These include companies such as Coach and Google, who have neighbouring offices and stores. As is traditional in the US, where public funding for the arts is minimal and institutions rely on philanthropy, the names of the biggest donors are prominently displayed in the foyer. So far the Shed has raised an astonishing $500m.
I said, ‘If everyone is asked to invest in a centre for all arts – that encourages audiences who may feel like the arts isn’t for them – then I’m down with the neighbourhood.’” “We live in a world of unregulated capitalism. But, while the Shed is a public building, it’s still situated in one of the most despised private urban developments of recent times.
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There’s also a full-time community arts programme, including a free display of work this summer by 52 emerging artists chosen via an open call and funded by the Shed. Tickets are cheap by New York standards and Poots says there will be $10 ones available for each show “and not just in the nosebleed seats”. Photograph: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images The Shed, which is next to Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel (right) in the Hudson Yards development of New York. I want to do an immersive, spectacular performance.”
“I don’t want to do a proscenium theatre show, which you can do everywhere in Manhattan. Set in Flushing, Queens, at the other end of the 7 subway line from the Shed, it is an “airborne show”, says Chen, one that will make the most of the main space’s six-storey-high ceiling. The first season includes a collaboration between Björk and the theatre director Lucrecia Martel called Cornucopia and Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng with choreography by Akram Khan, written by the team behind Kung Fu Panda. MIF was biennial the Shed needs filling constantly.
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Poots will have the whole building to play with – two performance spaces, plus the galleries. It’s his ambitious ideas, proven ability to pull them off, and enviable contacts book that have landed the 51-year-old Scot this gig. At Manchester, he staged Chinese operas by Damon Albarn, a Kraftwerk gig in a velodrome and a collaboration between the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and film-maker Adam Curtis, which ended with a man wielding a chainsaw chasing theatregoers out of the building. Poots is a seasoned impresario, who knows the show must go on. In Reich Richter Pärt, two immersive live performances – one conceived by Steve Reich and Gerhard Richter, the other by Richter and Arvo Pärt – explore the shared sensory language of visual art and music. It’s a distinctly rough-and-ready start for a building that cost $475m. There are workers in hard hats busy hammering together seating platforms, some escalators don’t work, and the main space – under a huge shell that slides back and forth on huge wheels – is horribly echoey.
So will it be welcomed by New York’s culture-soaked residents, artistic community and the tourists queuing for the Instagram bait of the Vessel next door?Īs the world’s media files into the press conference last Wednesday, it’s clear things are not going entirely to plan. Its CEO and artistic director is Alex Poots, formerly boss of the Manchester international festival, whose challenging remit is to show only new work, not revivals, with a brief to mash together different artistic disciplines – established artists with new ones, pop culture with high art. The first major multi-arts institution to open in New York for decades, it is intended to bring culture to Hudson Yards, the controversial $25bn development of luxury flats and shops on Manhattan’s midwest side. More storm to the exits at the end, ostentatiously not clapping, as Fleming and a surprised-looking Whishaw take their bows to the rest of the 500-strong audience.
The first person walks out of this preview performance about 30 minutes in over the next hour around another 10 leave, the clomping of their shoes on an uncarpeted floor making them impossible to ignore. Others watching, however, seem less taken with Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a half-spoken, half-sung play written specially for Whishaw by the poet Anne Carson.
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