When working on the latest rounds of operating grant applications in 2017, Aislinn Rose, creative producer of the Theatre Centre, went to the Canada Council for the Arts with a plan that took the federal funding body by surprise.

Instead of earning more revenue from other theatre companies renting its space to stage their productions, the Theatre Centre wanted to make less.

“I was asking about how best to frame the fact that we wanted to bring in less revenue,” said Rose. “And their eyes just went straight up and they were like, ‘What do you mean by that?’

“What happens is artists are getting project money and then they’re giving half of it to us for renting the space. So artists, independent artists, are subsidizing the venue. . . . We would love to be able to say, ‘We believe in you. We believe in this project. We’re going to give you this space for free and you can spend your project money on the art,’” she said, instead pitching that the council subsidize those costs itself.

This isn’t the first time the Theatre Centre has challenged what a successful theatre company looks like structurally or operationally.

“We’ve always been very carefully and closely looking at the financial health of the organization, and that’s because we don’t consider ourselves the owner of the organization,” Rose said. “We’re not the owners of the building. We’re not the owners of the organization or its name. We’re not the owners of resources. We’re only the stewards. And so it’s 100 per cent our job to steward the space and those resources in a way that keeps them healthy and ensures that they are reaching as many people in the community as possible.”

To Rose, there is not a direct correlation between being fiscally responsible and operating an organization from a place of scarcity.

“As a resource comes to us, it then flows back out into the community, because we’re constantly saying, ‘How can we be more generous with what we have?’ ‘What do you need?’” she said.

The biggest area of the Theatre Centre’s operations that demonstrates this mandate is the company’s residency program, which provides artistic, administrative and technical support to a select group of artists with specific projects in mind. Notably, each project finishes within two to five years with the artists owning all of the project, as opposed to most residencies, which allocate a portion of the project to the organizing company. To the Theatre Centre, the goal is still a final production, with both the centre and the creating company co-producing and “putting money on the table.”

In the 15 years of existence, the program has seen many productions go on to great success; 2017 was an especially lauded year for the Theatre Centre. It announced a new partnership with the Luminato Festival called the Residents Project, the first result of which will be produced at this summer’s festival, the documentary play Out the Window by Liza Balkan.

The success of residency projects at last year’s Dora Awards meant the Theatre Centre was one of the top winners of the night, with two former residencies — Ahuri Theatre’s This is the Point and Heidi Strauss’s what it’s like — winning Best Independent Theatre Production and Best Dance Production.

A new group of artists, selected after a competitive interview process (Rose and artistic director Franco Boni assessed 90 applications and conducted approximately 30 interviews, before choosing only three projects) begin their multi-year residency this month.

Brussels and Palestine-based playwright Rimah Jabr, now working in Toronto, is creating (alongside visual artist Dareen Abbas) a new performance piece called BROKEN SHAPES in the genre of fictional documentary, about what happens to humanity in the context of borders, surveillance and fear.

Halifax musician, writer and actor Stewart Legere, with his group the Accidental Mechanics, amassed a cross-country collective of queer artists and thinkers to create The Unfamiliar Everything, which ruminates on isolation and loneliness within the Canadian queer community, and dissects the notion of the “chosen family.” Collaborators include playwright Jordan Tannahill, musician Rae Spoon, Mi’kmaq poet Shannon Webb-Campbell and cellist Cris Derksen.

Finally, Necessary Angel Theatre Company artistic director Jennifer Tarver will lend her skills as a director and creator to a yet-unnamed young artist.

These three projects join current residency artists Suvendrini Lena, Ian Kamau and a collective made up of director Ann-Marie Kerr, actor Maev Beaty and playwright Hannah Moscovitch (the play Secret Life of a Mother will be produced at the Theatre Centre in the fall of 2018).

Now that the new resident artists have been chosen, the Theatre Centre has a clearer picture of the next few years of programming, Rose said. “It has absolutely, for me, informed how I approach everything else that we do from that same sense of, ‘What do you need?’”

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As the Canadian theatre community faces an intense moment of self-reflection at all levels, from the personal to the institutional, generosity is never a bad place to start.

Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Karen Fricker.