Venue scarcity and performing arts centre (PAC) development in Victoria

Island cultures are fascinating.  The physical separation from the mainland creates a degree of metaphorical isolation that spawns creativity.  Newfoundland is the Canadian example that comes first to mind.  Despite its material constraints, “The Rock” breeds actors, writers, comedians, poets, and musicians out of all proportion to its population.

But don’t ignore the west coast.  Victoria and its 12 adjacent municipalities comprise an arts powerhouse that the rest of Canada ignores.  It’s worth understanding a bit about this before talking about NetGain’s work out there.  

All the municipalities of the Capital Regional District together have a population of a little over 400,000, ranking it in a group of similarly sized cities that include Kitchener, London, Halifax, and Oshawa.  None of those other cities have a year-round professional opera company, a fully professional resident orchestra, a thriving conservatory of music, and a professional dance company.  Each of them has one, two, or three of those, but Victoria is alone among Canadian cities that size in having them all.

Before the pandemic, their music conservatory had 4,500 course registrants and owned two facilities for teaching and performance.  Translate that into Toronto numbers, and it dwarfs the direct teaching courses and class work of the Royal Conservatory of Music in a catchment area of 2.5-3 million people.

Here’s the problem.  With such a high level of performing arts appetite and literacy, and with so much local production and performance being generated, existing performance venues can’t accommodate the burgeoning demand from artists and audiences.  Mounting competition for stage time in the 1,400 seat Royal Theatre pitted Pacific Opera Victoria, the Victoria Symphony, and Ballet Victoria, against prospective touring companies wanting access to Victoria audiences.  

So, on the strength of NetGain’s work on the current Civic Theatre plan for the City of Toronto, Victoria’s big, local, non-profit producers engaged us to analyze the problem and recommend some solutions to the producers and the regional government overseeing the Royal Theatre’s arm’s-length managers.  

After two contracts to help resolve this problem, NetGain was engaged again in 2021 by another local group that wasready to act on our recommendation to build a new performing arts center.  Called the Greater Victoria Performing Arts Centre (GVPAC), this group just wants to build a facility capable of showcasing Victoria’s artistic output to the world, and of bringing the world to Victoria.

That might sound hyperbolic, but as a funny side note, the old Royal Theatre was physically incapable of hosting full-scale shows from the mainland or from their local producers.  

On the GVPAC project, we consulted with touring producers from major cities in Canada and the US, over and over again hearing hilarious stories about how the constraints of the Royal Theatre deprived Victorians of shows touring to Seattle and Vancouver, and how the shows making across the Georgia Strait we re-cut down in scale to fit the small stage and orchestra pit of the Royal’s 1913 vaudeville configuration.  

One ballet tour producer exclaimed that Victoria had never seen “Swan Lake with all the swans!”  When their tour reached the Pacific, they had to leave cast members and portions of the set behind in Vancouver before loading onto the ferry for the crossing.  A Broadway impresario echoed this complaint and local producers confirmed it.  In fact, the opera company in Victoria builds its shows and sometimes rents them for remounts on the mainland, but after performing on the Royal’s cramped vaudeville stage, must add to the scale of the production they ship to the mainland so that it will fill larger, purpose-built stages.

NetGain’s view was that this was an enviable problem.  Most Canadian cities have expensive civic theatres for which there isn’t enough demand, but Victoria already has more performing arts being produced than it has stage time and space to accommodate them.  And they have strong audience demand for this stage product.  

Many complicating details prevent Victoria from having the performing arts center it so badly needs and wants, and NetGain is waiting for the call to restart the project in earnest.  The GVPAC is still trying to secure a building site and align support from at each level of government, but what’s really holding the city back is another little-known peculiarity of Victoria.

The City of Victoria, the biggest municipality in the region, has only 91,000 people when everyone’s home.  It is surrounded by 12 other unamalgamated municipalities, meaning that the total urban population of the region is governed by 13 mayors and 13 councils, which opt in and out of programs and services delivered by a regional government called the Capital Region District.  

In this odd structure, it took a scandalously long time for Victoria to stop pumping raw sewage into the ocean and absurdly its EMS and fire services aren’t fully integrated across the whole city.  It’s even more difficult to broker support for what’s seen as a discretionary expenditure like a performing arts center.  All 13 municipalities would like the benefit of having it in or near their little fiefdom, 12 will resent the one that enjoys the direct economic benefit, and none will want to pay first or pay more than others.

In the background, various enlightened councilors have been working on the problem of venue scarcity for small and emerging arts users.  Again, Victoria has a special problem.  Where, in other cities, community arts groups can occupy and repurpose underutilized commercial space to produce and perform, it’s much harder to gain permission for public assembly in an earthquake zone like much of Victoria.  One study stated the problem in a way that pertained to both large and small-scale stage users.  Venue scarcity occurs when there aren’t enough adequate, affordable, and available venues to meet the demands of artists and audiences.  This perfectly describes the difficulties arising in the 1,400-seat Royal Theatre, as well as the small performances of new and emerging companies in former hospitality, retail, and industrial buildings.  

NetGain took lessons from this work that proved applicable in Toronto, particularly in its 2024 work for Outside The March Theatre Company.  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.