CALGARY — When Alex Sarian decided to leave his position as acting executive director of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, he and his wife made a shortlist of “world-class” cities to which they would consider moving.
“Our first reaction was, ‘We’re moving to Tokyo, we’re moving to Barcelona, we’re moving to Mexico City’—all the places that we’d love to travel to,” he said.
Instead, the former head of one of the world’s preeminent performing-arts centres wound up in Calgary, a city better known for cowboys and black crude than theatre.
