River Clyde Arts launches public campaign to help find a permanent home in P.E.I.

River Clyde Arts is on the hunt for new land in Prince Edward Island, and it's calling on the public for help in securing that forever home. 

The New Glasgow-based arts organization, which is best known for its annual River Clyde Pageant, just celebrated its 10th anniversary this past summer.

The spectacle explores themes of environmental stewardship and the natural world, and is told with the help of vibrant colours, stilt walkers, choirs and puppets of all shapes and sizes.

Even after a decade of entertaining audiences, the organization and its pageant have never had a place to call their own — and as it stands now, they don’t yet have a venue for next summer’s performance. 

“It’s incredibly nerve-racking," artistic co-director Megan Stewart told Mainstreet P.E.I. host Steve Bruce. 

“If we don't have a new home confirmed by March of 2026, then it means that we're going to have to probably radically rethink what happens to that summer's River Clyde Pageant.”

Performers first took to the outdoor "stage" back in 2016, but the pageant has been presented on various plots of land over the years — and moving around takes its toll. 

“River Clyde Arts has been kind of a nomadic organization for the last four years,” Stewart said. “There's a lot of infrastructure that comes with... outdoor performance projects of this scale. And we are realizing that it's a huge drain on resources to be moving.”

Mossbank Flower Farm hosted the pageant for the last three years, but Stewart said that was never a permanent solution. The agreement was made when the shop was just getting off the ground.

River Clyde Arts has been working on a land acquisition project since 2022, but securing a home base has brought its fair share of challenges. 

“There were a couple different properties that we were entertaining and that looked like they would have been pretty viable options," Stewart said.

“We explored them as thoroughly as we could and then realized… they were no longer viable options. And so this has kind of prompted us to start to look more widely.”

For Stewart, the real challenge is finding a property that can fulfill the pageant's needs. The land itself is a key player in conveying the stories to the audience — and that means there are specifications on what the group is looking for. 

“This is an outdoor theatre performance, so we really like building the performance in partnership with the land," she says. “We're really responding to the geography and we're responding to the history of the place.”