Shaw Festival opens Artists’ Village in Niagara-on-the-Lake

A new 40,000-square-foot Shaw Artists’ Village opened in Niagara-on-the-Lake this week.  

The space includes a massive wardrobe facility and apartments for Shaw Festival actors.

The Shaw Festival converted a former retirement home into an artists’ village close to the main stage.

The cost for this space was about $30 million, with about half of it paid for by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

“What we’ve done is converted all the spaces into 26 apartments for our visiting artists over the course of the season. A new education centre and performance lab, a new centre for short-term visiting student groups to stay with us and take our programs and a new wardrobe facility,” says Tim Jennings, executive director of the Shaw Festival Theatre.

This is one of the largest theatre wardrobe facilities in the country. It used to be made up of four different locations spread out across Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The Burton Centre for Lifelong Creativity and the Shaw Artists Village consists of five buildings.

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“The wardrobe facility being all under one roof certainly makes things easier … it’s also the ability to have rooms for our artists in residence to be able to stay here, to stay in places that we can control the rent on is important for these artists taking these jobs. Almost everyone that works for us comes from out of town,” Jennings says.

“Having all of this under one roof is immeasurably important as it brings all of these things together. We’re close to wardrobe, we’re close to ensemble designers and it means that we can set up our programs and sort of leave them set up and curate it a bit because the Shaw Festival is a wonderfully busy hive of activity,” says Warren Bain, interim manager of education at the Shaw Festival.

Many of the Shaw Festival actors are living in the village instead of renting apartments in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Education is also one of the main benefits of this facility.

“In class you’re working with people that are like in their 30th season here, so you’re working with seasoned professionals. Watching them take class again, it’s a really humbling experience and also reminding you to re-engage with the work differently at different parts of your life,” says Dillan Chiblow, Ojibwe actor, storyteller and member of this year’s acting ensemble at the Shaw Festival.

“We do about 1,500 education and outreach programs on top of the 850 performances and so education has it’s own audience of about 120,000 people that see things here,” Jennings says.

Shaw Festival officials say this new facility will allow the festival to offer more community programs and opportunities for people to connect with their love of theatre.

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