A look at San Francisco’s Safehouse for the Performing Arts. Pictured: Resident artist Lili Weckler in rehearsal.
Indie dance incubator to celebrate new home in former gay-porn house in Tenderloin
Indie choreographers, musicians and theater makers are a scrappy bunch, equally adept at blazing creative trails and finding off-the-grid performance venues. But even their superior hand-to-mouth skills are no match for San Francisco’s superheated real estate market, where underground spaces are being razed in favor of high-rises, and skyrocketing rents make surviving locations unaffordable.
In an end run around the market, a network of major foundations, the mayor’s office and nonprofit partners are helping small arts organizations play the property game — and win. Joe Landini’s dance incubator Safehouse for the Performing Arts is the latest indie to join the landed gentry.
In February, Landini signed a 15-year lease on the Tea Room Theater, a 49-seat former gay-porn house on the ground floor of the West Hotel, at 145 Eddy St. At Safehouse’s 10th-anniversary fundraising party this spring, the public can take a first peek inside.
Landini is relieved to settle down after a nomadic first decade, during which Safehouse (then called the Garage) relocated from Howard Street to Bryant Street to 1 Grove St. “It was always, ‘Have we made enough money to make the rent, and is there enough money for the next move?’ ” he recalls. Stability is an odd sensation, but “now the board and
myself can spend time reflecting on the real needs of the artistic community. How do we build on that, and can we be more?”
Safehouse (the acronym stands for Saving Arts From Extinction) is now rooted in an independent performing-arts nexus that includes Exit Theatre, CounterPulse, PianoFight, the Center for New Music and the Luggage Store Gallery. It’s a renaissance rather than a reinvention of the 33-block Uptown Tenderloin Historic District. The Tivoli Opera House and the Baldwin Theater are long gone, but ACT’s century-old Strand Theater, the 1922 Golden Gate Theatre and the 1926 Orpheum Theatre now anchor the district.
Emerging artists don’t fill opera houses, though; they thrive in small, flexible spaces with the lowest possible overhead. That’s where people like Landini come in. “If there’s anybody who can make magic on a dime, it is Joe Landini,” says Tom DeCaigny, director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission, a significant player in the real estate strategy.
“It’s been a really critical pathway for emerging artists,” DeCaigny says of Safehouse, a lean organization dedicated to earlyand mid-career dance makers, LGBTQ artists and cross-genre collaboration. Laura Larry Arrington, Alyssa Mitchel and Dominika Bednarska are among the many beneficiaries of the programs Landini offers.
The quarterly Resident Artists Workshop provides studio time and performance production in exchange for five hours of housekeeping work at 1 Grove St., while the Sum-
of Economic and Workforce Development and other departments to repurpose vacant ground-floor retail spaces for the arts and other nonprofits — and breathe new life into the neighborhood.
“That commercial space is a community asset,” says Donald Falk, CEO of the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., Landini’s landlord. The corporation owns 40 low-income housing properties, like the West Hotel; the protected housing stock prevents displacement of residents, who have welcomed the artists as neighbors. “We’re not simply looking at how we can go about getting the most possible rent,” Falk says, “but also the contribution the use of that space can make to the neighborhood.”
Exit Theatre staked an early claim to the Tenderloin, in 1983. “Back then, it was offlimits,” Artistic Director Christina Augello said by phone. “People thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to go do anything in the Tenderloin, it’s a scary neighborhood.’ ” She’s seen perceptions steadily evolve since then. “The city changed, real estate has changed, boundaries have changed. And now we are the San Francisco theater district.”
Acquiring property, even via a nonprofit landlord, requires negotiating savvy and seed money that most artists don’t have. So in the wake of the Economic and Workforce Development’s initiative, numerous organizations have cropped up with real estate readiness training, creative financing and leasing strategies.
The return on this substantial investment of time and grant money is quantitative, according to Mayor Ed Lee. “Performing arts are vital to the fabric of this diverse neighborhood as they will draw residents and visitors from
around the City,” he wrote in an email. “These new arts organizations demonstrate the City’s ongoing commitment to revitalize the Central Market and the Tenderloin communities.”
Adam Fong, executive director of the Center for New Music, argues that the qualitative return is just as valuable. “What I’ve seen happening in other cities, such as Munich or Manhattan, is that when it gets so expensive that the artists can’t live there, you still have artistic culture, but largely you have consumption happening and not creation,” he said by phone.
“I don’t think that’s what people really want to happen in San Francisco. I think people take pride in having homegrown talent and being the place where invention happens.”
Most Safehouse artists will continue to innovate at 1 Grove St., until the lease runs out in 2018 and the Tea Room becomes its full-time home. Until then, 145 Eddy will be dedicated to the queer dance residency Airspace.
“There is a real need to support queercentric art making, especially young, multiabled, people of color and trans artists,” says Landini. Airspace is the right first use for the Tea Room, he says, given its history as an all-male theater in a pioneering queer neighborhood: A block away, at 101 Taylor, stood Compton’s Cafeteria, where trans women launched the nation’s first trans-rights riot in August 1966. Earlier this year, Supervisor Jane Kim proposed legislation to designate the area the Compton’s Transgender, Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual District.
Landini is also busy deploying grant money for renovations like a sprung dance floor, a Disabilities Act-compliant restroom and 360-degree soundproofing in time for a September opening. He’s also restructuring Safehouse as a collective, with lead artists like choreographer Lili Weckler taking on larger, yearlong service commitments.
“Joe is just an incredibly generous person,” says Weckler, 29, who is writing grants for Safehouse while developing her contemporary-dance rock-opera triptych, “De Huma.” “I see him again and again put himself — maybe even his own sanity — on the line for the artists who come to him.”
Kary Schulman, director of San Francisco Grants for the Arts, echoes the sentiment. “One tenacious individual can make such a huge difference,” she says. “He cares, and it serves all of the artists really, really well. They need that.”