WTC Performing Arts Center Reaches New Stage

A preliminary sketch of the World Trade Center performing arts center, which is supposed to open in the next four to five years. Image: Charcoalblue

After years of controversy and unanswered questions, the cultural component of the World Trade Center is finally taking shape, at least on paper.

The performing arts center, yet unfunded and with a hoped-for opening in four to five years, announced on Wednesday its artistic leadership, and it released a preliminary sketch of the center’s three-story quarters that it expects will feature dance, music, theater and opera.

The center, to be located at the site of the temporary PATH station, will have three theaters on the second floor, with 550, 250 and 150 seats that can be combined for larger audiences. The drawing, by the London-based theater design firm Charcoalblue, also shows a cabaret space, cafe/bar, and box office on its first floor, and a terrace on the roof.

David Lan, a playwright and librettist and the artistic director of London’s much-heralded Young Vic, has been named the consulting artistic director. Lucy Sexton, producer and director of the New York Dance and Performance Awards, known as the Bessies, will be the associate artistic director.

In a phone interview with the Trib, Maggie Boepple, the center’s president, said that Downtown residents and others in the community have told her that, along with wanting to see a wide range of performances, “they also want to come and have a cup of coffee and hang out...which is why we really have thought a lot about having [the center] open from breakfast to late at night.”

According to the announcement, the center’s productions will not only be simulcast to audiences beyond New York, but could could include collaborations with artists in other cities worldwide.  “It’s going to be a ‘smart’ theater, that means very connected,” Boepple told Community Board 1 late last year. “We take the use of the word ‘world’ very seriously.” A possible name for the center, she said, is the World Center for the Performing Arts.

Sexton emphasized the center’s interest in collaborating with other New York City arts institutions, from the Joyce Theater, City Center and the Public Theater to Downtown organizations such as Gibney Dance, the Flea Theater and Three-Legged Dog.

“I think the goal and mission of the place is to commission and produce new work by New York artists in collaboration with international artists and partners,” Sexton said in a phone interview. “It will be a way of co-creating work that also tours and has an international presence.”

Sexton sees the center as supporting the work of other institutions “rather than as competition or repeating what others are doing, so it’s serving a need that’s not already met in the New York arts landscape.”

While Boepple has said that the cost to build the center will be below initial estimates of between $300 million and $700 million, she has to yet indicate exactly how much it would be. And it still remains unclear where the money will come from.

“We’re not ready to talk publicly about cost,” she said. “We have to design a building that is affordable.”

But with the announced appointments and the vision of a flexible center that allows for many types of performances, private sector fundraising can now begin, according to Julie Menin, a member of the center’s board of directors and the former chair of CB1.

“What’s so exciting about these plans is the various configurations of space,” she said, “where you can put on performances of all different sizes.”

Boepple would not say whether Frank Gehry, whose firm did preliminary work on the building’s design, will be the center’s architect. “All we’ve done is slow things down because we needed to understand what the artistic vision was going to be in this building and how you make that work,” she said. “That’s not working with an architect, that’s working with a theater designer, and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

In the meantime, CB1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes pronounced the latest announcements as “wonderful” for Lower Manhattan and the entire city.

“New York is one of the leading cities in the world,” she said, “and this will help us to continue to be at the top in the cultural arena as well.”