Nice One, Misha: Baryshnikov Arts Center at 37 Arts Earns LEED Honors for New Jerome Robbins Theater

If you've hung around with artists recently -- or at all -- then you've heard someone say, "this is a tough time for the arts." And while it's pretty much always a tough time for the arts -- that's why they're the arts and not, say, arbitrage -- this is New York, which means that there's still plenty of great places to see performances. One of the better-known and generally one of the better of these is the Baryshnikov Arts Center, housed in the John W. Averitt-designed 37 ARTS building in Chelsea. Having living dance legend Mikhail Baryshnikov as part of the brand obviously helps, but BAC also presents very good, very ambitious work. With the news that the BAC's new Jerome Robbins Theater has received unspecified LEED certification, that ambition has crossed over from something my wife (a dancer who works at another awesome modern dance presenter) cares a lot about to something I care a lot about. Just like that, we have something to talk about at dinner. Thanks, Misha!

And yet there's more to this story than a dinner at my apartment filled with bon mots and delightful conversation -- which is kind of our dinner every night, if you count chewing and serious conversations about Top Chef as bon mots. The BAC's re-imagining of the 299-square-foot proscenium-style theater as the ultra-modern new Jerome Robbins Theater is scheduled to wrap up in February 2010, and should provide a venue that's both intriguing and ambitious enough to match the BAC's impressive dance and theater programming and the work of soon-to-be company-in-residence the Wooster Group. (That's a compliment, the Wooster Group is dope)

The Baryshnikov Arts Center occupies the top three floors of 37 ARTS, with the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, a new resource and rehearsal center for the chamber ensemble Orchestra of St. Luke's, occupying the lower three levels. Much of the renovation work on the Jerome Robbins Theater was done with theater-type things in mind -- improved sightlines, installing state-of-the-art lighting and rigging systems, that sort of stuff -- but a commitment to using recycled content and local/sustainable construction materials earned the project the LEED nod from USGBC. We'll have more on this project in weeks to come, I'm sure. We'll see what I can learn at dinner.

Check out the BAC's very cool slideshow of the renovation here.