But seriously, to make it out like renting an old barbershop and cleaning it up to make room for art is a way of challenging the system or making less institutional art is a bit presumptuous. Most institutions have a mandate to make challenging and radical art. And who says there is a crisis of space in the city? Toronto is HUGE! There are churches and libraries and city owned buildings and outdoor band shells and parks and a lot of them sitting empty everywhere. It takes a bit of writing, and meeting people and looking outside the “theatre community” to find them, but they do exist and perhaps its the theatre community itself that needs to think outside its own box. A couple of questions: How many people does this performance space fit? What size of cast and audience can one expect? If we are talking peer based collaboration, how many of our peers can we have here? In the photo, I see more people outside than in. From my outside perspective, Videofag is a queer centered cabaret space available for small groups of arts experimenters to surprise and delight each other with songs, dances and mostly individual pieces like the Great Canadian Rant (an art form Daniel MacIvor invented, and Rick Mercer perfected).

It should be a lot of fun, and could be the spark of something bigger, especially if running and cleaning and booking and fixing and administrating space becomes something that you both love and enjoy, then hopefully there are bigger and better spaces on the horizon! Maybe you’ll be the next people to take over stewardship of Alumni or Factory or Buddies, and bring with you some experience and practical know-how as well as a scene. That’d be cool.

While I can understand the way in which this can be oppositional, I think instead of *distinction*. Of course it implies that none of the existing structures produce that feeling for me, but me wanting that space doesn’t mean others shouldn’t have theirs.

It seems very hard in this theatre world to make distinction, in part because it is seen as oppositional. “Alternative” has become a meaningless term – though if a mono-culture remains, it remains in theatre. And yes, beaurocratic thinking (institutional) is not specific to size. And age, old or young, doesn’t have a causal relationship with vitality or depth.Yes, there are imbalances to correct and equalities that need championing and there are distinctions to be made – material, aesthetic, historical, social and political.
Maybe we could use more distinction with less stigma?

This doesn’t answer Evan’s very valid concern that the buildings with the most resources will be the ones that speak to a place of power (econimic, social, governmental.) Spaces outside of power are most often temporary, a bit mobile and supported through sweat-equity and solidarity. And maybe there is a way to move back and forth, find something in the shimmering middle. And if there is, it is certainly up to us to find it.

Which will probably take a bunch of work, some dancing and a solidarity that doesn’t rid us of distinction.

That being said, I am very happy to see a new space open up in Toronto. Give artists a venue and they will fill it!

I think Brendan’s point about the institution is very connected to what you’re reading from this, Michael, about resources: The ‘70’s Toronto theatres and their descendants (the ones Jordan’s cited, mostly) cohered as organizations around particular groups’ images of identity and their search for the recognition of those images. The way that resources are distributed is not only about the age of companies and audiences. It’s reflective of the politics at the time of their foundings and how that politics came eventually to serve, or at least achieve compatibility, with the agenda of the government. The name of the new space, Videofag, is a very traditional gesture from this perspective. Reducing the terms of the conversation only to age is a problem. If young artists don’t think any differently than their predecessors then what difference does it make, handing off the baton?

But the impulse to make a new space is surely an oppositional one, and I’m curious to see how that opposition gets articulated. I respect your courage, Jordan, in starting that process. I think Dave Hickey wrote that the best part of having your own gallery is getting to enact what is impossible or impolitic to say.

Bobman