COLD LAKE – It is no secret that many industries have been negatively impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the arts and the live entertainment industries are no exception.
This year will mark the end of the Cold Lake Arts & Entertainment Society’s (CLAES) operations.
The society will indefinitely close the book on its story after years of perseverance and struggles to make the arts a viable and supported institution within the community.
“After much deliberation, it is with heavy hearts that we announce the Cold Lake Arts & Entertainment Society will be permanently closing our doors,” read a statement released by CLAES on Jan. 9.
CLAES had become well-known in the Lakeland for the several theatre productions held at the Grand Parlour in Cold Lake.
Lockdown measures as well as the cancellation and restrictions around in–person events crippled the society’s ability to perform in front of live audiences, Teresa Pettit told Lakeland This Week.
After the Grand Parlour theatre, which opened its doors in 2017 and hosted CLAES’s productions, announced it would be closing in January of 2020, volunteers hoped to rally the public’s support by putting on a large-scale production of The Greatest Show on Earth in May of 2020 at the Cold Lake Agriplex.
“It was going to be this big circus event. We had all these volunteers from all over Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C., it was going to be quite amazing,” Pettit recalled.
When CLAES volunteers were preparing for the production, the pandemic was just taking a hold of communities across Canada. Very few expected the lockdown and public health measures would last for long – and Pettit was one of them.
“We can't even really blame anything because nobody really knew what was happening... Here we are two years later – we're still in it. Nobody really knew what to expect. Nobody knew how to move forward,” she said.
Finding ways to stay financially sustainable became increasingly difficult for CLAES.
After the Grand Parlour closed its doors, the society needed to store its props, equipment, stage and costumes, among many other items.
“We were doing smaller events to try to keep our storage unit paid for... So, that was really stressful as well because then the Bingo started to slow down because of the pandemic,” Pettit said. “It made everything so much more difficult, and it already was difficult running a theatre."
However, there may be a glimmer of hope in the near future for Lakeland residents wanting to see more arts and culture in the community.
“While our community will face a closed chapter, we are excited to offer support to a new organization that may better serve the community. We have decided to donate some of our physical assets including staging equipment and furnishings to the Clayton Bellamy Foundation for the Arts,” continued the statement from CLAES.
The Clayton Bellamy Foundation for the Arts, a newly founded non-profit organization, has committed to supporting education and community-based arts programs in the Lakeland region.
Recently, the foundation has asked area municipalities to provide financial support in order to transform a space in Bonnyville Centralized High School into a state-of-the-art theatre, workshop and performance space.
Pettit said the decision to donate CLAES equipment, which they had worked to collect and create over the last five years, to the Clayton Bellamy foundation came after the board had a meeting with Bellamy himself.
“They had a lot of things in place that we didn't really have,” she acknowledged, adding that Clayton’s contacts and support stretched beyond local communities and offered opportunities to bring various partners to the table.
In the end, Pettit and the rest of the CLAES board felt that because the foundation has a similar goal – to reach youth in the community and offer a space for fine arts – it was the perfect organization to pass the torch to.
"I'm looking forward to whatever happens next with what Clayton's doing in Bonnyville,” said Pettit. “I hope we start to see ourselves pull out of where we have been over the last couple of years so we can start to see not just the arts come back together, but our community come back together.”
The last in-person production put on by the CLAES at the Grand Parlour was an ‘80s musical rom-com called What’s Love Got to do With It.
The production was an original show written by Pettit and musically coordinated by Taylor Sinclair. It was performed through December of 2019.
