Outside the March teaches us what makes a theatre a theatre (and how to relieve venue scarcity)
You may remember our work with the Royal Theatre and the Greater Victoria Performing Arts Centre. Where the issue of venue scarcity arose from a high demand for large-scale performing spaces and no agency to build them. With many high-budget groups being forced to downsize and even leave performers behind to play in Victoria, it is difficult to imagine the issue of venue scarcity in a city like Toronto - the “Entertainment Capital of Canada”.
For indie theatre, dance, and music producers in Toronto, it’s irrelevant how many venues exist. What matters is how many are available for rental, are technically capable of accommodating the performance, and offer rates that make it affordable to small producers. If conditions of venue scarcity are allowed to persist at any level of the performing arts ecosystem, the aspirations of new entrants to the market will be thwarted and those producing at the upper levels will eventually be starved of trained talent, technicians, managers, and cultivated audiences.
NetGain collaborated with Outside the March, a renowned theatre company favoring non-traditional venues, to explore creating a mobile equipment inventory for flexible performance spaces, supported by a half-million-dollar pledge. Their feasibility study concluded that a $1.2 million inventory could adapt various spaces, addressing venue scarcity in Toronto's indie arts scene and utilizing surplus commercial space, with potential municipal support to revitalize the arts ecosystem.
NetGain received an invitation to meet this hugely accomplished theatre company who prefers not to perform in traditional stage venues. Outside the March prefers to bring artists and audiences together in spaces that complement the performance. What is commonly thought of as a theatre, like a cinema or a recital hall, with its orderly rows of front-facing seats, with fixed lighting positions focused on an elevated stage, is rarely the most natural setting for the audience experience this company produces.
For anyone unfamiliar with their work, it’s worth scanning critical reactions to their body of work. Their most recent production of Lucas Hnath’s, “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney,” was the most completely satisfying piece of theatre I’ve seen in a decade.
So we took them seriously when they asked us to test the idea of building an inventory of mobile equipment for creation of professional performance space anywhere that suited them. In fact our initial reaction was to advise them that the idea should be explored on a scale that met not only their needs, but also the needs of their indie peers in theatre, dance, and music. At that scale, it was possible to lend the equipment out on a cost-recovery basis to minimize the net expense to Outside the March for storage, maintenance, and replacement.
They approached a charitable foundation with a proposal for NetGain to explore the idea, and immediately received a half million pledge. Soon after, we started work.
The 90-page report determined that it was feasible to build an inventory of at least $1.2 million worth of equipment for adapting almost any building to performing arts use. Equipment modules for front of house, audience seating, stage structures, lighting and sound equipment and controls, stage management, wardrobe, and carpentry, were all provided for, with consideration of redundancy in categories of equipment likely to be in demand by others during periods of use by Outside the March. Care was also taken to protect the core artistic mandate from the diversion of staff and other resources to operate this ancillary business.
Still more fascinating than this conclusion was the context of venue scarcity that appears to grip indie producers in Toronto. With a small survey that we fielded with help from Toronto Arts Council, we learned that a strong majority of indie producers are dissatisfied with the purpose built or adapted small performance venues available for rent now, and would make much more use of rental equipment to enhance or relocate their shows if they could afford to. This finding gave us confidence that there would be sufficient demand for use of Outside the March’s equipment to make their initiative feasible.
For more context, this work was occurring at a time when the commercial real estate industry was speculating about how much of current portfolios would be written off because of remote workers’ refusal to resume full time office occupancy. More commercial space was available than ever before, but in buildings that lacked the equipment and amenities needed for the optimal connection between artists and audiences. Outside the March had come up with a way to help the least secure performing arts producers expand the range of location and schedule options.
Among those new options is the possibility of bringing professional performing arts production and performance into parts of a sprawling city that would otherwise never be reached. Consider the fact that there aren’t any performance spaces north of the Masonic Temple on Davenport Road all the way up to the Meridian Arts Centre at Yonge and Sheppard. There is a similar paucity to the west and east outside of the central core.
But anywhere there is a vacant big box store or warehouse, delivery depot or gymnasium, equipment modules from inventory at Outside the March would enable a theatre, music, or dance company to roll in, set up, produce, perform, and load out after a short run. Opportunities to engage new communities in the creative process would enrich these neighbourhoods in some of the ways taken for granted in downtown Toronto.
After all, what makes a theatre a theatre isn't its brick and mortar shell; it's an environment created to achieve the optimal connection between artists and audiences. By providing for a superb experience from the street in front of house to where audiences are seated, and from the rear loading dock in through the back of stage to the curtain line, this can be achieved with mobile equipment and amenities, in structures that uniquely serve the artistic purpose. Too often little versions of big theatres are built, confining artists to whatever form the structure's configuration compels - typically a proscenium stage faced by rows of fixed seating.
We expanded the scope of these implications to consider how this might help the municipal government’s cultural development plans during a time of austerity. In May 2024 Toronto’s Mayor and City Councillors did a joint press conference highlighting a $26 billion infrastructure funding gap. Rather than build more small, technically deficient theatres, at great public and private expense, the City of Toronto could help by providing surplus space for storage of a large mobile equipment inventory, and by making policy to incentivize short term loan of vacant commercial space for arts use. With the right balance of available space, at affordable cost, adequately equipped, Toronto could reinvigorate its indie arts scene to rival any city in North America.
As consultants, it was gratifying to work with a client that dared to act on its dreams. Their idea of cost recovery equipment loans to animate dead commercial space for venue-challenged indie arts organizations, is irresistible. The feasibility study conducted by Doug Simpson and the artist/architect, Michael Awad, concluded that there is an optimal inventory size for the company’s wellbeing, but that the community would benefit from this initiative at almost any scale. It’s favoured by a commercial real estate disruption occurring at a time of venue scarcity for the arts sector, and by simple, commonsense logic. Outside the March has found a formula for allocating a post pandemic surplus of commercial and institutional space to relieve a shortage of affordable, available, and technically adequate workspace in a critical area of Toronto’s vast, complex arts ecosystem.