onstagepittsburgh.com: Former schools in the Pittsburgh area are being transformed into community hubs by established arts leaders, such as Mark Clayton Southers’ Madison Arts Center (the former Madison Elementary School) in the Upper Hill District, for Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company, and Colleen Doyno and Pittsburgh Musical Theater (the former St. James School) in the West End.
3 comments:
As someone who is passionate about engaging with their community and about having more third spaces, this could be very exciting. I am hopeful that these transformations include spaces where community members are encouraged to come without any money spending required. This article mentions a coffee shop and a theater being included both of which come with the expectation of spending money while the community lounge mentioned could just be a space for people to hangout and interact without any monetary pressure. When it comes to encouraging a community to engage with the arts there needs to be free ways to do so, maybe this lounge could have a small stage set up where people could perform at any time, or a craft space with some tables and supplies. This project is a very exciting one and I hope the people doing it feel passionate about keeping art activities available to the entire community.
I love to see theater in found spaces, renovated spaces. I am a huge advocate for making theater accessible to everyone, so companies putting on works in places they typically wouldn’t is so amazing to me. I hate when the performing arts are perceived as some elitist thing, since really it should not be- I believe the epitome of making art is crafting human connection, especially in regards to performance art. The only really sad element of this is that so many schools are shutting down that it’s becoming a pattern to take on that space for performance, which is a much more major societal issue blah blah I won’t go on about all my thoughts and feelings there or else we’d be here a while. Anyways, it’s a lovely thing to me that this adaptive reuse is finding spaces for artists wherever they fit, and therefore getting more people involved in the theater community.
In some ways, the transformation of these old Pittsburgh schools reminds me of the Heidelberg Project. I recently visited the first Heidelberg installation in Detroit, Michigan, where I was able to walk around the different collections of dumpster dives turned into art. These projects take repurposing to a level I could not have imagined before. In the case of Detroit, the idea is to bring beauty back to neighborhoods and houses that had been abandoned. The artists utilize old things that had been thrown out and forgotten, such as lone shoes or tvs thrown on the side of a road. Similarly, these art centers in Pittsburgh send the message that the city is intentionally prioritizing its art scene and preserving the groups that contribute to that art. As we continue to drain resources from the Earth by creating anew, initiatives like these provide an important focus on the structures and land that we have already built.
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