How the Center came to be.

The brain-child of Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers (the dynamic duo behind the NY theater company Trick Saddle), The Center for New Work is a multi-venue roving institute for the development and presentation of cutting edge performance and visual art. Started in 2016, the Center was created to fulfill the need for artistic support, intellectual exchange, and Arts Residencies in the Bay Area. Our hope is that the Center will help struggling artists who want to live and make work here. It is essential to support artists in the Bay Area now— at a time when the NEA is under attack and creative thinking, strategic partnerships and innovation in the arts is essential to our survival. We believe the increased pressure to make commercially successful work in such an expensive place squelches artists' ability to innovate, experiment and explore. We want to create a new paradigm.

CONTACT: director@centerfornewwork.org

With partners and host sites throughout the Bay Area, the Center has a three-pronged approach:

• To provide free space toward creative research and act as a laboratory for experimentation

• To offer the community master classes in dance, theater and visual art

• To present new work in the visual and performing arts by established and emergent artists

The Center is designed to occupy creative space on a temporary basis throughout the Bay Area. We specialize in showcasing new works by established and emergent artists. Begun in 2016, the Center initially featured workshops in Grotowski technique by master teachers Wendy vanden Heuvel and Raina von Waldenburg, and artist-in-residencies by Director Becca Wolff and her theater company Tilted Field and choreographer Milissa Payne Bradley and her dance company, The Milissa Payne Project. The Center will introduce The Incubator, our Artist in Residence program in fall 2017 with spaces for 10 individual artists / arts groups.

Near-term plans, longer-term aspirations and visions for the future.

We want to connect artists to free space for the incubation of creative work. We want to support artistic research and connect artists to a crucible of other generative artists who can help inform each other's work. And we want to foster the development and presentation of new work while contributing to the intellectual exchange of ideas within the greater arts community. We have structured The Incubator program like that of the HARP residency in NYC. Local artists will be selected through an application process and invited to become part of a think tank of artists who support each other in the development of new work through a workshop format. The Center provides free rehearsal space and its Incubator arts collective provides feedback during the one-to-three year period of creation from germination of an idea to production & presentation of the final piece.

THE INCUBATOR

Over the near-term, we will be launching The Incubator program with the first class of artists invited to apply this summer for residency starting in fall 2017. In the long-term, we hope to expand the Center to locations throughout the Bay Area (San Francisco, East Bay, South Bay and North Bay) with multiple master classes, artist-in-residencies and new works being presented. We have plans to debut a site-specific series Arts Services celebrating famous San Francisco & Bay Area "Happenings" from the 1960's and 1970's, featuring some of the original artists in these reinterpretations. Although we have no permanent home, the Center for New Work makes its artistic home the Bay Area itself in order to reach a broad spectrum of artists and arts loving community.

PRESS

In Precarious Times, San Francisco Theater Artists Fight Back

HUFFINGTON POST 03/24/2017
Carla Escoda, Contributor

At Tuesday’s Arts Advocacy Rally at San Francisco’s City Hall, theatre artist Clove Galilee tells me she was standing in the crowd listening to speakers when a car drove by and the driver screamed, “Get a real JOB!”

“The ‘Artistic Class’ is under attack in our country,” observed Galilee, “and unfortunately the Bay Area – despite all its money, especially in the tech industry – does not seem to value the power of the arts enough.”

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