Yellowknife (Feb 17/03) - Dwight Hickey came North to visit friends for a month or two in 1996.

He stayed and now owns five local businesses, mostly in the food industry. Back in the 1970s he was a performance artist, sharing the stage with the likes of the Parachute Club and Jane Siberry.

He even takes credit for naming the Kids in the Hall. Today, the artist inside is still never far behind.

Yellowknifelife: Everyone says you've lived a very interesting life -- performance artist, nurse, five-star chef. How does a guy like you wind up here?

Dwight Hickey: Friends, plus I've always wanted to come up and see the North. I was living in Calgary at the time, and I had friends who were living up here so I decided to take a trip up to spend a month and I stayed.

Yellowknifelife: How long were you a nurse?

DH: About seven years, I trained at McGill University. I still did a lot of cooking in between jobs as well.

Yellowknifelife: Was cooking merely a means to an end, to supplement your income during your artistic pursuits and training as a nurse?

DH: I always wanted to be a chef so I took a course through the restaurant association in Toronto, and then went to George Brown College. Then I started training with Madame St. Laurent in Belle River, outside of Windsor, Ont. She was a well-known chef in Southern Ontario. Then I went back to school, and then went to various restaurants, just different types of cuisine from fast food to fine dining.

Yellowknifelife: Where does your involvement with the performing arts fit in?

DH: I went to the Canadian School of Mime in Niagara on the Lake.

Yellowknifelife: You were a mime?

DH: Yeah, I trained in several years of ballet, and then several years of mime just to enhance whatever performances (I'd) go into. Mine was basically performance art, which has a combination of mime skills, clown, juggling, music and an instrument that I made out of garbage, actually. It took about seven to 10 years to hit that form of clown, which is a clown that had been done in the 1930s by Oskar Schlemmer out of Bauhaus (school in Germany).

That form of performance art was very much lost after the war (Second World War). It's a combination of all the skills that you can learn to develop that form of clown. The closest I've seen to that clown is Lindsay Camp out of London, England, whose performances were absolutely amazing actually.

Yellowknifelife: What kind of miming would you call this?

DH: Well, it's basically a form of mime they would call corporal mime. It's a combination of (Etienne) Decroux's, Marcel Marceau's kind of interpretation sort of all pushed into one to create all the illusions and stuff.

Yellowknifelife: What separates corporal mime from the layman's idea of mime?

DH: That kind of mime I hate. I can't stand watching it. It's a very basic form of mime. It would be like watching someone do barre exercises in ballet (practice).

Yellowknifelife: Corporal mime. So this is the kind of stuff you were doing back in Ontario?

DH: I used to manage the Rivoli Cafe, the performance room, for three-and-a-half years on Queen St. (Toronto). It was quite interesting. There were a lot of things happening back in the '70s in Toronto, music-wise. I mean Jane Siberry, Parachute Club, Mary Margaret O'Harah, Molly Johnson -- some really interesting bands happening.

Yellowknifelife: You knew all these people?

DH: Yep. They all performed at the Rivoli, and Kids in the Hall use to as well. It's a funny little story. They were just a young group of kids and they were trying to get a comedy group together so they wanted to rehearse. We couldn't let them on the stage because of all the sound checks and everything. But we had a wide hallway so I said, "you can rehearse in the hall."

So every time the phone would ring I'd say, "Could someone get the kids in the hall, there's a phone call for them." This went on for about seven months. Then they got their big break at Yuk-Yuk's, but they didn't have a name, and the phone rang again, and I said, "Could somebody get the kids in the hall," and everybody looked at each other and went, "The Kids in the Hall."

Yellowknifelife: You were the one that named the Kids in the Hall?!

DH: Well, there's actually about three of us that take credit for it. It's funny to look back on all of that and see where we all are today. The Kids in the Hall are quite famous at what they're doing, and I never dreamed that I would own five businesses.

Yellowknifelife: So in the seven years you've been up here, you've basically started up from scratch. In the beginning you were just a lowly line cook at the Prospector. Probably not too many people knew about your more illustrious past?

DH: I did my resume over to just look like a fry cook. When you've been a chef a long time you don't let people know you've managed restaurants because you'll never get a job.

Yellowknifelife: Too many cooks?

DH: Yep.

Yellowknifelife: You've since dazzled Yellowknifers with some of your elegant banquet displays.

DH: It was probably some of most elaborate catering they've seen come out of the Yellowknife Inn, during that period when I was executive chef. They were quite interested in all the art garnishings and all the tables that went very high up in mounting things -- things that I had seen that were coming out of kitchens in Yellowknife, especially in catering, was basically just on a flat tray.

So within a short period of time we were totally booked. Jack Walker (former owner of Yellowknife Inn) basically gave me poetic licence just to create. I credit a lot of our success to what we do today to his trust actually.

Yellowknifelife: A lot of people must've been like: 'Holy smokes, we're still in Yellowknife?"

DH: Just because we're in Yellowknife doesn't mean you can't give somebody something that they would find in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, New York, L.A., wherever. We have a lot of things that could be -- should be -- used. A lot of art carvings. There are a lot of talented people in this town. That's thing, when people come up North, a lot of people really don't know what to expect.

Yellowknifelife: How do you get along with other chefs in this town?

DH: I have a lot of respect for some of the chefs in this town, like Pierre at Le Frolic is an excellent, excellent chef. I'm probably welcome in every kitchen in this town. I have a lot of friends that I know in this industry.

Yellowknifelife: So you do still do a lot of catering?

DH: We're cutting back on our catering right now because of staff shortages.

Yellowknifelife: So you own Grandma Lee's, The Airporter, the airport gift shop, your catering company -- now I hear you're going to open up Yellowknife's first juice bar.

DH: Hopefully within the month of February we're going to be opening up a juice shop called Juice it Up. It'll be all natural juices. It'll be our version of a juice shop, which is nice. It'll be right beside Grandma Lee's.

Yellowknifelife: You're a long way from the Rivoli. You're planning to stick around for a while?

DH: This is the first time I've ever called anywhere my home, actually ... You kind of realize after a certain while that once you stick with something -- it's like a lot of people -- they don't understand if you want to be great you got to practice.

You may never hit perfection, but you can come pretty close.