Teatro Live!

Finding the creative route past the pandemic

For many businesses, 2020 was a difficult year. The pandemic took a toll on most industries, but was particularly hard for those dependent on in-person experiences, like the performing arts. For theatre companies like Edmonton’s Teatro Live!, 2020 marked the beginning of a difficult few years, as they endured rounds of closing, reopening, and limited audience capacity.

For Andrew MacDonald-Smith, it was an especially challenging period to take on the role of artistic director with Teatro Live!

“Looking back, that was really a tough time to start running a company,” he laughs. “We were playing it day by day as to how long we would be shut down for. It was incredibly difficult.”

At the onset of the pandemic, Teatro already had a long and storied history in Edmonton. For nearly forty years, the company has been a pillar in Edmonton’s theatre scene, a place where audiences could reliably find witty, comedic entertainment, often centred around the works of playwright and co-founder Stewart Lemoine. The company was well-established, and looking forward at what the future might hold.

“We were in the midst of planning the next 40 years and considering what the future could be: how we could grow, how we could better serve our audiences and artists in the city,” says MacDonald-Smith.

“For the first 35 years of Teatro’s history, we were able to make plans and consider what worked and what didn’t, and how to move forward with our creativity. The arrival of the pandemic really cut down those plans and made us completely repurpose our organizational structure to figure out how the company could survive with this huge unknown looming over us.”

One of the resources the company was able to take advantage of to make it through those tough pandemic years was the federal government’s Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) loan program. When the loans were created in 2020, the funding was a welcome lifeline for organizations navigating the uncertainty of the pandemic. Nearly 900,000 small businesses and non-profits across Canada took out the short-term loans to help cover a variety of expenses, like payroll, rent, insurance or utilities.

The CEBA loans were interest-free and partially forgivable: for a $60,000 loan, organizations were expected to pay back $40,000, initially by a deadline in January 2022. That deadline was later extended to late 2023, and finally January 2024.

But as the deadline approached, organizations like Teatro! were still looking for ways to pay back the principal amount. The pandemic wasn’t over yet, and business certainly wasn’t back to normal.

“We really struggled, and had great hope that we would receive that relief of another year to come up with the funding, or come up with a significant fundraising campaign to help us pay that loan off,” he says.

Thankfully, decades of creative thinking came into play, and in December 2023, the company launched their Teatro 400 fundraising initiative. Within three weeks, Teatro had raised nearly one-quarter of the required repayment amount.

“We realized that we only need 400 patrons with only $100 each to reach that forty thousand dollars. So it was the coming together of passionate arts supporters to help us kick the final pandemic-related pain out of our lives,” says MacDonald-Smith.

Building on that momentum, Teatro reached out to the Social Enterprise Fund to secure the last $25,000 in financing to repay the loan before the January 2024 deadline. The Teatro 400 could then be collected to pay off the financing, without the rushed deadline of January 2024.

By June 9, 2024, thanks to the support of donors in Edmonton and around the world, the Teatro 400 was complete.

“It’s just been incredible to receive messages from people across the world and see how many lives Teatro has touched,” says MacDonald-Smith, adding that the campaign has helped to reinvigorate Teatro’s vision for the next forty years of the company.

“Over the past few years, we’ve been so hyper focused on what’s in front of us. You don’t always notice all the people who have their hand on your back behind you. So the Teatro 400 has really helped remind the company that what we’re doing is worthwhile.”

But in addition to acting as a reminder of the importance of Teatro’s work, the fundraising campaign has also freed MacDonald-Smith up to focus on the job he was initially brought on to do.

“As an artistic director, my job is to find new ways to bring new art and really fun comedies to the Edmonton community,” he says.

“To be able to return to that, and not be constantly problem-solving and focused on the challenges, is really exciting. Now we’re able to dream about what we can do for Edmonton again.”