To our beloved community,

With GORGE close on the horizon, we just wanted to reach out and give you a little peek behind the curtain and update you on where things are at.

The programming we are offering for GORGE is the result of thousands of hours of combined labour and a decade of mentorship, experimentation, and collaboration. For the fifth edition of our festival, we made two bold shifts: to host the festival as a standalone, 10-day alternative Pride in September; and to work hand-in-hand with established event producers to create a festival greater than the sum of its parts. This ambitious undertaking has been in the works since the day the previous edition of GORGE ended, in June 2024. Now, over a year later, we are almost ready to show you what we have built.

Despite over a year of outreach, curating, writing, knowledge-sharing, planning, and booking, we have hit a snag. After waiting a gruelling 7 months for the result of our funding with The Canada Council for the Arts, we have been denied, one week out from our festival. While there is a longer conversation to be had here about how our federal arts funding body is fundamentally broken, stifling artistic innovation through administrative backlog, unwilling to listen, and unable to follow through on its promises to the community it claims to represent, we don’t have time for that now. We have art to make, artists to pay, capacity and community to build, and audiences to delight.

Trust us. We are scrappy. We are resourceful. We have an incredible festival lined up for you, thanks to amazing support from provincial and municipal funding streams and local sponsorship, alongside those countless hours of unpaid work and creative output by our team of collaborators.

We do, however hope that you can support us and help us get this festival over the finish line, ensuring that we can continue to offer free and affordable programming to the community, while not bankrupting ourselves financially, physically, and emotionally.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and we will see you at the function, loves!

xoxo

Andy & Clo

Synonym Art Consultation