Before two new stages for dance, music, theater and other arts join the area’s arts ecosystem, there comes a party: Saturday’s free Platform Opening Day in Kendall Square, where the highlights include Bandaloop – a “vertical dance company” that performs on tethers, bouncing around outside and midway down the terra-cotta facade of the gorgeous, 16-story building that Takeda will make its headquarters within a year.
At the base of that headquarters, 585 Kendall, is The Platform – the public arts and community space that includes the 404-seat Takeda Theater, 125-seat Tempo Stage in the lobby, a rentable rehearsal space, food and drink and lots of room for hanging out. “We want to have the neighborhood come in here and feel welcome,” said Connie Chin, chief executive of Global Arts Live, the space’s programmer.
The event shows it off Saturday with the Kendall Square Orchestra, Tiny Desk musician Ella Faye, the Floor Lords dance troupe and other performers, a reading by former Cambridge poet populist Jean Dany Joachim, a vendor market and an introduction by artist Rachel Mica Weiss to “Fog Labyrinth,” her work of nearly 7,000 color-changing acrylic rods that hangs over the lobby.
Some Opening Day events aside from the Bandaloop performances are outside, where landscapers are installing interactive chimes visitors can use a bit like Tom Hanks in “Big.” Some are inside at Tempo, so the public can get a sense of what’s possible at The Platform as future visitors – they can come eat their lunch in the commons, for instance – or as an artist who might perform there. In between are those who might want to use the space in a public way, such as using it to hold yoga classes. “It can be very flexible,” Chin said during an October tour. “This is all a landscape for discovery and meeting up.”
Part of an arts ecosystem
A boost to area arts is what drives this space, though – there’s a reason the facade of the building is meant to suggest the rippling of a theater curtain, Chin said.
Global Arts Live, which went 36 years presenting international music and dance without a home base, claims the stage for 100 nights at The Platform; the rest are for the community, designed so “people can self-produce reasonably economically and still have access to our box office and our website,” Chin said.
Twenty-five nights of use will be given away free to the community, Chin said. The application process is being worked out, but is meant to “serve artists that would not otherwise get access to spaces like this.”
“There are so many extraordinary artists here, and part of what we’re trying to do here is to provide space for for people to work. I feel like it’s a little bit of a renaissance, because postpandemic, organizations were in recovery. Now they’ve got their heads up and they’re thinking toward the future,” Chin said.
A cultural district
With the coming of The Platform, talk has begun of a cultural district recognizing and promoting the opportunities there and at The Foundry, Multicultural Arts Center, MIT Museum and even the Museum of Science at the Boston city line. “We’re very much thinking, how can we all work together? How can we help anchor a cultural district here?” Chin said. The area also hosts a Cambridge Art Association gallery and other museums, galleries and an Art Walk Project that shares a focus with the Takeda building: joining art and science.
Cambridge’s Central Square was named one of the state’s four cultural districts (along with Essex, Marlborough and Sandwich) in 2012 for its “mix of small, funky, independently owned shops and creative startups”; the state board that awards the designation, formed two years earlier, looked for compact, walkable areas with a concentration of cultural facilities, activities and assets. Central Square has kept the designation despite a tough local economy that has driven out several institutions and businesses present during the first designation, including the All Asia and T.T. the Bear’s Place nightclubs, ImprovBoston comedy club, Out of the Blue and Mobius art galleries and the adult boutique Hubba-Hubba.
Especially as the American Repertory Theater prepares to leave Harvard Square for Allston, The Platform represents renewal in Cambridge, and not just because it has hired a staff of 30 to maintain it and crew the productions within, including from three booths looking down on the stage for lighting, spotlight and video editing. The Platform also fills a niche physically.
“There are the smallest spaces, like The Dance Complex. There are big downtown stages,” Chin said. “The ecosystem for a long time has really needed a midsized theater, and this is exactly answering to that.”
Shaping the space
To be a home for not just Global Arts Live but for “the rest of the arts community,” it worked with an ongoing advisory circle and real estate developer BioMed to build to ideal but keep rental rates low, underwritten by fundraising, Chin said.
Performers will find an extraordinary space, shaped and equipped from the ground up from the experience of Global Arts Live’s Maure Aronson as productions roamed and he saw what features theaters boasted or lacked. Though Chin claims no specific input on the design side, she has an MBA from Yale earned after dancing for 10 years in New York and applied at the Massachusetts dance mecca Jacob’s Pillow for 15 years, with the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and at the Boston Public Library. “I feel like everything I’ve done has led up to this moment,” Chin said.
They have crafted a 40-by-45 stage with a 72-foot opening in an intimate house with raked seating so each has a good view; a rehearsal area of the same size – so performers don’t need to adapt movement when they get before audiences – with mirrors, ballet bars and dedicated changing room with showers; four dressing rooms and an artist green room set up with everything from a record player to dishwasher and refrigerator; a 9-foot concert grand piano and baby grand by Yamaha; streaming capabilities (to guarantee Takeda can hold global meetings) and a potential live feed to the ground-floor public space; and an enormous amount of technical equipment for nearly every kind of performance.
Classical and circus
The Platform is the legacy of tech philanthropist Glenn KnicKrehm’s dream of building a $300 million cutting-edge, five-hall Constellation Center for classical music and opera – proposed in 1996, once expected to open in 2012, but bogged down in fundraising and acoustical research, ultimately conceded with a $50.5 million sale of the parcel to BioMed in 2018. But Chin is leery of overpromising as a stage for symphony.
The Kendall Square Orchestra was in here, “playing with no amplification, and it was surprisingly good,” Chin said. “It was clear, a little bit dry,” and a little bit of technical help on the edges might work. “We didn’t know if you could you do classical in this space acoustically, but we think the answer is yes now.”
The space is also getting toured by circus groups. “We’re not really set up for aerial, but circus is on the rise,” Chin said. “We’re very interested. We’ll see what can fit here.”
For dance, though? Chin is excited about how The Platform fits into a broader arts ecosystem as it stages Ballet X from Philadelphia on Nov. 21-22, the same weekend Vivo Performing Arts brings Ballet VC from Vancouver to Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre and the ICA hosts New York’s Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Co.
“Building a dance audience is something I’ve always been interested in, and the idea of having three major companies in Boston at the same time,” Chin said, “is thrilling to think about.”
The Platform Opening Day, noon to 4 p.m. at The Platform, 315 Kendall St., Kendall Square, Cambridge. Free.
