TAC Awards $300,000 in Grants through Open Door Process

Toronto – Toronto Arts Council (TAC) is pleased to announce that six innovative arts development projects have been awarded grants through a new funding process called Open Door.

A TAC pilot initiative, Open Door provides one-time funding designed to respond to important and timely initiatives that have the potential to create transformative change in Toronto’s art sector. 

The aim of Open Door is to empower arts organizations to find solutions for current and future challenges through working with collaborators, sharing learning and expanding their horizons.  

“This process provides us with an important new way to respond to great ideas bubbling up in the arts community. It allows us to take some risks and, as well; challenge the arts community to think beyond the scope of their own organizations or  arts disciplines” says Director and CEO Claire Hopkinson. “This first round of funded projects include collaborative approaches to international market development, new and collaborative audience development initiatives, and an experimental model of cooperative theatre production.”

A total of six projects were funded in a peer-reviewed process and approved by the Board of Directors in its most recent meeting:

Art Metropole will partner with Raster Foundation from Warsaw on VILLA TORONTO, bringing over a dozen local and international art institutions together to create a central exhibition in the Great Hall at Union Station in January, 2015.   Site-specific projects, performances, screenings, concerts and artist talks will stimulate dialogue between the international arts community and Toronto’s thriving local art scene.

CanAsian Dance Festival will partner with four Toronto dance presenters - DanceWorks, Dance Immersion, Dusk Dances and Dance Made in Canada - to present a collaborative showcase for Toronto-based artists during the Canadian Performing Arts Presenters annual meeting in Toronto in 2015. This first time collaboration will create new market development opportunities for Toronto’s dance artists and show the diversity of the practice within the city. 

Fall for Dance North Festival will be a new, large-scale dance festival produced at the Sony Centre in October 2015. Offering $10 tickets to high-calibre dance performances over four days, the festival aims to develop Toronto's dance market by growing audiences for dance and by reinvigorating Toronto's dance presenting ecology for presenters and artists alike.

Harbourfront Centre will facilitate an industry showcase featuring excerpts from tour-ready dance, theatre, and performance works as part of OFF CINARS in Montreal in November 2014.  CINARS is Montreal's biannual international performing arts marketplace that brings together over 300 presenters from 40 countries.

Toronto Consort, representing the Bloor Street Culture Corridor consortium, will launch a targeted promotional campaign to promote its new free Bloor Street Cultural Corridor mobile app, which aims to expand audiences for 13 arts and cultural institutions along the Bloor Corridor.

Why Not Theatre will develop their experimental model for cooperative producing in theatre, which was successfully piloted in the spring of 2014, to address the increasingly limited resources available to emerging independent companies. In this initiative, community residencies will create an infrastructure for the sharing of venue, production, mentoring and administrative costs between mid- to senior-tier companies and emerging artists. This funding will support the creation, documentation and dissemination of this new interdependent model of developing new works.


For more information on applying for Open Door funding: http://www.torontoartscouncil.org/Grant-programs/OPEN-DOOR

Contact: Kerry Swanson, kerry@torontoartscouncil.org, 416 392 6802 x209