Constellation Charitable Foundation

CONTACT:

161 First Street, 2nd Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142-1207
617 939 1900
constellationcenter.org

Glenn A. KnicKrehm, President

DESCRIPTION:

Small arts organizations are currently in a “no-win” situation. Performance spaces are too few and too small, foreshortening the audience development that is needed to enable financial viability. Boston, among all cities in the nation, enjoys an unusually large number of excellent small-to-medium-sized performing arts groups, yet we enter the 21st century with a nearly total lack of equivalent small-to-medium-sized performance spaces. Massachusetts as a whole enjoys a number of excellent community and regional theatre companies, yet they lack adequate theatres to support their growth and strengthen their viability.

The Constellation Performing Arts and Film Center Project is committed to responding to all of these needs by creating four world-class halls (total seating: 1,500, largest unit 800-1000 seats) and related supporting spaces in a single facility. Project participants have already invested three years to perfect the design of what will be the best music performance space in the world for smaller and medium-sized groups. The facility will include: a Recital Hall for orchestral music; a second hall specifically suited for jazz, folk, gospel, and world music; a “Jewel Box” hall for more intimate performances; a state-of-the-art motion picture theatre, of a quality that does not now exist in the East; and a music recording studio and film post-production space. The Recital Hall will feature the only authentically produced Bach organ outside Eastern Europe. The movie theatre will feature its own authentic theatre organ appropriate to accompanying the classic “silents”. It will be one of the best-equipped film auditoria in the world, appropriate for the best film archives in Europe and America. It is intended that the movie business will help financially to support the performing arts uses of the facility. If this venture succeeds, it can be reproduced in other cities across the nation and around the world, thus making a strategic difference to the arts.

This new kind of facility promises, as never before, to foster increased dialogues between collaborating artists, art forms, audiences and performers, and old and new technologies. It offers a rare philanthropic opportunity: to help create a strategic breakthrough for an entire field of philanthropy. The Project is conceived and inspired by its leading donor, who is contributing substantially. The project costs an estimated $70 million, and about half of this has now been raised. A site has been purchased in Cambridge.

(2000: CULTURE: Arts: Performing: Music and Dance)