New Report on Understanding the Needs of Performance Creation Spaces

Determined to draw long-term solutions out of ongoing adversity, C-Space recently released a report titled BACKSTAGE SPACES: Progress Lab 1422 and the Future of Performance Creation Spaces. 

This important report examines the myriad issues facing such facilities and offers specific recommendations. We highly encourage you to read it and share it widely, as it is only through understanding and communicating the adversities we face together that we can also take meaningful steps towards change. 

The Backstage Spaces report provides an understanding of the needs of performance creation spaces so fellow stakeholders, policymakers and funders can take action.

Vancouver’s notorious and ongoing space affordability crisis has caused a variety of operational challenges for C-Space (Vancouver Creative Space Society), a collective of theatre and dance companies operating out of a single building on Vancouver’s Eastside. Many other arts companies, organizations and non-profits currently face similarly precarious situations.

Over the past 13 years PL1422 has become a critical part of the local and national performing arts infrastructure, serving as the creation space for new shows seen on stages across the country.

Dramatic increases to their rent and related operating costs have motivated C-Space to investigate new approaches to their ongoing organizational sustainability in the face of this unrelenting economic pressure.

Price per square foot is only one piece of the current affordability predicament—there are an array of conditions that constrain and influence the cultural realm in the City. Through this report, C-Space has looked inward at its own organizational strengths and limitations, and drawn on experience and problem solving skills—as artists, leaders and advocates. It has then mapped these internal pieces onto an external landscape of policy, real estate investment and funding structures. This combined analysis reveals the complex set of conditions that continually destabilize the operations of our cultural organizations.

This report is an attempt to capture the scope of the challenge. It proposes possible future conditions that will allow C-Space, and organizations like it to thrive by embracing its values of equity, autonomy, care, experimentation and collaboration.

As expressed by Backstage Spaces, “It is necessary to create regulatory conditions for cultural production without having to quantify exactly what culture is being produced.”

To read the full report, click here.