Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center Reveals Artistic Team and Vision

	Sketch of the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center

The Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center ("the PAC") announces the establishment of a core team of artistic leaders: David Lan (artistic director of London's Young Vic) as consulting artistic director; Lucy Sexton (artist, producer, and director of the New York Dance & Performance Awards (aka The Bessies)) as associate artistic director; and Andy Hayles, managing partner of Charcoalblue (London's National Theatre, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, and the future home of Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse), as theater design consultant. Stephen Daldry (director of the films The Hours, Billy Elliot, The Reader, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and of Billy Elliot the Musical, and former artistic director of London's Gate Theatre and Royal Court Theatre) has joined the PAC's board of directors. The artistic team is collaborating with the PAC's staff, board, and numerous consultants to create a place that is unique on the cultural landscapes of New York, the United States, and the world.

Maggie Boepple, the PAC's director, describes these developments as pivotal: "We now have an A team in place and a vision for what should happen inside the building. The program we've developed will give people a reason to return to the PAC over and over."

The PAC will be a global center for the creation and exchange of art, ideas, and culture. The new leadership envisions an institution that will produce and present new work, primarily by New York and US artists, often in collaboration with artists, companies, and institutions in other parts of the world. The PAC will premiere works of theater, dance, music and opera, including productions that span multiple disciplines.

All of this will take place in an adaptable venue with unprecedented digital connectivity. Charcoalblue, which will collaborate with the PAC's design architect, has devised a preliminary design with the flexibility to accommodate a variety of stagings and seating arrangements. The PAC will include approximately 550-, 250-, and 150-capacity spaces that can operate independently, or combine for larger performances. Linda Shelton, executive director of The Joyce Theater, who continues to participate in the development of the PAC, said, "I am enthusiastic about this new, completely flexible venue, which will offer a variety of performances, both large-scale and intimate. I look forward to continuing to work with the artistic team and Maggie Boepple as the vision is refined."

The technical capacity is important not only to expand the potential audience of performances (via high-definition simulcast), nationally and internationally, but also to facilitate the creation of distinctly 21st Century art: collaborations, in real time, between performers in New York and, say, Beijing and Sydney.

The PAC's innovation will go beyond both art and technology to accomplish a unique social function. Boepple et al are planning a cultural destination like David Lan's Young Vic, one that is widely considered one of the world's most exciting performing arts centers, and that currently has no equal in New York. The Young Vic is full of life from morning into the night, attracting a vastly diverse community of artists, performance-goers, professionals and others, sometimes just for a meal, coffee, or glass of wine. Likewise, meeting a desire that the Lower Manhattan community has expressed, the PAC will have ample public space, open all day, for these purposes. Furthermore, given the World Trade Center Transportation Hub and the Fulton Street Transit Hub, both slated to open soon, the PAC will be exceedingly accessible to people from across the city and beyond.

Lan's appointment follows a yearlong search, then several months of courtship, on the part of Boepple and the board. When she joined the PAC as director in March 2012, Boepple had written Lan's name on the first page of her first notebook. His name kept coming up, since he met all three of her criteria for a consulting artistic director: one who was an artistic director or producer in more than one discipline; who has run a theater that is successful in terms of programming and atmosphere, and that attracts a diverse audience; who has led an arts institution through a new build or rebuild. Lan will remain artistic director of the Young Vic while consulting on the PAC, to which he is deeply committed.

As an artistic director and producer, and as a writer of plays and opera libretti, Lan has garnered international acclaim. He has also overseen the design (in close collaboration with Charcoalblue) of a theater that is especially well regarded. The Young Vic redesign, completed in 2006, created a super-flexible performance venue that can be reconfigured easily -- proscenium, thrust, traverse, in-the-round -- to realize each director's particular vision. The Young Vic balances its books year after year, not only via creative co-producing and co-presenting arrangements, but also by achieving extraordinary attendance: an extremely rare 96% from 2011 to date. And the Young Vic's audience is widely considered the most diverse and most engaged of any theater in London.

In The Telegraph last week, Rupert Christiansen called the Young Vic "the best theatre in London." He elaborated, "The main auditorium is flexible in shape [and] allows intimacy and immediacy, as well as some room for grand scenic effect and theatrical surprise. The two smaller performance spaces are...invitations for that fundamental theatrical faculty, imagination, to get to work...There's always a healthy mix of age and ethnicity. The grooving in-crowd can swan around, but ordinary folks won't feel intimidated or excluded; it always feels as though a good party is going on...And what about Lan's artistic program?...Look back over the last three years or so, and I defy you to find anyone in town who can match [his] record."

Daldry says, "David Lan runs the most interesting theater in London, and I have no doubt that the PAC will benefit from his extraordinary theatrical vision, intellect, and community-building skills. I look forward to working with him, Maggie, Lucy, and the PAC board on this exciting and vital arts center."

Lan considers the PAC an opportunity to achieve on a larger scale what he has done at the Young Vic. Perhaps the most meaningful parallel between the two venues is the hallowed ground on which they are and will be situated, respectively. The Young Vic is built on a former bombsite where scores of lives were lost in World War II -- collateral damage from the targeting of nearby Waterloo Station. In Lan's words, "Where there was violence and destruction, art is now made. It's as if theater has helped to heal the wound."

Boepple met Sexton via Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where Boepple was president and Sexton produced the annual gala. Boepple approached Sexton to join the PAC's artistic team because Sexton "knows the downtown performing arts community, and the greater New York performing arts community, as well as anyone." Sexton has worked in dance, film, and theater for more than 25 years, producing live events and documentary films, and directing performance and theater, while continuing to write and perform her own work. In addition to serving as director of the New York Dance and Performance Awards aka The Bessies, she was board president of Performance Space 122 for ten years. For the PAC Sexton has arranged and participated in countless conversations with artists and arts administrators about what this city needs (and doesn't need) in a performing arts center.

The hiring of Charcoalblue concludes another yearlong search: for a theater design firm to work closely with the artistic team, board (especially Stephen Daldry, who led the Royal Court through its renovation in the late 1990s), and, ultimately, the design architect on the interior of the building: the size and design of the auditoria, rehearsal spaces, public spaces, and back-of-house. Boepple kept encountering Charcoalblue attached to exceptional performing arts complexes, such as the National Theatre on the South Bank of London, the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, and St. Ann's Warehouse's future home, in the Tobacco Warehouse on the Brooklyn Waterfront.

"The new artistic team has given shape to our vision for this historic site and its surrounding communities: a cultural center, open from early morning until late in the evening, with a fantastically dynamic program. The eyes of the world are on Lower Manhattan, and the PAC will be one of the world's most exciting arts centers," said Julie Menin, a founding PAC board member and former chair of Community Board 1.