Huntsville Festival of the Arts celebrates 25 years in 2017

Feature photo: Huntsville Festival of the Arts (HFA) Board Members (front from left) June Salmon, Beth Ward, Tia Pearse, Kareen Burns, Cheryl Stamper, Will Gibson; (back from left) Greg Perras, general manager Rob Saunders, Suzanne Riverin, Carol Gibson, Steve Campbell, Barry Hayward, Helena Renwick, HFA president Karen Cassian, Sharon Marks.

The Huntsville Festival of the Arts will be marking its 25^th anniversary next year, an anniversary they will be celebrating along with Canada’s 150^th birthday and the 100^th year since the death of Tom Thomson. While the Festival hasn’t secured its lineup for the anniversary year you can be sure there will be a tribute to Tom and Canada in there.

However, before they begin planning for the 2017 season, the HFA recently held their annual general meeting to wrap up the 2016 season. By all accounts it was a fairly successful year, with a few bumps along the way, according to Festival general manager, Rob Saunders.

“It was either feast or famine this year,” Saunders said. “Sarah Harmer, Bruce Cockburn, Downchild Blues Band, were solid, but what wasn’t selling was disappointing. It’s not like you are losing substantial money, it’s more of a feeling for the artist and a feeling of the room not being full and the overall vibe. Everybody wants a decent-sized audience. In that hall [the Algonquin Theatre], if you can get 150 to 175 people you can get a feeling of it being full. You don’t want to have it much less than that.”

Both Saunders and HFA president Karen Cassian agreed that in light of a changing landscape and the addition of a lot more competition in the arts programming realm, the Festival needs to do an analysis of what kind of programming they should be doing and who they are doing it for.

We totally accept as a board that we are underwriting certain performances and we know that going in, but I think that if we are bringing in a tribute to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, as we did, and we are not really breaking any new artistic boundaries with that one, and we lose money, then the question is, what’s the point? Why are we doing that? If we are making artistic inroads, then I totally agree but sometimes that wasn’t the case so why, what happened? It’s an analysis thing we have to do.Rob Saunders, HFA general manager

Despite the low attendance at some of the smaller shows, the Festival finished the season on par with the previous year and in a strong financial position with net assets totaling $73,122.

According to Saunders, during the off-season of 2016 the Festival put on four concerts and seven play performances. In July they had 14 main-stage concerts over 21 days. In total they used the Algonquin Theatre 34 evenings over the year.

The strong financial position allows the Festival to continue their off-season programming and to be creative with things like the pre-show which highlighted young local talent, often scholarship recipients, Concerts at Noon, Nuit Blanche North, the Slam Poetry workshop at the High School, and of course, their scholarship initiative.

Photos courtesy of the HFA

Don’t miss out on Doppler! Sign up for our free, twice-weekly newsletter here.