Linda Balduzzi zigzagged her way through university, fought to get into a directing course at the National Theatre School of Canada and stunned herself with a job as Executive Director of the Ottawa Arts Court Foundation. The path doesn’t seem strange now, but each step taught her the same lesson: “in the performing arts, there’s no hope in hell of succeeding on your own,” she explains.

That statement could also be the motto of Arts Court, the city’s slightly convoluted but perfectly rational centre for artistic creativity – its incubator, bureaucracy, support staff, gallery, performance venue and fainting couch. Without the magic wand of collaboration, the whole thing might fly apart at any moment. In Balduzzi’s mind, keeping hope alive within the Centre’s artist-run organizations is her main job.

Linda Balduzzi. Photo by Mike Levin.

“We’re all like minded people here, but it can be like herding cats,” she says about the position she’s held since 1994. The project Balduzzi has cooked up this season – the eight shows of  Summer Fling -may seem like another theatre festival, but the art/business hybrid could supply the best source of hope that Ottawa’s arts sector has had for a very long time.

Ten years ago the project would have been called a P3 (public-private partnership), a buzzword for regenerating infrastructure and services that the public sector could no longer afford to do on its own. Today it’s just called The New Paradigm, because without private-sector involvement, arts and culture has a suffocating future.

Balduzzi understood this years ago and started her ball rolling by suggesting she sit on the board of the Downtown Rideau Business Improvement Area (co-sponsor of Summer Fling), and that BIA Executive Director Peggy DuCharme reciprocate on the board of Arts Court. Both women believed that creativity and commerce were natural allies, but in retail, people need proof.

The business group was tangentially involved when Balduzzi’s Sexy Laundry, staged during the quiet summer season last year. The penny dropped for BIA members when sales in the area rose noticeably during the play’s run, and this year it’s fully on-board.

“It was funny when this first came up a few years ago, because when I told them that artists get paid, they all went ……’Oooooohhhhhh’. Now they get the artistic component, and they’re investing in the arts because they know it’s an economic driver. Peggy DuCharme, she gets it completely. She’s the one who went out and got the ($65,000) grant (for Summer Fling).”

There’s precious little of this collaboration in Ottawa. Elaina Martin did it for the Westboro BIA by creating Westfest; The Little Italy BIA is behind all Corso Italia’s arts and culture; Somerset Chinatown BIA is gaining artistic traction with its annual Chinatown Remixed; and Annie Hillis is working hard with the Wellington West BIA to become an arts patron. But that’s about it for major business-association  sponsorship.

Balduzzi hopes Summer Fling helps change this. She grew up in an Italian family in Old Ottawa South where arts and culture were part of the clan’s fabric. “I was brought up in these things; it was part of our lives, so we didn’t judge how valuable it was. It just was.” At Lisgar Collegiate, she was part of a performance group that delivered, possibly, the first arts-award cup to the high school’s trophy case.

She wanted to direct theatre, heading to York University for a year, where she learned discipline but little else, and then transferring to the University of Ottawa, which demanded that theatre students be hands on. “I wanted to see how other people did it. That’s what I got.” Plus enough motivation to start a theatre group with a friend, the Flying Buttress Company. There were directing jobs at the Museum of Civilization and the Great Canadian Theatre Company before she applied to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, which offers the country’s most sought-after, arts-education programs (165 students; 150 teachers and mentors).

Thinking she didn’t “have a shot in hell,” Balduzzi applied for the Arts Court job right after graduation. She got it, and wrangled a condition that would allow her to continue, occasionally, a directing career. That was 16 years ago, and she’s still wearing an ever-changing assortment of hats. It would be wonderful for arts in Ottawa if the one she’s now sharing with the Downtown Rideau BIA started a new style trend.

Summer Fling offers five shows at Arts Court: Educating Rita (July 14 – Aug. 1); Satin Dolls (Aug. 6, 7); Inseparable (Aug. 10-12); Swimming in the Shallows (Aug. 12 – 22); and My Summer Crush Improv (July 20, 27, Aug. 3, 24, 28). Two shows at the Ottawa Little Theatre: Murder On the Nile (July 20 – 31) and Tuesdays With Morrie (Aug. 4 – 7). And one event at the National Arts Centre’s Fourth Stage: Romeo and Juliet (July 27 – 30). Full details at http://www.artscourt.ca/index.php?page=76&id=40.