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The Scene Room
The Scene Room Podcast spotlights the movers and makers redefining the performing arts—focusing on innovative marketing, leadership, and the importance of collaboration. Hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman, with a keen eye on audience trends and cultural shifts, the goal is to explore how artists and organizations are connecting with communities, shaping the future, and redefining what it means to engage and inspire.
The Scene Room
Chris Lorway — Arts, Empowerment, and Community Connection
Chris Lorway, the visionary President and CEO of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, is in The Scene Room this week. He discusses his leadership approach—empowering teams, fostering trust, and building a culture of collaboration and excellence with a shared vision and core values.
Chris shares his commitment to nurturing local talent, his interest in Banff Centre’s role and commitment to Indigenous Reconciliation, and his passion for multidisciplinary programming. He also reflects on the transformative experiences available at the Centre and why this position ultimately drew him back to Canada.
Against the stunning backdrop of Banff’s natural beauty, Chris reveals how the outdoors inspires artistic expression and deepens community engagement. Join us for an inspiring conversation that weaves together innovation, heritage, and a bold vision for a future where art and community flourish side by side.
This episode was recorded on February 3, 2025. To stream the video version of this episode, please visit https://youtu.be/jPpED1UEHYQ OR The Scene Room's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/watch/61563953652615/1166248235074214
All episodes are also available in video form on our YouTube Channel. All episodes are hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman.
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Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have Chris Lorway here, the CEO of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada. Chris has an extraordinary track record in the arts, with leadership roles that span from his time as founding artistic director of the Luminato Festival in Toronto to his work with Stanford Live and the prestigious Lincoln Center in New York City. Now he is CEO of Banff Centre, which is a place known for nurturing artists, fostering creativity and leading transformative arts experiences. I'm so delighted that he's here, and whether you're an artist or an arts leader, or simply curious about the landscape of the arts, this is a conversation for you. Chris, thanks for being here.
Chris Lorway:Great to be here, good morning.
Elizabeth Bowman:So glad that you accepted this interview request. I really was so excited. I mean, obviously you've got a huge job right now and you've had many huge jobs, so I'm really interested in your perspective.
Chris Lorway:Yeah, really great to be joining you today.
Elizabeth Bowman:So why don't I just get right in there? I just want to know a little bit about your leadership style. I haven't. I've read a lot of articles about projects you've been involved in, but not many give away that kind of secret. How do you lead? What's your philosophy? Who are you?
Chris Lorway:It's all about, I think, bringing a team together who shares your vision and your values and figuring out a way to collectively move something forward. And I think you know it was interesting when I was back at Lincoln Center in the day and I first met Janice Price, who was one of my mentors and longtime colleagues in the business. You would see that she would often bring back people from her previous lives to come together to work with her on whatever new role she was in. And I guess, as I get on in my career at this point I understand that sort of impulse where you, after you, spend all that time creating a team, even if you move, the ability to go back to people who you know are in alignment with you and share those values. It makes your job a heck of a lot easier.
Chris Lorway:And even here at the bounce center I'm now I'm working with four or five people that I've worked with in the past who again have been able to jump right in, get a sense of knowing how my brain works, but also have that independence to be able to take whatever their role is and then run with it. And I think, for for the most part I would say that's my main characteristic of my leadership is to really trust those people around me and to build a team of people again that are all hopefully rowing in the same direction and work collectively to achieve whatever goal. It is no interest in micromanaging or getting into the weeds on things, if anything. You know I might be accused of being a little bit outside the details, but I think when you're in a role of CEO your job is not day-to-day. It's really about looking five years out and trying to figure out how you're going to get to where you're going and empowering those around you to do what they need to do to help you get there.
Elizabeth Bowman:How did you get into the art specifically? What's your background growing up?
Chris Lorway:Interestingly, I grew up in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and I was born with I just recently found this out but a thing called leg calf disease, which happened a lot in households where there was secondhand smoke and it just meant that blood didn't flow into the hip bone and so, as a result, I was born with a severely distended hip and spent the first five years of my life in and out of cast trying to fix it.
Chris Lorway:It never really set and in the end I ended up having surgeries to my hip and knee in grade three and grade five.
Chris Lorway:But as a result, I was the odd kid out who wasn't at the hockey rink or are doing that type of thing, just because I didn't have the ability to do that, and instead I found myself being immersed in music, and that was a mix of being a piano student early on in my life but also studying voice and becoming a boy soprano and a choir boy, and that sort of took me through my whole trajectory, sort of straddling the world of the arts, which was eventually, you know, got into the Cape Breton Youth Choir with an amazing woman named Sister Rita Clare, and then I ended up going to music school at Dalhousie University sang with the Rotary Youth Choir, which is the Nova Scotia provincial choir, got into the national youth choir as a as a quartet member and started to build that network.
Chris Lorway:And then I realized at a certain point that even though I was doing a performance degree in voice at Western, eventually after a couple years at Dal I realized that I wanted I got more, or just as much, if not more, gratification from actually being behind the scenes and supporting artists as I did, trying to focus on being an artist myself. And that's when I the transition. So I did a little bit of a detour back to Cape Breton and helped to start the Celtic Colors International Festival, which is a big Celtic festival, and then went to New York City to do Columbia's Masters in Arts Administration, which set my career off where I am now.
Elizabeth Bowman:I also come from the choral background, so I relate to that heavily To all those young choristers out there wondering what they might do with their music education. I mean there's a lot of possibility out there.
Chris Lorway:One of my roommates in college at Western is the conductor for the ACCC this year doing the big National Youth Choir project, and so it's fun to sort of see where people end up. I ran into another colleague when I was in Auckland, new Zealand, who was a former chorister, was a former chorister and even my friend lance, who I sang with at juilliard, went on to be a music director for broadway and got me connected with amazing people like alan cumming Kristin Chenoweth and that whole side of the industry. So so choir has done me well and connected me to many wonderful people. Singers in some ways are this weird amalgam of the music brain which you know tends to be mathematical and analytical, but at the same time we're also like actors, in that we tend to have a more extroverted personality than a lot of other musicians in the world. I know there's always exceptions, but I think blending those two things of that, the mathematical prowess plus a lot of extroversion, kind of sets us up to be arts administrators, I think.
Elizabeth Bowman:And on that topic, what do you believe are the most critical skills for arts leaders today? I guess it follows from what you were just saying.
Chris Lorway:Yeah, it's interesting.
Chris Lorway:I was just talking the other day with Andrew Taylor, who runs the Arts Administration Program at American University in Washington, and he was sort of saying what advice do you have for students who are coming through these programs now?
Chris Lorway:And I would say, definitely, given the world that we're in and that we're heading into, the reliance on the old systems and the old models I think is setting people up for failure in a lot of ways and there needs to be a whole new way of thinking. And one of the things that I've been lucky enough to do over the course of my career is really have an opportunity to be entrepreneurial within my role, whether it was at Luminato or when I was at Roy Thompson, massey Halls, certainly at Stanford and now Banff. There's a whole for-profit, commercial part of my job which has me thinking very, very differently, but where the art lies is how you figure out how to bridge those two worlds and, being committed to the mission of the organization, how you use those for-profit ventures and that revenue to actually enable you to dream big and do things that really support the mission and the underlying goals of the organization.
Elizabeth Bowman:How do you approach balancing artistic vision with financial stability, especially in the digital age?
Chris Lorway:There's often that question about how far as performing arts or the arts in general do we have to immerse ourselves and shift and change and adapt to digital, and I have mixed feelings about that, in the way that as we become digital nomads and certainly live our life in front of a screen in some ways, the question becomes do we become part of that community and immerse ourselves wholly in it, or do we actually create experiences that differentiate ourself from that experience and give people an outlet to in some ways take a step back and release themselves from the screen?
Chris Lorway:And I think that's what the arts have always done and you see that I think even with younger people who are trying to figure out ways to have experiential theater and things where poor people are having, these immersive experiences tend to be that response, in a lot of ways, to the immersion in digital for a big part of our lives. So I think, while we have to sort of think about ways we can embrace the technology and certainly think about ways to utilize it to make work more interesting and to give artists another set of tools to be able to experiment, it ultimately comes down to that original two planks and a passion about getting people on a stage or into a gallery and really experiencing things firsthand, and that, for me, is the transformational aspect of what we do, and I don't know whether doubling down on just trying to recreate that in digital space is the answer.
Elizabeth Bowman:I agree. I feel like the digital component to it. It sort of complements it in some ways through marketing efforts and getting people to see from the outside the mainstream. I think that digital advertising like I was saying in the last episode about augmented reality, the actual idea of the production is not how I would want to necessarily experience art or a production, but educating those who might not otherwise come across it. That is a tool to do that with.
Elizabeth Bowman:But I totally agree that ultimately when you're going into a performing arts experience, it's a much more saturated experience If you don't have that barrier. It is like a barrier sort of like using a music stand, the comparison of using a music stand versus not using a music stand. Somehow that creates that barrier between you and the audience. Even though you're still standing there looking at them and singing to them. There's nothing physical between you that cuts off that communication somehow. And it's so interesting and I'm sure that that digital interface would do the same. So I guess it's a matter of using those tools intelligently and complementary in order to grow that experience ultimately.
Chris Lorway:Yeah, and I think you know what also is sort of fascinating, from just an observational standpoint, is most of digital culture is consumed in such bite-sized amounts, and I'm very much that guy who, at the end of the day, will sit down and scroll through YouTube and just watch a bunch of you know five to seven minute clips of various things or less.
Chris Lorway:But then you know the response to that is the sort of immersive festivals or productions where people will go and spend 10 hours. So it seems like in some ways, we capture people's attention in a more meaningful way than the digital world can do. When you're actually together with friends, experiencing something collectively with an audience, it's just, it's a very different experience and one that I don't think we necessarily value enough. But I certainly see, even with this new generation coming off social media, coming off Facebook, coming off Instagram and trying to focus on being present in the now, that we could see an amazing shift over the next decade as to how people actually want to come together in community and what role the arts can play in actually facilitating that.
Elizabeth Bowman:That with the tariffs that are now coming into play? Uh, with the united states. Uh, and canada. Uh, well, the united states putting on tariffs on canada. Um, what do you? How does that impact your programming? Is that going to impact your programming? And all these visa delays that have happened with the current administration in the United States, with cross-country collaboration?
Chris Lorway:Yeah, I mean we're still very much in a moment where we don't really know what this looks like and what's going to happen. When I was in the US and trying to bring international artists in, I think I would be more concerned if I was on that side of the border, given the complexities of securing that type of visa and I think this in general. We're seeing this move towards nationalism, I would say, around the world, and as we sort of tighten our borders and really look at who's coming in and out, it obviously makes it more difficult for artists, who often need to be able to transverse the world in order to make a living. So it's a very interesting time and the US has always been a major market For Canada. Right now, you know, we're slightly different in that our role at the advanced center is first and foremost that of a post-secondary, and so we're a training institution. So at this point, even my other colleagues at U of A, u of C, u of T, the bigger universities, are dealing with like international student caps. But because our programs are different and shorter in nature, the same types of restrictions don't apply to us.
Chris Lorway:So for now, unless Canada has a response that tightens up our borders in an equal way to what's happening in the US. I'm not currently concerned about it and we will still be able to do our thing. The bigger issue is that with the increasing exchange rate, I know I sent some money across the border the other day and it was $1.48 to send a dollar across, and it just means that US artists start to be priced out if they're coming through or touring because of the almost 50% increase in fees based on that exchange rate. So those are the things that I think are a bit more limiting, but again, we're in such a volatile moment right now where so much change is happening, that none of us really know where things are going and what things will look like in a year's time.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's a very concerning time for Canadian artists, I think, obviously the visa wait times are so epic to work in the United States and hopefully we'll see Canadian presenters take more responsibility, I guess, for our Canadian talent. You know, hire them Because obviously not all Canadian presenters have a mandate to hire Canadians above a certain percentage. But it's looking really dire for Canadian artists Canadian artists, as far as I can see from my nightly scrolling on YouTube and various social media platforms, where you know I'm accumulating a very wide variety of information. But yeah, I'm hearing the concern there from artists.
Chris Lorway:Yeah, I think the other piece of it is that whenever you are given a set of parameters that in some ways impose constraints on how you normally do business, I see that as a bit of an opportunity to take a moment to rethink about how you can change or modify to fit into that new operating context, and I'll give COVID as an example.
Chris Lorway:When that happened in California, we like everybody, everybody else shut the doors in mid-march and very quickly what I called did a period of unproducing, where we had to look at all the things that we had lined up for the next four to six months and figure out how to be, first and foremost, empathetic to artists who were being impacted by that immediate turn off of the spigot and and figure out ways at the same time to keep your audience engaged with your institution.
Chris Lorway:And so what I found during that period, where we were a hub that really focused the majority of our energy about bringing people into our community, covid really made us turn inwards and focus on the artists that were living in our community and how to support them and the relationships that we developed through.
Chris Lorway:We became a bit of a distribution hub for creating digital content as a one-stop shop. So we put together a team and invited people like Chanticleer and Zakir Hussain and Kronos Quartet and Daniel opened the New Century Chamber Orchestra and Tuck and Patty like all these artists came in and we made digital content with them and as a result, you know, turning inward and really focusing on community allowed us to strengthen those relationships and showed us how much amazing things were happening in our own backyard. So I think, as Canadians, as we face what could be a tough period in terms of having that permeability across the border, it does offer us that opportunity to look inwards and say how can we actually use this as an opportunity to really invest in Canadian artists and to create maybe a next boom for the arts in Canada as a result of that constraint?
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, it's a positive outlook, which is great. I mean that's what we need. I guess major change always results in some sort of transformation and, like you said, we saw that from COVID. A lot of people have that narrative where they were doing one job before COVID and then after COVID, suddenly they were either in a new line of work or suddenly pursuing their dreams that they had zero time for before. But yeah, so those were the positives that definitely came from that. Banff is the best place on the earth. I mean I love Banff. There's no secret there. On my social media Every time I go to Banff it's just pictures and hiking and all the things. What was your most exciting thing when you were considering this position and moving there?
Chris Lorway:For me I had been, I'd done more work in my current states than in Canada 10 years in New York City and then seven in California, with a 10 years in Toronto in between.
Chris Lorway:But when I looked back to say you know what would draw me back to Canada as an arts administrator, the job that was at the top of my list was this role at the Banff Centre, and I think it's because I've worked in a multidisciplinary environment for most of my career and so going into a single institution a symphony or a ballet or an opera was not as exciting to me, even though at this point in my career that would have been a natural step to go into a bigger institution.
Chris Lorway:But I still wanted to be able to work across both the visual and the performing arts and media and everything else, and the Banff Centre really offered that. The other piece for me was we have a leadership mandate and the work in particular that we do with Indigenous leaders and artists. I again, have had a lot of experience over the years of working in that space with community and really enjoyed the role that I personally and the institutions I work with can play in the reconciliation process and so being able to combine all those different elements and then having it dropped into incredible facilities and, arguably, one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's a bit of a no brainer at that point.
Elizabeth Bowman:Definitely, and I mean I just love the cross disciplinariness of Banff, all the people that you see in the cafeteria and interact with the cafeteria and interact with. When I was there, I sat down at a table with a bunch of print makers who were trying to figure out how to ship their creative products that they had made over their time. They were trying to figure out how to ship them home and some of them they were giving away and I was like, oh my goodness, like these artists are just giving away their some of their stuff. And, yeah, I had some amazing interactions there. I just think it's, if you ever need a reset creatively, I mean it's the perfect place to go.
Chris Lorway:Yeah, it's kind of like we jokingly call it like arts camp a little bit. We just had a really great month actually, with the way that I sort of dream in my mind Banff would look and feel. We had the Banff Musicians in Resonance in for three weeks and in the first two weeks we had the Kronos Quartet in as faculty and mentors, working with a whole range of musicians from around the world. Then we had Shad in working for the last week and we had a couple of younger hip-hop musicians that he was mentoring and at the same time we had a poetry program on initial mixing of the poets and the musicians, some pretty interesting artists and residents. We had Taylor Mack was here along with Timothy White, Eagle and Tigger, two of his collaborators, and they were in one of our latent studios. And then we had the launch of our new cultural leadership program. We did a pilot, so we had a bunch of arts administrators on campus.
Chris Lorway:And then we had this really sort of fun and unusual thing at the Banff Center, which is a relationship with an organisation called BIRS, which is the Banff International Research Station, and every week we have 40 mathematicians from around the world come to the Banff Centre campus to solve a problem.
Chris Lorway:So it's like this alchemy when you throw all these ingredients into a pot, what will happen? And we had a really fun night where Timothy White Eagle led a programme it was very improvised, sorry where he put flyers up around campus to come and participate in what he called the Chaos Orchestra, which was essentially three hours of unmitigated adult play where people just were able to be silly and roll around on the floor and make sounds, and it was a mix of all these worlds. Oh, and we also had the Mahabharata, the why Not? Theatre production here rehearsing before they were off to mount the project to the Perth Festival in Australia. So again we had members of that company, the mathematicians, some of the musicians in residence, some of the poets, all in this room kind of playing together as adults. It was a very fascinating way to sort of look at what is possible here at the Bound Centre and how bringing people from all these different communities and lives really enriches the entire community.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's important to gain different perspectives, no matter what industry you're in, so that it is the perfect place to check in with others and have those conversations about what you do and what they do and the industry and all the things. So, yeah, it's. I mean, it's just a fantastic place. Are you now hiking all the time I am? Yeah, I just went out for Are you now hiking all the time?
Chris Lorway:I am, yeah, I just went out for a big walk on Saturday as the snow was falling, which was pretty magical. I'm also a downhill skier Living in the Bay Area. It used to be, depending on the traffic, a three to five hour drive up to Lake Tahoe, so it's much nicer when you're only 20 or 40 minutes away from some pretty incredible skiing. We're hoping to get a bit more snow. We're in a bit of a cold snap right now, but we had about 10 centimeters over the weekend and it's always nice when you have the bluebird sky days with fresh powder and can get out on the hill.
Elizabeth Bowman:So that's the other thing I mean. Hiking is the perfect way to connect with people who also you may not know very well, and then by the end of that three hour hike everyone's. You know, fast friends yeah when I was last there I did ha ling, yeah in canmore, and then I mean I always do sulfur because that's fantastic and get coffee on top.
Chris Lorway:So I still haven't done sulfur yet. I've been used to give me a hard time because I haven't done the gondola yet either, but it's definitely on the list you haven't been up sulfur, like at all, like not even the gondola oh yeah, I go up the hot springs all the time, but never made the trip up the gondola yet.
Elizabeth Bowman:What's one unexpected thing that most people don't know about you?
Chris Lorway:I guess you know it's something that I think we all do. We sort of ask ourselves when we get into groups like this and are trying to figure out each other's histories what is your art and how do you sort of find that expression? And that's evolved for me over the years, but I've enjoyed everything from you know, writing and starting to think about ways in which not in the nonfiction space to sort of think about ways in which we work within the sector. I've certainly piano for a long time was my therapy, where I would come home and just sort of sit and play, and I have a beautiful grand piano downstairs in my living room and I haven't had a chance to really immerse myself back into that space, but it's something I definitely want to do this year.
Chris Lorway:And also you know a lot of my. The way I got into this business, as I mentioned earlier was was through singing and it hasn't been something that used to be. Even when I moved to New York and the whole decade I spent there, I was very active in the Juilliard Choral Union and gigging around the city with a small chamber group, and so I miss that. It was a great outlet to stay directly connected to work, and I would say that's probably the one thing that I'm missing in my life right now, that I want to figure out a way to sort of circle back to.
Elizabeth Bowman:Thanks so much for being in the scene room and it's been great to chat with you and you know I'll look forward to seeing you at some point, hopefully in Banff.
Chris Lorway:Yeah, down in New York City at some point.
Elizabeth Bowman:Great.
Chris Lorway:Thanks, Elizabeth.
