HERE Arts Center is a New York City based off-off broadway presenting house, founded in 1993, with two stages specializing in hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media and puppetry. From 1993-2009, HERE supported over 12,000 artists and served approximately 950,000 audience members. HERE supports the work of artists at all stages in their careers through fully produced works, commissions and subsidized performance and rehearsal space.
HERE describes their mission as “supporting artists' independence within an interdependent community. The HERE community provides the artist with access, arts management innovation, and nonprofit enterprise. We measure our success by the lively, active exchange that occurs in our spaces daily. With this in mind, our seasons are driven by the needs of our community.”
They are located in SoHo on 145 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013 between Spring and Broome. The space has been totally rebuilt and redesigned for 5 months and for the first time since 1993. This renovation had a cost of a million dollars. It happened at the beginning of 2008 and was the occasion for a big reopening gala in June, gathering together a few productions that happened to be important to HERE in some way.
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Since 1993, HERE has served over 12,000 emerging to mid-career artists developing hybrid performance and work that does not fit into a conventional programming agenda. Examples include Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues; Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique; Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers; Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven; Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts; and Joey Arias & Basil Twist’s Arias with a Twist. Work produced and presented at HERE has garnered 13 OBIE awards, an OBIE grant for artistic achievement, a 2006 Edwin Booth Award (“for Outstanding Contribution to NY Theatre”) from the CUNY Graduate Center, three Drama Desk nominations, two Berrilla Kerr Awards, four NY Innovative Theatre Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Recently, HERE received a $500,000 federal grant by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Artistic Director Kristin Marting picked up a 2005 BAX10 Award for Arts Managers. In 2005, HERE purchased its long-time home and has just completed a complete renovation in 2008, all through a five-year, $5 million “Secure HERE’s Future” campaign.
There are two theatres (including a 63-seat proscenium and a 150-seat flexible blackbox), a cafe/gallery, and support spaces.
Each season, HERE produces three to six works, which are developed over a one to three-year period through Resident Artist programs: the hybrid performance-based HARP and the puppetry-focused Dream Music. Programming for 2008-09 includes premieres by downtown legends Joey Arias and Basil Twist, director Mallory Catlett’s visceral war-song cabaret, choreographer Faye Driscoll’s dance memoir, composer Christina Campanella and playwright Stephanie Fleischmann’s installation-art song cycle, and more. They also feature work-in-progress showings by our Resident Artists in our annual CULTUREMART festival, in addition to regularly presenting the work of Visiting Artists (such as the upcoming New York premiere of Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines by former Resident Artists and all wear bowlers creators, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle).
HERE Arts Center offers every year a chance to emergent or already known artists to develop their project in a 3-5 year time. The selection takes place every January. HERE receives each year more than 100 applications for the HARP (Here Arts Residency Program) and chooses about 20 projects that match its interests and concerns. The new group meets every month, added to the old people and everybody discusses the projects, giving advices and names that could be useful.
Between 1993 and 2009, HERE and the work presented at HERE have received: