Bard on the Beach structure to remain year-round as public art

Bard on the Beach's giant tent structure to remain year-round at Vanier Park as public art

Concept for public art for the metal structures of Bard on the Beach's tent at Vanier Park. (Bard on the Beach)

Bard on the Beach’s structures will have a major visual presence at Vanier Park in Kitsilano throughout the remainder of this fall and into the upcoming winter and early spring seasons.

Typically, each year, the non-profit organization behind Vancouver’s long-running annual summertime Shakespeare Festival takes down all of its temporary structures at the field north of the landmark civic building that is home to the HR MacMillan Space Centre and the Museum of Vancouver.

Currently, crews for Bard on the Beach are well underway in their process of removing the festival’s temporary structures, but they will stop short of removing the large main stage metal arches that support the iconic red-and-white striped tent.

While the tent covering will be removed, the metal structure will remain in place between November 2024 and March 2025, when Bard on the Beach usually has no presence at Vanier Park. The festival’s season usually runs from mid-June to mid-September each year, with set-up beginning in March/April and dismantling finished by late October/early November; in 2024, the performing season began on June 11 and ended on September 21.

You might also like:

On Monday evening, the commissioners of the Vancouver Park Board unanimously formally approved the direction of providing festival organizers with the permission to keep the metal structure in place on a pilot project basis.

Tent dismantling progress for Bard on the Beach at Vanier Park, as of October 22, 2024. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

This will enable Bard on the Beach to reduce some of its major costs related to assembling and disassembling the metal structure for the main stage tent.

Currently, the organization spends about $2 million (20%) of its $10 million annual budget on the set-up and tear-down of its tenting, but these costs are expected to further rapidly increase in the future, with the major labour requirements and the use of heavy crane equipment.

Costs for staging events and festivals in BC have skyrocketed since the pandemic, shaking the financial viability of the organizations that put them on, with many being non-profit entities.

Bard on the Beach’s tents at Vanier Park. (Bard on the Beach)

Dismantling process for the main stage tent. (Bard on the Beach)

“We are experiencing the same issues that so many organizations are experiencing, especially what arts organizations have encountered post-pandemic. Costs are soaring and audiences have not returned to the levels we saw pre-pandemic. We are optimistic that we’ll rebuild our audiences, but we need more time to do that and we need to find ways to reduce our costs of doing business, and find new revenue,” Claire Sakaki, the executive director of Bard on the Beach, told Park Board commissioners during Monday evening’s public meeting.

“Instead of trying to find ways to remove all signs of Bard between November and March, might we be able to repurpose some of the infrastructure for use to enhance arts and cultural activities year-round?”

Erection process for the main stage tent structures. (Bard on the Beach)

She says they have heard of interest from other groups in using the space during the festival’s off-season period for artisan markets, farmers markets, and small-scale festivals.

The metal arches will remain in place on-site, and Bard on the Beach will cover the costs for cladding the footings of the arches for safety and protection, with the surface of the cladding doubling as a canvas for public art, such as the possibility for First Nations art. There will also be nighttime lighting of the arches to improve the public realm aesthetic.

Bard on the Beach will cover all costs and pay a parkland usage fee to the Park Board. No costs will be incurred by the municipal government. These combined costs of activating the structure for five months and paying a fee to the Park Board are apparently lower than the alternative cost of fully dismantling the structure this fall and reassembling the structure next spring.

Concept for public art for the metal structures of Bard on the Beach’s tent at Vanier Park. (Bard on the Beach)

Green Party commissioner Tom Digby also brought up some discussions of potentially considering enabling Bard on the Beach to be a permanent feature of the site in the future. As well, there have been talks of expanding the festival’s footprint at the park.

Over the years, Bard on the Beach also previously pondered turning the festival’s grassy muddy area into a hardscape to enable better year-round use for both its festival and other users, as grass reseeding efforts over the decades have failed to produce a usable surface.

Sakaki notes that hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent by her organization on reseeding, but “nothing has been able to remediate the area.”

Bard on the Beach launched in 1990, and it has expanded its programming ever since from one play annually to at least four each season, growing from 34 performances in its inaugural summer to over 200 in Summer 2024.

The 2024 season closed with about 90,000 spectators, which is down from 103,000 in the 2019 season and the over 100,000 per year the festival attracted for each pre-pandemic season from 2017 to 2019.

You might also like: