National Arts Centre | Canada is our stage

The National Arts Centre (NAC) is Canada’s bilingual, multi-disciplinary home for the performing arts. The NAC presents, creates, produces, and co-produces performing arts programming in various streams—the NAC Orchestra, Dance, English Theatre, French Theatre, Indigenous Theatre, and Popular Music and Variety—and nurtures the next generation of audiences and artists from across Canada.

Brilliantly renewed by the renowned architectural firm Diamond Schmitt Architects, the NAC has improved performance spaces, public areas for education and events, and a magnificent glass atrium with a glittering entrance on Elgin Street, embracing Confederation Square and some of the most iconic views of important landmarks in our nation’s capital.

The creation of Canada’s National Arts Centre was part of the explosion of pride and optimism that led to the celebration of Canada’s 100th birthday in 1967. Unfortunately, the NAC’s construction fell behind schedule. It did not open until June 2, 1969, two years after the celebratory year. It was the culmination of the aspirations of Canada’s leading artistic figures of the time. Many, such as Ludmilla Chiareff, Celia Franca, Jean Gascon, Louis Applebaum, Nicolas Goldschmidt, John Hirsch and Herman Geiger Torel, were the founders of our leading artistic companies and festivals and they worked collegially as advisors for both the physical design and future purpose of the NAC. Despite their differing interests they believed strongly they were creating something important for Canada.

Hamilton SouthamPhoto © Karsh
Above all, the NAC benefited from the leadership of a cultivated, far-seeing and highly-placed visionary in the person of G. Hamilton Southam, an ex-diplomat and Ottawa resident, and also from his personal friendship with the project’s leading patron, Canada’s Prime Minister of the day, Lester B. Pearson. Pearson had wanted something special for Canada’s capitol to celebrate the country’s centenary and a national performing arts centre was it. Southam took a modest proposal by local citizens to build a decent concert hall in Ottawa and developed it into a magnificent edifice and national organization for the arts. Built to both produce and present music, opera, theatre, and dance, it was also bilingual, designed to reflect Canada’s linguistic duality – the first, and still the only performing arts centre in the world with such a complex mandate.

In the nearly seven years that it took to build, the Prime Minister defended the project in a Minority Parliament and ensured it had the money it needed, while Southam personally led the project and guaranteed that the quality of design and construction was first-class in every way. Superb facilities and highly trained stage crews, which were part of the organization from the outset, have made it a favourite of leading performers from all over the world. Its three main performing spaces, the Opera, (now renamed Southam Hall), the Theatre and the smaller experimental Studio were on the leading edge of theatrical technology when they were designed and remain, over forty years later, among the finest performing spaces in Canada. These halls have not only presented so-called “high art”, such as operas, ballets and symphony concerts, but also have played host to a huge array of Canadian and international variety artists and popular performers – from Yves Montand to Ginette Reno, from Barbra Streisand to Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and the Bare Naked Ladies, as well as big-stage touring musical theatre. The intimate Fourth Stage which serves the local community was created out of a former shopspace and party room in 2000.