Halifax filmmaker captures the city's hidden arts crisis in Making Space: A Halifax Story
Filmmaker Gareth Wasylynko explains why it’s harder than ever for venues to hold on
When the last independent theatre in Halifax's north end — the 149-capacity, black box known as The Bus Stop Theatre — was up for sale amidst rapid neighborhood gentrification in 2019, Gareth Wasylynko remembers thinking someone should make a movie about it. As artists flooded city hall to speak on the venue's importance and city councillors' phones were flooded with calls, "it felt like there were all these different pieces and different angles to it. And so I guess I just had the thought… 'That would work as a documentary — at least, I think it could work'," he says. "At that point, I had never done a feature. So I was like, 'I don't know who's gonna make that."
It turns out, that someone would be him.
Today, The Bus Stop Theatre stands, if not exactly tall (the structure is a squat two-story), then at least exemplary at 2203 Gottingen Street: As Wasylynko's new documentary Making Space: A Halifax Story documents (and this is all public record, so don't call it a spoiler), the co-operative running out of The Bus Stop was able to buy the building, and has since renovated it so extensively that it is considered one of the most accessible venues in the city and an absolute lynchpin in the cultural scene.
But, Wasylynko of all people knows how rare a success story The Bus Stop is. Making Space follows the fates of the other indie arts spaces — The Waiting Room and The Khyber building — which were once live art hubs in the same vein as The Bus Stop.
The Waiting Room and The Living Room were two north end theatres similar to The Bus Stop and were flattened for development within years of each other. Condos and a doggie daycare, respectively, stand where they once rented to over 20 independent theatre companies.
The Khyber building, meanwhile, is a longstanding arts space that has housed many organizations over the years, from the city's oldest gay bar to the live music venue that launched Joel Plaskett's career. Not to be confused with the Khyber Centre for the Arts, the building at 1588 Barrington Str. has been the centre of a volunteer-powered struggle to survive and reopen for 10-plus years.
It's all part of a larger portrait of the city today: according to the most recent Stats Canada data, Halifax is the second-fastest growing urban area in the country, and the change is palpable. But an overlooked aspect of that change, as Wasylynko's film shows, is the precarity of arts venues.
"We have issues and challenges and crises regarding space, whether that's housing or whether that's cultural space, like art spaces," he says, explaining that the government funding offered to arts organizations isn't keeping up with the rental market. Even when it does, when more funding money is eaten up by rent, a "trade off" is made between rent and programming budgets, he adds. "For some groups, they reach a point where it's no longer tenable to make that trade-off."
"I would say that it's not so much that they're adding to the city. I would say that, like, they actually are the city," Wasylynko says about arts venues. To view it as "'We have a city and these [spaces] are this bonus.' I'd say is a totally wrong way to think about it." He continues: "The way I tried to frame it in this documentary is, you have the built environment and then you have the life, the culture, the people — and it's not a city with one or the other. You need both."
Making Space is Wasylynko's feature-length documentary debut, and his path to making it was a bit atypical. Wasylynko doesn't consider himself a diehard for the arts or a stalwart of the creative community in Halifax. He started out making short films focussed on city planning with a group called Planifax, and still feels a little imposter syndrome.
"I guess it's accurate; it feels weird because it's my first," he says in response to being called a documentary filmmaker. But, when the narrative elements were so visible in the story of The Bus Stop — and when it became apparent that the theatre's happenings was part of a larger story unfolding across the city — Wasylynko became the expert he reluctantly concedes himself to be, researching venues and conducting endless interviews of various arts workers and venue directors. Defining something by what it lacks — or, in this case, what has been flattened and developed over — is never easy. But
for Wasylynko, chronicling the disappearance of these spaces was a challenge achieved through archival footage and a segment of the film shot on Almon Street with a co-founder of the shuttered-since-2018 Waiting Room.
This lack of spaces translates into fewer opportunities to show artwork: as the former director of The Bus Stop Theatre, Sébastien Labelle, told Halifax weekly The Coast in 2021, heavy demand for space means the venue has had to turn away 213 days' worth of artistic activity per year. This, if anything, shows exactly what Wasylynko means — and what his film explores — when he says arts spaces are not bells and whistles to be added after the fact: Imagining a Halifax with nearly a year's worth more live, local art is to imagine a city transformed.
In Making Space, a theatre on Gottingen Street that was built in 1930 and seated 2,000 people but closed decades ago is brought up as an example of how previous generations seemingly understood the value of arts spaces.
"I think at the time, our population was like 80,000 in HRM — something ridiculous like that," Wasylynko says "So if you think about the proportion of the city that would be in that theatre any given night, that speaks to the way we attend shows as well.
"But we actually don't have a 2000 seat theater or venue space in the city at this time," he continues, "and I think we're ready for it again … It speaks to the same issue that we haven't prioritized these spaces, and we're kind of like passing the buck. No one's taking responsibility for making them happen at that scale."
The fact that Wasylynko's film will screen at The Bus Stop theatre feels both fitting and a confirmation of exactly how vital one of the star spaces in his film remains. Wasylynko acknowledges how meta it feels, while naming other arts organizations fighting for the firm footing The Bus Stop has: DIY punk venue RadStorm and media arts organization Centre For Art Tapes are two top-of-the-head examples of groups looking to buy a permanent home in the city, he shares.
"I guess my dream is like all these groups own their space and they're able to renovate them so they're useful, and they're able to just do their thing and not spend all their time worrying about how they're going to pay rent or how they're going to keep the space going, and they're able to actually focus on arts," he says. It's a vision built on what he's learned from making Making Space. "We're just treading water instead of taking a step forward."
Making Space: A Halifax Story screens April 16 at 7:30 p.m. at the Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen St.) in Halifax.
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