The Shaw Festival is celebrating the opening of a 42,000-square-foot campus in Niagara-on-the-Lake that will house dozens of actors and other performers who put on the theatre company’s productions, as well as anchor a variety of education programs.
The Artists’ Village was the site of an opening reception and ribbon-cutting on Friday, attended by the Shaw’s top executives, as well as local, regional and provincial leaders.
The facility was built at the site of the former Upper Canada Lodge long-term care home on Wellington Street. The residences opened in February and have been nearly full since April.
Currently, the Shaw Festival rents apartments across NOTL to house its seasonal company, keeping about 100 artist beds in town at a subsidy of roughly $800,000 a year against market value, said Tim Jennings, the Shaw’s executive director.
The village’s 26 furnished apartments, which hold up to 31 artists, will replace a share of those rentals.
“The Shaw Artists’ Village is a game-changer,” Jennings said at the ribbon-cutting event.
The five-building village took a year and a half of construction and forms the centrepiece of the festival’s ongoing $150-million fundraising campaign, called All.Together.Now, which the federal government backed with a $15-million matching grant in 2024.
Inside the Artists’ Village, the new Burton Centre for Lifelong Creativity gives the Shaw’s education and outreach programs a permanent home after years of competing for space at the Festival Theatre.
Jennings said the Shaw holds more than 5,300 of those events each year, reaching more than 120,000 people beyond its stages.
The centre features a dance lab with a sprung floor, sound-isolated practice rooms, a digital lab with a green screen for media and hybrid programs and a flexible room called Village Hall for performances and lectures.
In September, the Shaw will launch a program for members of the aging population interested in dabbling in the performing arts, to be held at the Burton centre.
“It is our goal at the Shaw Festival that you don’t just come here to see a play — you come here to play,” said Melissa Novecosky, associate executive director. “You come here to do an activity. You come here to try something, to get out of your comfort zone, to be with other people.”
The centre is named for Canadian entrepreneur Jim Burton, whose family foundation invested $5 million in the project. He describes the village as “bringing Shaw to the street” — carrying the skills of professional theatre to people who may never work in the arts.
Burton traces that conviction to his youth in Orillia, where a visiting musician inspired him to join an orchestra as a trombonist and see a future beyond his hometown.
“Maybe it sets a spark that inspires them for the rest of their life,” he said of the students who will visit the campus.
Those students can stay overnight in the adjoining visitor residence, which offers simple two-bed rooms at about $60 per bed per night for school and university groups taking part in Shaw programs.
Novecosky said the price could make multi-day trips realistic for university theatre programs squeezed by shrinking budgets for arts and humanities. Queen’s University has already scheduled to bring a two-week course to the campus.
The new wardrobe building unites almost 60 costume workers who produce close to 1,000 costumes annually for Shaw’s 12 to 14 productions. The department previously operated out of four locations.
“The most expensive thing here is labour,” said associate head of wardrobe Janet Ellis, whose staff often lost parts of each day just tracking down basic supplies and “running up and down the stairs.”
The new facility puts the whole operation on one level, with room for seven cutting teams instead of five.
Artistic director Tim Carroll called theatre “the best thing in the world for the kind of crisis we face,” pointing to social isolation and hours lost to screens as the problems the village is built to counter.
Tim and Frances Price gave $10 million to the campaign, among its largest private gifts.
“After decades of dreaming about it, drawing it, discussing it, fundraising for it, advocating for it, fighting for it and very frequently lying awake at night worrying about how we’re going to fund it,” Jennings said. “We at Shaw finally have achieved it.”
