Stephanie Ryan: Performing arts centre not enough to address Surrey’s cultural infrastructure deficit
The City of Surrey recently announced it is moving forward with building a performing arts centre in the emerging downtown core.
The architectural consultant has been selected and will begin work on site selection and programming for the new centre.
Mayor Dianne Watts says she hopes senior levels of government and the private sector will chip in to fund the project that is envisioned to include a 1,600-seat main stage theatre and a studio theatre with 250 seats.
I will be the first to admit that the city should invest in a performance venue downtown if it wants to be taken seriously as a second metropolitan core for the Lower Mainland.
But I wonder what the business case is for putting that many bums in the seats. The reality is Surrey is seriously underdeveloped when it comes to its cultural community and current assets when compared with cities of a comparable size across Canada.
Surrey does not offer any cultural economic multipliers to the city’s economy—that is, shows or productions significant enough to generate their own economic spin-offs. Its museum and art gallery facilities are too small to attract major exhibitions or destination-oriented events. The Surrey Museum and Surrey Art Gallery have the same exhibit space of cities with half or a quarter of Surrey’s population.
Surrey lacks the number of arts organizations and programs, and funding levels, of cities of equal size in Canada. In 2006, Surrey had 36 not-for-profit arts organizations (one per 11,267 residents) whereas Mississauga in Ontario had 215 groups (one per 2,844 residents).
A lack of core funding for nonprofits means their finances are always somewhat tenuous.
Most cities offer a cultural granting program to their cultural nonprofits with a pool of money in the range of $2 to $17 per capita. Surrey has yet to instate any cultural granting program. And the city has not allocated enough cultural staff resources to support new arts nonprofits or help them to recruit and retain good people to lead their organizations with some sense of continuity from year to year.
In fact, only four percent of the city’s parks, recreation, and culture funding from 1998 to 2008 was allocated to culture.
Surrey’s arts community is not faring well at the federal level either—in 2006, Surrey accessed $139,670 in federal cultural production grants, less than one percent of Vancouver’s whopping $14,617,173.
What does all this mean?
Surrey produces far fewer local not-for-profit arts organizations than its peers. The few organizations that do exist suffer from a lack of core funding, the absence of a civic cultural granting program, and inadequate support from civic staff in recruiting and retaining leaders for their organizations.
It’s great that Surrey is going to invest a lot of money building a performing arts centre but they should also address how they are going to fill the seats. By all accounts it looks like local groups alone will not book enough shows to keep the place afloat.
The city must make a business case for the new performing arts centre—who will use it, how often they will use it, and how the centre will manage to not sit empty. And then they should build it.
In the meantime, Surrey should establish a cultural granting program—the norm for most cities its size—and hire more cultural staff who can support local arts nonprofits to recruit the people they need to succeed and to access grants at the provincial and federal levels.
A new performing arts centre is a good idea. But to be truly successful, Surrey must address the deficit in its local arts and culture infrastructure.
Stephanie Ryan writes about smart growth and civic affairs in Surrey. She was a candidate for Surrey city council in 2011.
Comments
11 Comments
Mike Puttonen
Feb 21, 2012 at 5:10pm
1600 seat Convention Centre facility. Mayor Watts can call it what she wants.
stephanieryan86
Feb 21, 2012 at 9:24pm
Mike, Mayor Watts and Surrey First have been talking about building a Convention Centre in Cloverdale. The duplication wouldn't make sense.
Anita Zaenker
Feb 21, 2012 at 9:36pm
And the province needs to address its deficit in investing in our public school system's arts and music programs, not only to develop future artists, but to develop future patrons of the arts.
Surrey
Feb 21, 2012 at 9:58pm
What a brain moron. As if taxpayers need to hold the hand of every artist in Surrey. Arts funding is great and Mayor Watts is bang on by making such a bold statement with this project. This girl just pointed out that the bulk of Vancouvers arts funding comes from the federal government so why is Mayor Watts being dragged through the mud in this vapid article? Oh right she ran for the socialist party in the 2011 Surrey election...
stephanieryan86
Feb 22, 2012 at 3:38pm
Hi Surrey, Vancouver's arts community also receives a great deal of support from its municipal government. Vancouver provides, among other things, $1.3M in annual cultural infrastructure grants, as well as cultural grants, theatre rental grants, and support through their community arts and development program. The arts and culture sector is an important contributor to our local economy and that's why it should be supported.
Mike Puttonen
Feb 22, 2012 at 5:12pm
Stephanie...We'll see, we'll see. I'm a lot older than you, and I've been studying the paths of cultural funding and development for about 40 years, so just call me cynical.
If the house isn't for a Convention Centre, then it will host touring shows. No local i.e. Surrey theatre company could fill it. Even if there was such a company. I doubt that an Arts Centre production, the sort that tours the suburbs, could fill it either. So what's it for then, if not for a Convention Centre or for touring shows where the box office leaves town with the artist?
Much more reasonable would be a 750 seat space (or two) that could house those Arts Club shows, or better yet --- house a resident company!
Mike Puttonen
Feb 23, 2012 at 3:44pm
Stephanie, I went to your website, and it was good to see your progressive, positive, and informed arts policy. No contact there that I could find, so this will serve.
I do think it unfortunate that arts advocacy has backed itself into the corner of the "multiplier effect". The bumph for "multiplier effect" of the BC PLace reno and the Olympics were both vastly over-estimated. The "multiplier effect" is a general term that can cover a multitude of formulae, all of them self-serving. There's the much quoted (yet never explained) $1.36 return in taxes for every $1 spent on the arts. When I looked at the consultant's formula for that I realized we weren't in Kansas anymore.
The best Surrey arts policy will support companies, organizations, artists and businesses that will bring patrons to Surrey from the rest of the lower mainland. Certainly some of that can be achieved with a big touring house, but the "multipler effect" crutch masks the fundamental weakness of touring shows - as with Hollywood North, while jobs are created, the profit usually leaves the city. To become a mature city, Surrey must create, not just consume art.
I'm looking out my landing room window from a house on the hill in the best city in the world, and across the river, there's Surrey. Here's a project in Indianapolis that would suit Surrey's on-going civic goal of linking up the amazing vitality hidden in your various neighbourhoods and ethnic conclaves...
http://www.indyculturaltrail.org/publicart.html
Flex Neck
Feb 23, 2012 at 9:34pm
good points all around, even from "Surrey". The one point y'all agree on is that their needs to be more accessible infrastructure for cultural development - supposedly something the "community" can produce culture in, meaning locals put on shows for locals, of all varieties, from music and performing arts to food festivals to experimental media art. all this is a question infrastructure, and by this i dont even mean physical buildings for this stuff to happen in, but some innovative way to overcome the burdens of suburban sprawl puts on people's ability to come out and check out things.
for this it is a great thing to have a largish venue at a transit hub and designated City Centre, it will likely provide the desired "halo effect" for that developing utopia that is Central City and surroundings. People going there for those out-of-town shows, no matter which suburb of Surrey they are coming from, incl. Vancouver, will want to have choices of bars to go to afterwards, as well as possibly check and revisit a streetlevel gallery/cafe or shop for a new skateboard at the next kool spot for kool kids that possibly would be somewhere between the new skatepark at the new rec centre (which also has the only non-commercial outdoor projection surface in the Lower Mainland ASFAIK)
and Central City Mall...the key here is to follow through and make it possible for those kool kids to find something else to do than hang around at that mall and come up with bad ideas about how to fight suburban boredom - i.e. get some municipal funding together for non-profits to do some interesting stuff, as Stephanie points out, to address the cultural and literal wasteland Surrey currently is.
Jeremy Herndl
Feb 24, 2012 at 4:36pm
Thank you Stephanie Ryan for this article that brings the cultural poverty of Surrey BC to light. While Surrey, specifically Whalley is undergoing an ambitious urban renewal it also reveals the fact that there has been scant investment in its character. It is sprawl for the most part, built by the car, for the car. The Central City plan is occurring in one of the most interesting, yet culturally impoverished sectors of the city. This is not to say that there is no culture there. There most certainly is. It is multi-ethnic, with First Nations, agricultural and industrial history all coalescing in one place while the primordial forest that once stood there struggles for purchase in any space that is left unattended.
There has been a lot of energy invested in Surrey for business, real estate and commerce. The city would benefit tremendously with investment into its latent cultural sector. Many of the artists who have fled to Vancouver might return to Surrey if it can become more hospitable. I think that Surrey needs to invest in spaces for cultural production, not just to be exhibited or performed but to be made. Affordable studios, smaller performance and production venues will bring art and artists to this very promising city. You can build a beautiful, shiny new town but it will still be a ghost town of there is nowhere for anybody make anything. Who would want to live or invest in a ghost town?
The Surrey City Council has recognized the need for investments in art. There is a new Culture Committee and plans for a new Cultural Centre in Surrey City Centre. I hope that Surrey aspires to be a place not just for exhibition and performance but for production, because that is where the culture will flourish.
Elizabeth Anderson
Mar 11, 2012 at 10:08am
It is a challenge to create opportunities for making art South of the Fraser. I have a non-profit which promotes positive age relations through intergenerational art projects. Finding space for a hub to work and plan from plus venues for project workshops is a challenge. As one of the first graduates of Kwantlen's new BFA program I'm not surprised that my fellow graduates want to move to Vancouver.