While staying engaged with fans during the pandemic via digital experiments, streams of pre-recorded shows and social media outreach, Canada’s theatre community is gamely planning its revival and imagining exactly how to retake the stage.
It’s been two months since the COVID-19 crisis brought the curtain down on Canada’s theatres, and each week seems to bring fresh announcements about seasons being cancelled or postponed from Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre Company to Ontario leaders, such as the Stratford Festival and Mirvish Productions, to the venerable Charlottetown Festival.
Even Broadway, the behemoth next door, will remain shuttered through Labour Day.
However, Canada’s theatre community — whilst staying engaged with fans during the pandemic via digital experiments, streams of pre-recorded shows and social media outreach — is gamely planning its revival and imagining exactly how to retake the stage.
“The campaign for Canadian theatre in general — whether it’s Stratford to the smallest indie theatre company — is how to make our audiences come back and how to make them feel safe, so that they keep coming back,” said Nina Lee Aquino, artistic director of Toronto’s Factory Theatre and president of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres.
Gathering for a shared experience is at the heart of theatre — but it’s also what the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us we shouldn’t be doing, she said.
“That’s the puzzle that we all need to solve.”
WATCH | Biggest worry facing every theatre company? Audience, says Nina Lee Aquino:
Factory Theatre director Nina Lee Aquino on the paradox facing theatres: how does an art form dependent on bringing creators and audiences together do so amid a pandemic? 1:31
Theatre creators are brainstorming multiple, constantly shifting scenarios for when public health authorities will allow them to raise the curtain again.
“What does our season look like if we start in January of 2021.… What if there is no theatre for a full season? We’ve got to plan that,” Aquino said. “What if the government says theatres, sporting events, cinemas just cannot open until 2022? We need to prepare for the worst-case scenarios.”
That uncertainty is among the biggest obstacles holding artists back, she believes, because once there is an idea of when reopening will be possible, Aquino has no doubt the theatre community will dive back in with enthusiasm.
“You’re talking about artists here: we make the impossible possible. If there is something to respond to, we will respond to it and do it as creatively as possible, within the limits,” she said.
‘It’s our job to find a way’
Optimism for reopening this fall or next winter — albeit fully expecting to play to a much reduced audience of physically distanced patrons — is what’s driving Bernard Gilbert, general manager and programmer of Le Diamant.
The Quebec City cultural space and home base for Robert Lepage’s production company Ex Machina had just celebrated the six-month mark for its inaugural season when the pandemic shut everything down. If allowed to reopen for even a fraction of the audience it’s able to host, “then we would have a sense of doing … what we’re supposed to be doing: a public service of presenting arts in the city,” Gilbert said.
He and his team are busy dreaming up different types of live performances that they could stage: small acoustic concerts in the foyer, a simple circus duo or even a Lepage VR installation