Between pandemic lockdowns and the rising cost of living, succeeding in Toronto has been even more of a struggle for the city’s artists. A new space in the Annex has just opened to help.
There’s a recording studio, a rehearsal space, a lounge and private booths for artists to mix and have meetings — and the goal is to offer them at affordable prices, according to the organization behind it.
It’s called B Street Collaborative, or just “B Street” for short, and it’s the new headquarters for the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (TAPA), which calls it the city’s “newest affordable arts and culture hub.”
“It’s been a really tough time for arts and culture,” TAPA executive director Jacoba Knaapen told CBC at a crowded ribbon-cutting ceremony outside B Street Monday morning. “Giving people space and giving people time to create is critical right now.”
The new space will provide Toronto’s artists a place to collaborate, exchange ideas, rehearse and work on their projects, said Knaapen.
Organizers cut the ribbon to the B Street Collaborative arts hub in Toronto’s Bloor Annex neighbourhood. TAPA executive director Jacoba Knaapen is second from the right. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
These past few years have been a hard go for artists in Toronto, she said, adding that audience numbers are still yet to return to what they were before COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Since that time, TAPA’s membership has gone from 196 professional theatre, dance and opera companies to 119, Knaapen added.
“The numbers tell the story,” Knaapen said. “That gives you sort of an idea of how, not everybody had to close, but a lot of companies had to press pause – and how difficult is it to ramp that back up.”
The lounge in the TAPA headquarters will offer artists a place to mix outside of coffee shops and apartments. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
Most importantly, Knaapen says, is that the cost will be affordable to artists. B Street’s rates will offer artists space to rehearse at $25 an hour, and space to record at $20 an hour.
A demonstration of one of the new self-tape recording studios where artists can record auditions, among other things. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
Artists say new hub will help struggling professionals
“It feels like a wonderful restart,” said actor Ryan G. Hinds, who was among the crowd celebrating the opening Monday. “We’re all back in the swing of doing what we do and being in our artistic communities again. So it’s really exciting to see what’s going to bloom here.”
Ryan G. Hinds says B Street feels like a “wonderful restart” for Toronto artists. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
Michael Sinclair, the general manager at Obsidian Theatre Company, which supports Black artists specifically, said he hopes B Street will offer something he’s seen disappearing in the city over the past few years: affordable space to create and collaborate.
“It’s come at a time when the arts industry has been hit so hard,” he said. “We’ve lost so many spaces, you know, arts workers are leaving the city.”
Michael Sinclair is general manager of Obsidian Theatre. He says B Street offers space Toronto artists badly need. (Martin Trainor/CBC)
The building’s new director, Dylan Trowbridge, says B Street will be “a real physical headquarters for artists to get them out of their homes and into a space together again.”
“This building and B Street exists for one reason and that is to help artists thrive,” he told the crowd Monday. “We all know that performing artists in the city are facing a space crisis and we are here to disrupt that trend.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
