Under Canvas Cancelled

Under Canvas is a music festival style event that showcases the creative and artistic scene of St Andrews with collaborative booths from STAR Radio and Music is Love. This year’s Under Canvas was due to take place on Lower College Lawn with acoustic, hip hop and dance music and a line-up of Denis Sulta, Coops, Wovoka Gentle, Reckless Kettle, and Music is Love with all profits to support Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

However, this evening the Under Canvas committee announced that this years event is cancelled due to financial and logistical issues. Before online ticket sales closed on Saturday April 9th, there was a count of less than 200 tickets purchased.

The committee released the following statement:

“This year Under Canvas is extremely sorry to announce that we will not be able to continue with the event. Today we made the extremely difficult decision to cancel the event due to low ticket sales. As you may have seen from our promotion, we have been struggling this year to gain support for the event, and given financial reasons we do not have the capacity to continue. It really is a pity to not carry through with a vision we have collectively worked on so hard to build this year. However, we greatly thank you for your support.

Details concerning the future action regarding ticket refunds will follow. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any concerns or queries.”

Isa Ouwehand, the director of Under Canvas has also commented, “Sadly, as many people know, as we have operated on a policy of transparency, UC just didn’t have the same interest of previous years. It is a real pity given how hard we have all worked to put together an event.”

As we see one of St Andrews’ traditionally successful events fail, the question raises: does St Andrews have too many events? In addition to any issues that occurred behind the scenes of Under Canvas, this event was scheduled at an unfortunate time of year after most students have shelled out for multiple fashion shows, expensive spring holidays, hall balls, and the Rugby Sevens Afterparty which takes place on Saturday. Perhaps it’s not the fault of Under Canvas at all, but an unfortunate result of an over-packed calendar.

And in the words of a controversial anonymous poster on YikYak:

If you have purchased a ticket and haven’t heard from the Under Canvas committee or have any questions at all you can email them at [email protected].