I strongly believe that regional performance spaces on a smaller level are integral to supporting touring artists and artists who are just trying to sustain careers in their hometowns or in their home provinces without having stages like ours, a 250-cap venue in a rural downtown. The touring artist who may come through this year and then in two years from now to play the Scotiabank arena in Halifax won't have the opportunity to develop their audience and get them to travel to bigger centres to see them.
To name one artist, we had The Beaches headline the Jubilee music festival a couple of years ago to an audience of about 2,500 people. Fast-forward to a year later, and they're playing to 10,000 folks at the Scotiabank arena in Halifax.
Without that discovery platform, artists don't get the opportunity to make connections with people and build audiences to get to that bigger stage. That's tenfold if those spaces disappeared tomorrow. If your pubs, your coffee shops, your small-capacity venues like mine disappeared tomorrow, where are local musicians going to make a living and where are they going to play?
I would argue that the people I bring in for a show with 20 people are just as impactful as someone on the Jubilee stage playing to 3,000 or 4,000 people. They're making connections with everybody in that room. After those 20-person audiences, if you fast-forward five or six years, you see that more often than not they're playing to thousands of people or getting supporting spots at festivals, and so on and so forth. No matter if it's a theatre company or a musician, they need those small stages to sustain their career trajectories or grow their careers.