Theatre

AS220 Gets Theatrical

New programming creates fresh opportunities for Community Theatre in the Creative Capital

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When the Perishable Theatre closed its doors in 2011, you could feel the air downtown contract a little bit. Where would the theater groups find community and communion with their craft, with many – if not most of them – operating outside of the mainstream?

Four years later, and the solution for an innovative theatre community has been made available as AS220 steps in, precluding the vacuum on Empire Street, and rolling out a heightened level of community-minded programming. Now, as ever, the AS220 Black Box theatre at 95 Empire and the smaller performance spaces above it are teeming with life once more.

This community-minded programming stems from three different types of residencies offered by AS220, referred to as Live Arts Residencies. Two of the residency programs are the seasonal Resident Company Initiative and the Community Live Arts Residency, which is new and provides a six-month “incubator” residence where artists are given rehearsal space and free reign to complete a community-based arts project related to their work. Both have kept the space (and the PVD performance scene, itself) humming. AS220’s third initiative, the Production Residency, has been in place since AS220 took over the space.

The 2015-2016 choices for Resident Companies are Counter-Productions, Romp of Otters, the Manton Avenue Project (MAP) and Strange Attractor. Counter-Productions held a reading series in the fall and will present stage productions in the winter and spring; Romp of Otters hosted a launch party and will mount “sweeps weeks” worth of productions this winter and springtime; MAP will present original works by their Olneyville-area students throughout the winter, spring and summer; and Strange Attractor will showcase a collaborative project at a works in process showing in April, with an additional run of performances in June.

The Community Live Arts Residency counts Strange Attractor as its inaugural recipient, comprising composer Kristen Volness, video artist Xander Marro and interdisciplinary artist (slash spirit guide) Carolyn Gennari. These diverse artists will collaborate on a piece called Before We Begin, and will strengthen the connective tissue in the small arts community further with the artists volunteering at the Manton Avenue Project in Olneyville in conjunction with the show, and taking over the summer 2016 playwriting cycle.

The programs are administered by Marc Boucai, a self-described recovering academic who moved from New York City about a year ago to take the helm as Theatre Director of AS220. “I spent seven years of my life writing this Marxist, Leftist community-based dissertation that no one will read, which was supposed to be about doing change in the world,” he recalls. “Coming to AS220 and running a community arts space where I get to make that change happen on a daily basis… was worth my career shift.”

Marc says that some of the financial sustainability, still a delicate balance for any arts venture in this economy, is a result of investing in resident companies that typically bring along their own audiences. What’s more, the arrangement benefits the companies themselves, allowing them to have the space and time to conceive, workshop and perform their own unique work in a place where they feel at home.

“A theater company feels like it becomes a company when it has a space that they can go back to and feel some degree of ownership in,” says Marc. “If every show is in a different space… it’s really difficult to concentrate not only on doing work, but building a very specific culture around the company.”

Marc was enlivened by the response of Bert Crenca – the outgoing Artistic Director and founder of AS220 – to go one step further and develop a robust theater program on the heels of the Perishable closing. “You can feel it in the space; the history of over 20 years of really daring, innovative performances,” says Marc. “During the first few years, we were figuring out how to keep that program sustainable, financially. Now we’re at a point of trying to figure out how the theater can best serve the community that uses it – and that’s a variety of communities. I’m interested in having the space speak to a whole bunch of different sets of the population of the city…. to highlight the multiplicity and diversity of Providence.”

AS220 Live Arts Residencies
as220.org/live-arts-residencies

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