I've seen nothing official, but this comes from a source who would know. On Tuesday I was told that the Board of Directors of Studio 303 are now discussing closing the place. That's the only detail I have.
This is both a shock, and not completely unexpected. Last year, they had to cancel Project Projo and the June Danse-Vernissage, because of a debt (and the cancellation announcement was the first I'd heard of a debt). But the August 2005 newsletter, I can't find it online, seemed optimistic and talked of having cut the debt by 75% and planned changes to take care of the rest.
I've been going to Studio 303 for longer than the Fringe, first being in the audience in October of 1993, and for the next ten years I missed a half dozen of the monthly shows, one time because it was sold out, and the rest because I was sick. The cookies started appearing there in December of 1997, six months after they first appeared at the Fringe, and in 1998 or 1999 Suzanne Miller said "You aren't staying to put things away?" and I did. Only a handful of people are still around from when I first appeared, and they aren't always in attendance. I also stuffed envelopes a number of times, though because such things aren't out in public view I was completely unaware of who did it, I thought elves, until not that many mailings before it was moved to an outside contractor. Those tended to be fun, because everyone including Paul and Miriam would help, and usually some of the local dancers/choreographers would help out. I even painted the office floor once, and was there when the futon was tossed out the window into the dumpster.
When I first got there, lighting was controlled by light dimmers on the wall, and there were so few lights that it seemed after every piece they had to be physically shifted. There were no risers for the metal stacking chairs. No curtains on the windows (which made it weird in May and June) and no curtains on the walls. But slowly things were added, often because some other performance space had upgraded and given us the old. And the place was always packed, with all the floor jammed with audience and standing room pretty crowded too.
But it also changed. A few years back, I suddenly couldn't stay. The expansion of the Studio had happened, a changing room and an extra office space, and of course all that fancy new equipment and seating (some from a government program to upgrade technical equipment, some from other groups who upgraded and had more hand me downs for us) had arrived. But, as with the Fringe, I felt I'd not been included in the changes. So I broke my ten year record of almost perfect attendance. But there were other changes. I always ignored the change where the space became "multi-disciplinary" rather than a mere dance space, because the dance back then was pretty free in categorization and there was no real line, though oddly in more recent years, that "weird" stuff has pretty much disappeared. But the space moved from being user run, the performers were the ones selling the beer and tickets, and helped in the office and on the board of directors. Eventually money came in to pay for staff, but now you have a situation where so much of the help is hired, rather than grew into the roles. Ticket prices went up, the shows became more formalized, going from unjuried to juried and from varying number of pieces and form to a more fixed number of longer pieces and themed.
It became less of a place to try new things for "mature" performers, to explore something new or test part of a bigger piece or simply to do their own choreography after being part of a company, and less of a place for a newcomer to perform (plenty of people have had pieces in the shows, and never heard from since). And the juxtaposition of different pieces was lost. I had a far better grasp of Japanese dance seeing it on the same bill as the much faster North American dance, than in seeing Mari Osanai at the Fringe, though of course it helped me to understand her work. I learned so much about the dance scene, mingling with the performers and choreographers, not because they were on stage, but because once I started helping a tad, we inhabited the same space. It was really nice to be able to acknowledge their performance with a nod afterwards, when "backstage" was the hallway. A number of times, the performers would thank me for the cookies, and so unexpected, I forgot to tell them that the cookies were a small way to thank them for performing. In some ways I kept going to make sure they had an audience, but it was cheap most of the time to get in and to see so much is maybe more important than seeing a handful of Big Shows, because then you can see patterns emerging.
So if the talk of closing is true, in some ways I see it as another case of trying to be Too Big. What it used to be was so vital, the shows were an extension of the studio's "day job" as a place to learn dance, but when some decided it should be a performance place, it lost a lot, even if the shows were still as well attended as fire laws permitted (at some stage, suddenly we were noticed, and heads were counted and people turned away). It can never be a performing space as its primary use so long as it's a learning place too, because having a run of more than one night requires too much work setting up and taking down. If a class is the next day, we can't keep the equipment up. We have far more equipment, and obviously the addition of a changing room makes it more like a performing space, but the overhead means nothing if it's not used. And the number of Danse-Vernisages has been reduced in recent years (well, they rose from the number when I first went, and then cut back), while other spaces have been used for some shows.
I suppose I may find something more soon.
Read my letter to Hour last year, they didn't publish it, about when Paul Caskey left. It is telling that the only piece I saw about him other than in the 303 newsletter was on Maisonneuve magazine's website.