Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., on Apr 16, 2019.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
It feels early, but some good holiday vibes cannot come soon enough. Bring on the pantos and Nutcrackers, please. One show that had been a part of Vancouver’s festive-season landscape for years was Bah Humbug!, a retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, set in the Downtown Eastside. Until it wrapped up in 2019, it was an annual holiday staple at what was one of the coolest arts projects in this city. Emphasis on “was.”
At the end of May, as the halls of academe were clearing out for the summer, Simon Fraser University sent out a terse e-mail announcing that SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs (SFUW) would not be continuing with its programming, nor commissioning or presenting new performances, “given current SFU financial realities.”
SFU was facing a projected $49.9-million deficit for the 2024-25 fiscal year, and cuts needed to be made. Michael Boucher, who had run the program since its inception (and lost his job as a result of the budget-saving cuts) says SFUW’s annual budget was about $500,000. Even numbers-challenged artsy types can do the math: it was a drop in the budgetary bucket.
And what it offered, say some of the people who used the space, was priceless: not just the venues itself – an art gallery, along with presentation spaces for theatre, dance, music and film, both large and small – but also a commissioning and presenting organization that worked hand-in-hand with the university to offer opportunities for students, professional artists and Vancouver audiences.
“It’s not just a loss for us, the cultural community,” said Bah Humbug!’s star Jim Byrnes. “I think it’s a terrible loss for the entire city.”
Mr. Byrnes, beloved Vancouver-based musician and actor, was among those who took part in a recent online meeting of arts professionals who worked with SFUW. The team came together this fall, with the busy arts season underway, to discuss what the loss meant for them – and if there was anything they could do about it at this point. (I was allowed to sit in on part of the meeting.)
“We never ran a deficit and to suddenly be informed that our doors were closed is nothing short of an abandonment of the original mandate,” says Mr. Boucher, who also attended.
The unceremonious shutting down of the once-celebrated program was a far cry from the fanfare with which it was launched during the 2010 Cultural Olympiad, with Robert Lepage’s Blue Dragon and the First Nations/Second Nature art exhibition featuring work by Rebecca Belmore, Brian Jungen and others.
Funded in part by $1-million from the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund, SFUW was touted as an Olympic legacy project – not just an innovative art complex, but an agent for change in the neighbourhood. And it delivered, with more than 200 events annually. There were commissions, residencies, international partnerships, extraordinary performances. Just a few examples of the primo work that was shown here: renowned choreographer Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica; Mr. Lepage’s play 887; Stan Douglas’s immersive art installation Circa 1948.
“There was a massive return on investment,” says Sherrie Johnson, now executive director of Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre and previously senior curator with Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Crow’s was in the midst of a major creation with SFUW when the announcement was made and plans had to be cancelled with little notice. Mr. Douglas and Marie Clements’s Locus Standi: The Extradition Hearing of Leonard Peltier, is a verbatim play based on the 1976 Vancouver inquiry into murder charges laid against the leader of the American Indian Movement in the shooting deaths of two FBI agents. It had a creation residency at SFUW last year and was supposed to return in August, with a world premiere in September. That didn’t happen. Now Crow’s is looking for new partners and hoping to premiere the work in 2026.
While the program has been shut down, the facilities remain and organizations are able to rent out the space.
Am Johal, director of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, points out that the Vancouver International Film Festival used the facility again this fall, and PuSh will return in January.
He says the rationale for the change was purely financial, and that cultural work and community connections are important to SFU. “We’re still reeling from the changes in terms of trying to figure out what the way forward is.” He says there are exciting opportunities in a “new budget environment.”
But one of the arts leaders on the Zoom meeting found the experience under the new structure lacking. “We were a renter,” says Mark Busse of CreativeMornings, a community group that returned to the facility after the bombshell changes, but has since left for the Vancouver Art Gallery. “The magic was gone.”
With so much community consultation before the project was set up, what happened around the decision to shut it down?
The quiet closure of this once-celebrated innovation illustrates how low a priority some organizations give the arts – even postsecondary institutions that claim to value them. The beautiful building is still there, but the dismantling of this program has left a hole in the community.