Artists of the 2024 Toronto Fringe Festival parade around the Annex neighbourhood accompanied by Pan Fantasy Steelband. Photo: Colleen Yates
Performing Arts
2024 Strategic Experimentation Fund
2025

Building on Metcalf’s history of supporting adaptive change in the arts, we are pleased to announce the recipients of the inaugural Strategic Experimentation Fund (SEF), an initiative that encourages grantees to learn before doing, through a lens of experimentation.  

With the conclusion of the Staging Change initiative — a multi-year effort to address complex challenges through small experiments, prototypes, and amplification of new approaches anchored in value creation — we were keen to develop the next evolution of this work, taking into account the time constraints and rapid change facing the sector today.  

Like Staging Change, SEF supports transformational efforts that rely less on best practices or external expertise and more on iterative experimentation tailored to each organization. Through SEF, arts organizations are invited to name a challenge and respond with learning-based experiments to reveal promising directions before committing core operational resources. 

We are pleased to share the 10 Toronto-based performing arts organizations that have received up to $40,000 to support their work in Phase 1 Experimentation. 

 

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is Toronto’s leading destination for artistically rigorous alternative theatre and a world leader in developing queer voices and stories for the stage. 

Challenge: How to address the loss of their relationship to audiences and determine what they need and how to meet those needs.  

Response: To implement an organization-wide culture of hospitality or a “hosting culture,” emphasizing flourishing relationships, empathy in interactions, and genuine care for others.  

Canadian Stage

Canadian Stage is one of Canada’s leading nonprofit contemporary performance companies, producing and showcasing new, innovative art forms from Canada and around the world.  

Challenge: How to balance audience growth with programmatic diversity, retaining loyalty across diverse demographics and varied preferences while still retaining core supporters.  

Response: To significantly increase their Dream in High Park and Panto audience conversion rate over three years. 

Factory Theatre

Factory Theatre is committed to exclusively producing and showcasing Canadian plays, making it the home of Canadian playwrights for over five decades.  

Challenge: How to address the confluence of a broken business model and need for mission renewal. 

Response: To create a new creation model that increases the capacity of the sector and reinvigorates interest in new Canadian theatre among audiences and programmers.

Guild Festival Theatre

Guild Festival Theatre is Scarborough’s only professional theatre company, committed to expanding the conventional definition of theatre classics by highlighting stories and artists that reflect its diverse community.  

Challenge: How to marry evolving artistic ambitions with an expanding and diverse audience that better reflects Scarborough. 

Response: To reimagine traditional marketing and outreach approaches such as word of mouth, social network amplification, and trust-building.  

Mammalian Diving Reflex

Mammalian Diving Reflex is a performing arts group that creates site and social-specific performance, theatre productions, participatory gallery installation, and more to foster dialogue and dismantle barriers between individuals of all backgrounds. 

Challenge: How to preserve artistic intimacy while nurturing young talents from non-traditional backgrounds. 

Response: To improve their team’s technical skills while still maintaining the integrity of their artistic practice through targeted and iterative digital training. 

Moonhorse Dance Theatre

Moonhorse Dance Theatre is dedicated to presenting the work of artists aged 45 and older.  

Challenge: How to make dance performances accessible and enjoyable for Blind or partially sighted audiences. 

Response: To amplify audio description practices and explore new approaches with a well-known blind theatre maker and a choreographer/dancer.  

lbs/sq”

pounds per square inch performance fosters and reflects a trans-disciplinary, cultural/environmental consciousness where artists connect mutual interests in the transformative human body as primary source for creation and performance.  

Challenge: How to address competition among single-dance-artist-led companies and the resistance to cooperation that often follows.  

Response: To investigate long-held assumptions with eight artists, to shift perspectives and reconsider cooperative intents. 

Small World Music

Small World Music is dedicated to celebrating cultural diversity and showcasing a diverse array of local, domestic, and international talent to audiences in Toronto.  

Challenge: How to re-invent a new business model, in the face of declining grants and donations, to sustain inclusive music programs for underrepresented communities. 

Response: To revamp earned revenue models with a focus on potential new opportunities with children and their parents.   

Soulpepper Theatre

Soulpepper Theatre is Canada’s leading artist-driven theatre company that also offers a host of ancillary programs to nurture and develop the creativity of everyone who wishes to engage with the performing arts.  

Challenge: How to invest in the human capacity needed to thrive. 

Response: To experiment with AI tools in three key administrative functions: marketing, fundraising, and production logistics. 

Toronto Fringe

The Toronto Fringe is Ontario’s largest performing arts festival and a platform for innovative theatre and performance.  

Challenge: How to adequately support their artists when the cost of producing theatre has risen exponentially, both for the artists and the festival. 

Response: To consider other ways to select artists, build new relationships with venues, and design new festival models.