Many happy returns

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This article was published 10/09/2023 (760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s arts groups are either catching their breath after an exciting summer of performances or sighing in relief they survived it all.

Either way, the most important fact is the companies are still breathing and ready to act, sing, dance and create another day.

“Culturally speaking, it felt like a huge success,” says Rodrigo Beilfuss, Shakespeare in the Ruins’ artistic director.

“Being around the (Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival) this year felt very different. It felt momentous. Like, ‘Oh my God, here we go, a crowd, and we all love it!’ as opposed to ‘We got a crowd, are we sure about this?’

“(The Winnipeg Folk Festival) was much more like, ‘Boom, here we are.’

“For us it was the same thing. We had a large number of people returning to the Ruins for the first time in years. We had a lot of first-timers, a lot of folks who heard about us but never got around to it.”

Shakespeare in the Ruins’ production of Twelfth Night earned a dozen sellouts among its 23 performances at the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park in St. Norbert during one of the steamiest Junes in Manitoba’s history.

A new Shakespeare-inspired drama, The Dark Lady, a co-production with Saskatoon’s Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, seemed like a whole different world from 2022, an entertainment year filled with uneasiness and hesitancy.

“Talk about a post-COVID thing — we travelled to Saskatoon and we did a show there,” Beilfuss says. “This Prairie collaboration that was decades in the making finally happened.”

Other festivals and companies reported strong attendance numbers this summer too. Ticket sales at the fringe festival rose sharply in 2023 compared with 2022 — 81,579 were purchased by the city’s avid fringe fans — thanks to almost 40 new productions and 108 sold-out performances.

The folk festival registered its second-largest attendance ever, bringing 74,500 people to Birds Hill Provincial Park in early July, including 18,000 on its final day, July 9, a capacity crowd.

The Winnipeg International Jazz Festival had a similar experience. Jazz fans jammed into Old Market Square for free concerts and the Tom Hendry Warehouse Theatre hosted sellouts for the Emmet Cohen Trio and Sun Ra Arkestra.

“It certainly has been our biggest festival since the pandemic and I think, more than looking backwards, it even will be a great model for how our festival will continue to look going forward,” says Zachary Rushing, Jazz Winnipeg’s programs manager.

There’s a flipside to this success. While the show went on, the bills must also be paid, and arts companies feel the same pinch from inflation as their audiences do.

Everyone has noticed transportation costs rising along with gas prices, but Beilfuss says costumes also cost more to make and repair — and the cost of storing them after the curtain closes has jumped too.

Even items festival-goers take for granted, such as portable toilets, have offset many gains organizations have made in 2023.

“Financially — I speak for most of us, if not all of us — it’s still a very delicate time,” Beilfuss says, adding he expects the company to finish the season in a deficit. “Great ticket sales alone were never enough to sustain these services we provide, but this time, post-pandemic, that’s even more evident than ever.

“This year no one had COVID support from the government, which we had last year, and we’re looking at the costs for everything and everything’s up; money has to come from somewhere.”

In April, arts groups from across Canada, including the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Manitoba Opera, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, which operates the fringe, wrote to the federal minister of Canadian Heritage, pleading for more operating funding because audiences had yet to return to shows in the numbers they had prior to the pandemic.

Arts productions are similar to life on a farm, where all the investment is put into the ground first, with fingers crossed that a strong harvest pays for those costs.

While ticket sales were strong this summer, the gains came mostly from walk-up buyers and companies play a dangerous game counting on spontaneous purchases while subscriptions and advance sales, which help offset the risk, struggle.

“We never know many will come,” Beilfuss says. “We rehearse for a month before we open and we’re bleeding money paying for the show. Then tickets sales will start to come in after the first performance and that is terrifying.

“If we build it, they will come … but will they?”

People most definitely did come in the summer of 2023 and artists felt the ultimate return that lured them into performing in the first place, Beilfuss says.

“This summer, it was delightful and electric to see so many people support us.”

alan.small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall