Thank you so much for the opportunity to share a bit of my story and The Theatre Centre's story.
I want to begin by showing you this image of the building that our theatre is in. It's a former Carnegie library in the heart of Queen West in Toronto, which is an artists' neighbourhood. I refer back to Jane Jacobs: new ideas need old buildings. This is an old building that was renovated about four years ago with the support of all levels of government. We had been in the neighbourhood and serving artists for 25 years, but it wasn't until we moved into this building that we saw our responsibility being much greater.
The neighbourhood was gentrifying. There were many condominiums, with thousands of people moving into the neighbourhood, and there was a real loss of public space in the community. There is a park, and that's about it. A lot of the other establishments in the neighbourhood are areas for transactions—for drinking, for restaurants—but there is hardly any public space, so the responsibility for The Theatre Centre to be a public space, a space for the community to gather, was extremely important. It was central to the concept of moving forward in our public programming but also to our ethos, to asking the question: what can a theatre be and who is it for?
I want to move forward with some of the slides on just generally who we are and our role within the community as a research and development hub for the community, serving artists across the country. Moving forward, it's about finding inspiration: what is the purpose? What is the purpose of a public space? It's about the importance of that. I just want to draw your attention, I guess, to one thing that I say quite a bit, which is that we built a theatre, but in fact what we're doing is nurturing a public space, and we do that every day. We're not open only at showtimes. We open at 8 a.m. We have a café that has free Wi-Fi and that welcomes people in. We're a third space.
What I want to do is just to go through some of our programs around our development programs, which are residency and the Progress Festival.
I'm not sure how much time I have, so I'm moving through stuff quite quickly.