Last summer, overwhelmed and frazzled by all the events I was supposed to be attending, and was not, I said that what we called Tourist Season should be called Art Season. When the County comes to life, it does so through music, books, wine, food, art, painting — and myriad conversations about them.

The Regent, which had sold out shows this month for Miss Emily and SOS — The ABBA Experience, had another full house last week for a screening of the new HGTV series about interior design in historic homes, The County. The 300 or so people who attended could have just watched at home. But they came out to watch it together — and then raved about it on Instagram, the County’s instant messaging system, all the next day. The County looks pretty good on TV — and on the big screen.

Art Season, it seems, is already upon us. In April. It’s the County version of climate change. Spring is the new summer, even when it feels like winter.

The Chamber Music Festival held its season launch this month, and the same evening, Globe and Mail columnist and political commentator Andrew Coyne was in town for the PEC Library Authors Festival.

Mr. Coyne, who was promoting the paperback issue of his 2025 book, The Crisis in Canadian Democracy, was in conversation with former Finance Minister Greg Sorbara and Councillor Bill Roberts. All 225 tickets for that event sold out in minutes. Justly so: it was riveting. Mr. Coyne is not only full of ideas all the time, but a brilliant communicator, in conversation as well as in writing, and he was well matched with Sorbara and Roberts, who took the session well over its (too short) set time.  

If you want to know what is going on here, just trail around after Mr. Sorbara. The next day, he was on another stage, this time with Marianne Ackerman, who was promoting her new novel, Oyster, set in the Toronto literary world — we even get to go to the Gillers — as well as in the County, where Ms. Ackerman grew up.

A couple of days later, I found Mr. Sorbara in yet another conversation, this time with County Stage Artistic Director Heather Braaten, about the upcoming rep season: theatre of all kinds will run all summer here, and, for the first time, into October. The Gazette will have more on that, as well as on the Authors Festival, in the weeks ahead.

And finally, Mr. Sorbara was guest of honour at the launch of Hotel Confidential at The Royal last weekend. Orchestrated by County Arts to mark its 40th anniversary, 16 artists, some from here, some from away, took over the entire Annex Building for three days, transforming its hallways and suites into a series of art galleries.

Opening night was so jammed, I went back late Sunday afternoon, thinking it would be quieter, and I could take my time.

If anything, it was even busier. More than 1000 people visited this contemporary art exhibit. County Arts had been expecting about 500. Contemporary art is not normally such a huge draw outside, say, Paris or London, where one expects the galleries and museums to be packed for a big exhibit. Such a press of people and chatter adds a whole new dimension to the experience.

In any event, the long wait to see renowned dancer and choreographer Christopher House dancing alone in his hotel room was completely worth it, as was every other part of this hotel takeover, or takedown.

The Annex rooms are in the Royal’s former stables, and they are lovely, and compact. Dancing to a beautiful, delicate piano concerto, Mr. House, dressed in boxers and a sweatshirt, conveyed by turns — literally — what it is to be alone in a hotel room: its novelty allows, or seems to, space to play. He gracefully spiraled, imagining himself liberated; curious, he checked out the china cups; increasingly enclosed, and isolated, he kept looking out the window, but seemed not to see anything, or, at least, not what he was looking for. I only saw Mr. House for perhaps five or six minutes — the line was on my mind — but  he offered an unforgettable, intimate performance of being human in a room that is not.

The other installations were equally engaging. My favourite was perhaps the room transformed by Danesha Nugent-Palache and Josephine Denis in a way that recalled to me my grandparents’ house. The monopalette of the Royal’s interiors was overlaid with the hues and textures of an older world, whose colours and fabrics are resolutely personal. A mint green satin bedspread and a pink satin tablecloth were matched with porcelain figurines recalling treasured family heirlooms. The room’s inhabitants wore elaborate lavender pajama sets with matching shoes. The artists created a world at once entirely itself, and yet inviting, comfortable. By evoking home in a hotel room, the installation suggested what is essential to each. The hotel room was not the winner in that encounter.

And yet, a hotel calls to desire, at once recurrent and fleeting. That was the subject of the Key Codes exhibit by Shelter Bay and Margaret Pryde, which mapped real hotels onto cinematic ones, to show “access is no longer to a room, but to moments suspended in time.” The Overlook Hotel of The Shining, The Grand Budapest, The King Edward, and the Magic Castle Inn and Suites in Orlando, Florida — every hotel is both real and entirely imaginary.

The reach and ambition of the show was striking. In conversation, curators Christina Zeidler and Stacey Sproule stress it took a village to choreograph and operate; it was an ensemble production.

If art and culture, music and design, are a transformative force here, that is only because they are getting the reception and response they need to thrive. In its 40th year, the County Arts Council has established itself at the heart of a small, rural community where collaboration, conversation, and cooperation are both essential and powerful. Art invites, but it only truly sings if we are willing to go where it wants to take us. None of what is happening here — I hesitate to put too firm a definition on it, this still fledgling effort — would fly without our receptive, even rapturous, response.

A serious conversation is unfolding, one calling to us all to take part, even just inwardly, in our thoughts. But that alone is enough to turn a community into an active, evolving, and absorbing confabulation. Let us celebrate and congratulate County Arts.