Cindy Schwartz struggles to describe what it feels like to be named to the Order of Canada. “It’s a big honour,” she says. “It’s an amazing feeling.”
The NDG resident was honoured for her work with her non-profit school, Les Muses: Centre des Arts de la Scène, which offers multidisciplinary performing arts training to artists living with either physical or intellectual disabilities, or autism disorder.
“I started this project with an idea, about half my life ago, and never dreamed it would even do as well as it really has done,” she tells The Suburban. “And to have it awarded this honour is just beyond amazing belief.”
Schwartz started dancing at a very young age. She remembers at the age of 8 dancing for patients at the Maimonides Geriatric Centre at the behest of her parents who were medical professionals. Seeing the joy on the faces of the patients watching her dance made an impression. Years later she taught dance in after school programs. “But I wanted to teach to people who I never got to see in my programs, or in any of the places I was teaching either, who weren’t included at all, who happen to have disabilities. I wanted them to be able to experience the joy of dance as well.”
She started off teaching two separate groups in two separate high schools – at Lauren Hill Academy, and at Ecole Irénée-Lussier, a school for high schoolers with intellectual disabilities. Eventually she integrated to two groups to form an amateur dance troupe. She found that the kids mixed and performed well together. “I started to see more and more talent in people with disabilities.”
That grew into her working with other artists in music and theatre.
That eventually led to her founding Les Muses in 1997. For the past 25 years, the school has offered professional performing arts training to adults living with disabilities. The work that Schwartz and her team do – promoting inclusion in professional artistic practice and raising awareness of the talent within the community – is what led to her Order of Canada.
Les Muses is considered unique in Canada. “Unfortunately, people with disabilities, until this day, still are not integrated enough, or very, very rarely, into professional performing arts schools,” Schwartz says.
But by opening a kind of back-and-forth between her school and the professional community, bringing in professionals who have disabilities – like Luca LazyLegz Patuelli – to give workshops, and seeing her students, who have to audition to get into Les Muses, make it in the professional world – like actor Gabrielle Marion-Rivard – has indeed gone a long way to start changing minds.
Marion-Rivard starred in the 2013 Quebec film Gabrielle as a young woman who, like herself, lives with Williams syndrome. She won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actress for her role in the film. There were others in the film, aside from Marion-Rivard, who appeared in the film.
Schwartz hopes that her being named to the Order of Canada will help open more doors for Les Muses, and for the students who study there. “There is huge talent out here,” she says. “And we need to equalize the playing field and give them a chance to show it.”
Schwartz has also just announced her retirement. Her last day was just a few days ago. She says she will still work as a consultant in the field, but at 65, and after struggling through a bout of ovarian cancer, raising her daughter, and dealing, as all businesses did, with Covid-19, she feels it’s time to step aside, confident that Les Muses will be in good hands.