Okay, so I've been browsing the green room forums for around 2 and a half hours and I have a nice section of notes, but nothing necessarily individual to my own situation.

I'm currently attending a university in winnipeg, mb canada and I am looking to start my own theatre and theatre company. I already have about 30 people looking to help me start, but legally i have no idea where to start. We would be producing shows that we write together (we have six already) and on the off season we'd be offering classes and rehersal space to schools, individual groups and other places.

We're hoping to build it so it includes space for a pit band (since the other local 250 seater stage does not have one) so that schools can take their musicals outside of the gym (the physed department bloody hates it as they loose a week of their program).

In the long run, we want to be able to support ourselves from running the theatre, directing, acting and teaching classes. Asides from that, the theatre would be open for community projects and seminars for free or a nominal fee, depending on the circumstances. We're willing to support community projects as long as it doesnt fall within the theatre season rehersals or classes.

I don't have any financial knowledge about lights and sounds, save for the way they work. I've been taking set and design, directing and stage management, so I have a good concept of how to run the shows, like i did before with various community projects.

How do I start? What legal documents do I need? What the hell is a bylaw and why do i need it? should i be looking to convert a space or build it from scratch? I want to maintain artistic control over the content we produce, because as a company, we write together. Everyone has a say.

HELP.

Remember having a theatre company there are two sides of one coin - the artistic side and the business side.  It sounds like you have a concept on the artistic side and probably some contacts.  Now you need to make your local contacts on the business side.

I think much of this depends on where you are geographically -- what is available in terms of vacant buildings?  If we had built something when we started we may have got a more suitable facility, but it may have taken so long to raise the funds that we'd still be waiting to put on our first show.  There is something fun about having a funky, less than perfect building, too.  Start checking around, talk to everybody you know and ask them to talk to people, too.  You will probably stumble on to something you can fall in love with.

There are a lot of decent sized vacant stores in the malls. I don't know if they would consider renting or donating some space until the economy improves in 10 years or so.

Possibly, but the difficulty of that is that  most are aimed toward 'for profit' companies not 'non-profit'.  The overlap is big, but the two are not identical.