One year after the Lindemann Performing Arts Center opened its doors in October 2023, a handful of student groups expressed frustration with the Brown Arts Institute after struggling to book the new space.
But since then, the BAI has been making a “concerted effort” to accommodate student performances, BAI’s Senior Director of Administration and Operations Chira DelSesto said in an interview with The Herald.
While the center’s first year was focused on making “splashy marks” on campus by hosting big-name artists —such as Carrie Mae Weems, Jon Batiste and Julien Creuzet — DelSesto said BAI is now “working to bring in more student groups (and) support more student projects.”
“Over the past four years, more than 30 student groups have practiced, rehearsed, performed, presented and recorded in BAI spaces and received professional technical and logistical support from an amazing team of educators,” wrote Jen Lucero, the assistant director for performing and visual arts at the Student Activities Office, in an email to The Herald.
But Lucero believes there is still room for improvement. Of the 75 student groups Lucero advises, 53 stage performances at least once a semester. But finding spaces for these performances is often difficult, she wrote.
Groups that want to book the Lindemann’s Main Performance Hall must plan at least two years in advance.
“The Lindemann is a professional theater” akin to a “Transformer” with its moving walls, audio-visual systems, lighting systems and safety systems, DelSesto said. Each reconfiguration, she added, costs thousands of dollars.
“Students are great and wonderful and scrappy” and can produce “amazing things in a common room in a dorm,” DelSesto said. “But that’s a very different kind of theatrical experience than coming into a space like the Main Hall of the Lindemann.”
The Main Hall’s expensive, technical equipment — which can be configured in at least five different ways — presents yet another road block to student performances.
DelSesto said she can’t just “let people without proper training, including safety training, loose in a space where maybe there’s not a floor where there was one yesterday.”
Going forward, she hopes to establish meetings between student groups and the BAI a few years in advance of a Lindemann performance.
“I don’t necessarily need to know exactly what show you want to do in two years,” she said. But she does need to know if a group “wants to do something. … We can start with that. We can work with that.”
But creating a cohesive relationship between student groups and the BAI is “going to be a long process, unfortunately,” she added.
Ben Rozea ’27 — co-director of the Brown Ballet Company and design director for Fashion@Brown — said the Lindemann helps “develop Brown’s institutional profile as an artist incubator and as a leading arts institution.”
“It wasn’t built to be a student space,” they said. “It’s disappointing to have such a beautiful space and not be able to use it as a student and as a student group.”
But Rozea feels that the BAI is now trying to make the Lindemann more “for the College rather than for the institution.”
This coming spring, Fashion@Brown will host their annual spring runway show in the Main Hall instead of at Davol Square in the Jewelry District, where it’s been hosted the last two years, according to BAI Director of Marketing and Communications Peter Chenot.
This semester, the BAI also introduced a new student ambassadors initiative, Chenot added. The ambassadors — members of BAI’s ArtsCrew — are trained to give tours of BAI spaces, including the Lindemann, and answer students’ questions about involvement with the BAI.
Zane Elinson ’28 is excited about increasing student involvement in the space, he told The Herald during his first shift as a student ambassador. Student group involvement, he added, is at the “forefront” of the BAI’s mind.
“It’s an incredible space,” Elinson added. “For it to be open to student activities is going to be a really awesome opportunity.”
Talia LeVine is a section editor covering arts and culture. They study Political Science and Visual Art with a focus on photography. In their free time, they can be found drinking copious amounts of coffee.
