Two of Toronto’s top summer arts festivals are in decline. Can new artistic leadership revive them?
Two of Toronto’s popular summer festivals are at a crossroads.
The Toronto Fringe Festival, after a year of near devastating cuts to funding and programming, is seeking a path to financial sustainability, while the Luminato Festival, whose events are significantly smaller compared to what they once were, aims to enter a new era of growth.
Both organizations are now betting on fresh artistic leadership to put them back on the map as cultural and economic engines for the city.
“We feel energized,” said Rachel Kennedy, the new executive director of the Toronto Fringe Festival. “There’s a real urgency in the sector, though there’s definitely an optimism within that urgency.”
Kennedy, a Toronto arts administrator and theatre producer, joined the Fringe in January as one of the festival’s co-leads alongside managing director Laura Paduch, who has been with the organization since 2018.
Their joint appointment, a first for the Fringe, came after the departure of former executive director Lucy Eveleigh, announced last fall. It also comes amid a tumultuous year financially for the festival, whose low-barrier entry process turned it into an important incubator for new Canadian works, launching shows including “Kim’s Convenience,” “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “’da Kink in My Hair.”
Kennedy and Paduch spoke with the Star at the Fringe’s office in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood, where taped to the wall is a list of words that the co-leads and their team brainstormed at the beginning of the year, and which they say will guide their approach. Among them: “human,” “accessible,” “resourceful.”
Indeed, the Fringe will need to be more resourceful than perhaps ever before as it heads into its 36th annual festival, scheduled to run from July 3 to 14. Due to low attendance and a loss of financial support from a provincial grants fund, this year’s summer festival will see a nearly one-quarter reduction in programming compared to last year’s iteration, from 100 to 77 productions in the lineup.
In the fiscal year ending August 2022, the organization reported an operational deficit of nearly $140,000. Financial details for the current financial year are unavailable (the Fringe moved to a new fiscal calendar, hence the delay in reporting), though Kennedy said that the organization managed to break even.
Still, if not for generous donations and pulling money from the Fringe’s contingency fund, she said the organization could have experienced another “devastating deficit.”
“The conFRINGEncy fund has been around for many years, and the success of last year’s fundraising campaign enabled us to stabilize and make up for any projected deficit,” said Kennedy, who could not immediately provide details about how much money was pulled from the fund and how much remains. “We are now hoping to build that fund back up so that we can rely on it in future years, as it has been vital to the survival of this organization throughout the pandemic.”
Moving forward, Paduch added that ensuring the festival continues to be financially sustainable will be a key part of her and Kennedy’s work.
As for whether the Fringe will ever return to hosting 150-plus shows during its marquee summer festival, as it did in the years before the pandemic, that remains to be seen.
“It’s always a balancing act,” said Paduch, noting that while there’s an urge to expand the number of shows mounted, the Fringe also has to ensure there’s an audience willing to support that work.
Because all revenue from the festival’s ticket sales goes directly to the artists, external grants and individual donations are especially crucial in funding the Fringe’s operations. The festival sold 47,000 tickets last year, still below the 68,000 sold in 2019, a banner year for the Fringe and considered the most successful in its history.
Toronto’s Luminato Festival faces its own set of challenges as it prepares to welcome its new artistic director, Olivia Ansell, who joins the organization next year, succeeding Naomi Campbell.
Now entering its 18th season, the annual multidisciplinary arts festival is notably smaller than it was a decade ago, though the organization recently posted an accumulated surplus of nearly half a million dollars.
During the 2023 fiscal year, Luminato’s programming budget was roughly $3.4 million compared to $4.3 million the previous year. In 2016, the festival dedicated roughly $7.4 million to artistic programming.
The Canadian organization has experienced its fair share of growing pains since its inception. After Luminato ran through its initial $15-million startup fund issued by the provincial government, its operating budget contracted by almost half between 2016 and 2018. It was also around that time that the organization lost its title sponsorship deal with L’Oreal, followed soon after by the sudden resignation of its artistic director, Josephine Ridge, who raised concerns over the festival’s business model and its ability to finance its artistic programming.
Ansell’s appointment, however, represents a major coup for the organization. The Australian arts administrator is the former head of contemporary performance at the Sydney Opera House and currently serves as director of the Sydney Festival, whose three-week annual event is significantly larger than Luminato’s 10-day festival each June.
On why she picked Luminato, Ansell said she saw an “enormous” opportunity for growth.
“I am quite enamoured by the deep cultural diversity and the potential that Luminato has to animate this city each June,” she said in a recent video call with the Star. “There are very few international cultural arts festivals in summer that exist, and they’re such an exciting asset for any country to have, so I think it’s our role to all get behind these festivals to build them, consolidate them and propel them into their futures.”
Ansell sees parallels between where Luminato is now and where it was when it launched in 2007. She points to how the festival was initially envisioned as a tourism driver to help the city recover from the SARS epidemic. Emerging from COVID-19, Luminato could play a similar role today, she said.
The Australian native has experience guiding a large art organization out of a crisis. As head of the Sydney Festival, she led the organization through the pandemic and guided the festival to surpass box office expectations in its return to live performance.
Ansell, though, acknowledged that each festival is unique to its host city, and that the 18-year-old Luminato is still very much in its infancy compared to the Sydney Festival, which recently celebrated its 48th anniversary.
“A new festival will always have growing pains because they run on limited resources and … once the festival becomes established, they go on these journeys and you can say they have aging pains. You can say the same about a city as it goes through transformation,” she said.
As Ansell steps into her new role, her approach will focus on striking a balance between showcasing local and international talents and forging collaboration among various groups.
“Lifting, promoting and expressing both Ontario and wider Canada’s identity is super important,” she said. “So the work of local artists is the cornerstone. But it’s really important, too, that artists collaborate cross-culturally and intergenerationally.”
Ansell added that she recognizes the important role Luminato plays not merely for artists, but also for audiences.
“What festivals do really well is providing access to culture. A lot of communities often say they can’t afford to go to the opera or they can’t afford to see the symphony on a regular basis, and I think this is where festivals played a huge role in being able to engage people culturally for those works that everybody deserves to see.”