Blaser. Poets Brian Fawcett, Sheron Thesen, Brian Brett, Allan Safarik and others grew out of the ensuing debate between the Black Mountain adherents and their detractors.

“There was this American subculture of Olson, [Robert] Creeley, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan,” recalled Alban Goulden. “It had its own behaviour and its own language. If you didn’t use that language you were beyond the pale.” The battle raged and SFU poets produced several little magazines to embrace their views on the poetry feud. Blackfish, West Coast Review, Iron and Ballsout, “A Magazine of Unpleasant Verse and Impolite Prose,” set about adopting or “smashing old forms.”

Whichever school you supported, for Goulden “there was a tremendous sense of what could happen. Everything fluid, unfolding, uncertain. What was possible. Period. And that was so wonderful.”

It was a feeling that also permeated the visual arts community on campus led by Iain Baxter. Under his supervision, “visual art at SFU was born not just into a period of ferment, but into . . . the global shift away from art objects and toward art as concepts.” Bill Jeffries’s essay likens it to lyrics of the Buffalo Springfield song For What It’s Worth: Something’s happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear. Whatever it was, Jeffries decided it was “wonderfully chaotic.”

Published by the SFU Retirees Association, the book’s stated intention is to capture “the excitement of that first decade of the arts at SFU” (1965-1975), and they succeed admirably. They chose, probably wisely, not to wander too deeply into the political controversies that marked those years. And yet, there is a brief discussion of the 1968 student occupation of the administration building. The famous or infamous “114” set a defiant tone of revolt that future student bodies incorporated into their campus experience.

To capture that excitement, the compilers relied heavily on access to The Peak’s archives. The weekly maintained an active arts and entertainment section providing many quotations to attest to the magical memories that keep pouring out of this expansive revisitation of the arts and culture scene at Canada’s once radical campus atop Burnaby Mountain.

Of course, there are too many memories to recount in an already rich history like this one. Ann Cowan’s “Legacy” chapter summarizes some that sprang forth from this “vision of a new kind of university where thought was free-flowing and collaborative” and “the abandonment of hierarchies for a democratic approach to governance and learning.”

But two of my favourites got missed in this impressive compilation supercharged by the zeitgeist of those historic moments. The first is about Queen Elizabeth II’s appearance on the front cover of The Peak.

It was the summer of 1971, The Peak was up to its typical insouciant mischief. Hotpants were the fashion rage of the time, so what better way to cause said mischief than to superimpose the queen’s crowned head on a hot-panted young model? It wasn’t art but it did what art often does: force people to question authority, royal and otherwise.

Did anyone notice the queen in hotpants that sleepy summer week 70 years ago? Yes, The Peak office received more mail than usual the following week. In this case, the earnest correspondents were members of the Monarchy League of Canada. They were not amused.

The second absent memory took place the previous October 19, five days after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had invoked the War Measures Act. The Peak flew under the RCMP’s radar when it quietly, and probably illegally, published the FLQ Manifesto, stating the separatist aims of Le front de libération du Quebec. One report said “publishing the manifesto could have led to significant backlash and potential repercussions for the newspaper and the university.” The paper escaped a police raid unlike its Victoria sister paper, The Martlett.

Again, it wasn’t art, but the paper saw it as part of its role to challenge what many saw as the overreach of federal government authority. Later, Quebec playwright Robert Lepage called the manifesto “a significant piece of Quebec cultural history that still has power today.”

Yes, it was a magical time from many perspectives, including mine. Thanks for the memories and for the many colourful reminders of what might have been.

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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. He was editor at SFU’s student newspaper The Peak in 1971. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Bill Arnott, R.D. Rowberry, Christy K. Lee, Colin Campbell, and Megan McDougall for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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