WHITEHORSE, YUKON - On June 7, three of the NWT's promising young artists participated in a youth dialogue with the Canada Council for the Arts.

The gathering was part of a series of youth dialogues around the country, which Canada Council director Robert Sirman said are being conducted to get input from young artists for the council's next strategic plan.

While representatives from Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut were expected to join in, no one from Nunavut could make it and only three from Northwest Territories could go. Michael Blyth, one of the three NWT artists who did attend, said this was mainly due to geography.

"Ideally they would have liked to have equal representation and that's just not the way it panned out," he said.

Blyth, artistic director and festival co-ordinator for Open Sky Creative Society, was chosen to attend the dialogue along with Erin Suliak, president of the Yellowknife Guild of Arts and Crafts, and artist Azure DeGrow of Yellowknife.

"I think they were just looking at the territories as a blob," said Blyth. "I don't think they were really after specific voices which is maybe why they should have gone to Nunavut."

Blyth said the gathering was basically a consultation in which the artists present were asked a series of questions. He said while the information gathered was not necessarily a broad representation of the territories, it was input from young artists.

This was the third youth dialogue that the Canada Council has held so far. Sirman said he has noticed multi-disciplinary artists are becoming more common. Suliak, who said she went to the Whitehorse dialogue as a dancer, a fibre artist and a person involved in art groups, agreed.

"I think that's one of the things that young artists do see," she said. "They don't see lines between disciplines. The lines are blurred and people cross them quite capably."

One of the topics Suliak said was discussed was the difficulty Northern artists have with isolation.

"Because the communities can be rather isolated, I thought it would be important for young artists to have the means to be able to travel and to share the work that they produce, because there are these barriers here," she said.

"We talked about artists being able to cross, go east-west, so youth artists could meet with one another from different territories," she said.

Arts councils from both the Northwest Territories and Yukon were also present at the dialogue.

Sirman is continuing to visit communities around Canada in an effort to get input for the strategic plan, which will be in effect from 2008-2011.