The Challenge of Organizing Arts Events in Ottawa: The Nomadic Bill Brown

As much as it pains me to say it, the next edition of Bill Brown's 1-2-3 Slam originally scheduled for Thursday, October 7 may not take place.  This is because The Cajun Attic, the venue where the BB123 Collective has been hosting the show for the past year, closed its doors for good yesterday.

Our poetry series has been a classic example of why it can be very tough to create and sustain an arts event in the city of Ottawa.  The show began at the Umi Cafe in Chinatown in September 2008.  In its first season, it provided a launching pad for a number of Ottawa's current crop of incredible spoken word artists - Graeme "Loh El" O'Farrell, Sean O'Gorman and Hyfidelik are just three of the slam newcomers who first got comfortable on the BB123 stage before moving on to brighter lights of Capital Slam and Urban Legends Poetry Slam.

But we experienced a difficult situation with double-bookings that led to the cancellation of the June 2009 show and the decision to move to Avant-Garde on Besserer Street. In the three months we were there, we had trouble finding traction and lost much of the audience we had built at Umi.  Our first anniversary show in September 2009 (where we introduced the 1-2-3 head-to-head format to Canadian slam) was our last hurrah.  We moved on to The Cajun Attic in October 2009, and hoped never to look back.

The space had most of what we needed - it was wired for sound, people could purchase food and drink, the stage and seating areas were in a nice physical layout, and for the most part things were smooth between the Collective and bar management.  Outside of one unfortunate double-booking incident, our year at the Attic was a fruitful partnership.

But bars and restaurants are capitalist creatures and this one didn't do enough to get its bills paid, so now that it's closed we are once again looking for another home.

The worst part of this is the extreme difficulty I have found over the last seven years, first with Capital Slam and then with Bill Brown, of finding solid, reliable venues of the proper size.  We are not music and our needs are different.  People having multiple conversations isn't considered polite at a poetry show.  Our events are usually best in rooms seating between 50-200 people, and there is a severe dearth of decent venues of that size in this city.  We are not theatre so most venues of that sort are inappropriate to the needs of a monthly poetry show.  The challenges are legion.

Capital Slam was nomadic for three and a half seasons before it moved into Mercury Lounge, and Bill Brown is suffering a similar fate.  Anyone got a 100ish seat venue with sound that might be open to hosting a poetry series once a month?  The challenges of organizing artistic and cultural events for Ottawans continues ...