Brown University unveils new performing arts center
PROVIDENCE — After nearly four years of construction, the Lindemann Performing Arts Center — a jewel in Brown University’s already ornate artsspace crown — is complete.
The opening of the 101,000square-foot venue, which will house performances, classes, and research work in music, theater, dance, and media, will be held on Oct. 21 and will include a full day of festivities — open to the public — beginning at noon.
In addition to tours of the state-of-the-art structure, located on Angell Street in Brown’s Perelman Arts District, the university is hosting a parade, block party (with food trucks), a variety of arts forums, and pop-up performances. At 7:30 p.m., the center’s inaugural public concert will feature renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman, who will perform with the Brown University Orchestra and the Brown University Chorus.
Avery Willis Hoffman, artistic director of the Brown Arts Institute, said the opening festivities will welcome the community, which underscores the center’s role as both a hub for arts research and artistic expression and a home for creative partnership with faculty, students, and surrounding communities.
“This moment marks the beginning of an amplification of the arts across campus and beyond, with this transformative new space promising to inspire new realms of possibility for arts scholarship, performance, and artistic innovation,” Hoffman said.
On a recent tour of the facility, Hoffman proudly highlighted the versatility and unique features of the center — including its one-of-a-kind technical, acoustic, and spatial capabilities — designed by the New York City-based REX architectural firm.
With collapsible walls, nested and moveable gantries, removable seats, and adjustable floors, the spaces throughout the structure offer numerous configurations that are adaptable to multiple art forms, Hoffman said, and “allow the focus to be on the artistic process so there is an extraordinary opportunity to dig into research possibilities [in] the arts and practice of the arts.”
All six surfaces of the Lindemann’s shoebox-shaped main hall modulate physically and acoustically to create five completely different stage and audience configurations — experimental media, recital, end-stage, orchestra, and flat floor.
The five pre-set configurations can accommodate Brown’s 100-piece orchestra (plus a 70-person chorus), individual recitals, major theatrical productions, immersive video and scenic projection with 40channel ambisonic audio, digital cinema, and traditional lectures and receptions. The main hall seats 275 people in the end-stage configuration, 388 for recitals, and 530 in the orchestra configuration.
Among the facility’s lowerlevel amenities are dance studios and rehearsal spaces that can be transformed into “black box” stages, and spacious, modern dressing rooms/green rooms that bear the names of well-known benefactors including Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones (the Douglas Zeta-Jones Dressing Room) and Jill Furman, a Tony and Emmy Award-winning producer (Broadway musicals include “Hamilton” and “In the Heights”) who received a bachelor’s degree in art history from Brown in 1990.
Douglas and Zeta-Jones’s son, Dylan, graduated from Brown in 2022, and their daughter, Carys, is currently a student at the university.
Brown President Christina Paxson said in a prepared statement that the Lindemann’s opening marks a “transformative new chapter for arts at Brown” and will enable “even more collaboration between creators and scholars across the arts and many other fields of study.”
“This truly amazing building promises to inspire innovation and experimentation in ways we can’t even yet imagine,” Paxson said.
“We’re delighted to celebrate the Lindemann with our own campus and the greater community for events that will offer an exciting glimpse at how brilliant performers, artists, and scholars will engage with this one-of-a-kind facility to push creative boundaries for generations to come.”