Tallahassee government leaders have voted to spend nearly $2-million in taxes on a project called TLH Arts inc. But that decision has left many with questions like what is TLH Arts and what does it mean for the community?
Kasandra Rose is on a summer music tour that includes stops in Chicago, St. Louis, and on this night Tallahassee. She’s playing in Indian Head factory’s performance space--a small café scattered with colorful chairs and an alcove for small acts with a backdrop of fairy lights. The other side of the building is a professional recording studio. Chan Leonard and his wife Tracy opened the space a few years ago.
Lenard says when he first moved to Tallahassee there weren’t many places to see performances.
“It used to be like dead—dead, dead—really dead! Now you’ve got no excuse. You can literally look in the paper or Facebook events and find something every night. It may not be your thing but there’s definitely something happening," Lenard says.
And there's a similar story in the performing arts community. Laura Johnson calls herself an advocate for the performing arts. She’s also the Executive Director of the Southern Shakespeare Festival.
“All of these very, terrific small theatre companies popping up in Tallahassee and there’s incredible talent in our city and we grow it really, really well. The problem is supporting it,” Johnson says.
While there are dozens are performing arts spaces in Tallahassee—from high schools, to universities, to outdoor amphitheaters--Johnson says small companies often struggle to find spaces to perform and rehearse. And she says she’s seen theatre groups fail because of that.
“In order to grow your audience you really have to have an established venue that folks associate with you, so they know that for instance Theatre Tallahassee has a home. And so you know to see theatre Tallahassee performances you go to theatre Tallahassee. Well you’ve got, you know there was Canopy Roads, there’s the Hispanic Theatre Company, there’s Irish Repertory Theatre. A lot of folks don’t know these companies because they’ll pop up at this particular venue and then six months later pop up over here and so they’re not at an identifiable location,” Johnson says
Johnson and others in the arts community are hopeful the answer to that problem will be found at the end of a dead end road, in a rundown building the state once used as its tourism department warehouse—and the intended location for TLH Arts Inc.
Jake Kiker calls himself one of the organizers of TLH Arts. He’s also a founder for the coworking and business incubation space, Domi Station.
“We have the ability to create this space much like Domi, but arts centric and arts focused for to create those same types of collisions for those groups that may never interact or intersect,” Kiker says.
TLH Arts inc is expected to include performance space, as well as recording studios, plus spaces for learning and collaborating. Johnson hopes it will provide performing companies without a home, an identifiable location--and at reasonable cost. And despite a few initial concerns Chan Lenard from Indian Head Factory has come around. He hopes TLH Arts will be a chance for more people to learn about the recording businesses—helping build Tallahassee’s reputation a place artists travel to for music.
“That’s an interesting thing and I think Tallahassee is very, very worth of artists coming down and taking a look,” Lenard says.
Kiker says he supports those ideas and hopes to partner with both Lenard and Johnson. But at this point, he admits it’s not completely clear yet what role TLH Arts will play.
“That’s why if you’ve actually seen the floor plan of the space, we’ve worked really hard to ensure that it has that maximum flexibility. It doesn’t have to be the huge performing arts room. We can cut that into two. You have the gallery space. We have the admin and coworking offices. We want to make sure we’re not locking into one thing and then that model doesn’t work. We want to make sure there’s enough time and energy to pivot and use those spaces differently if we need to,” Kiker says.
Kiker says he plans to work closely with the people he hopes will use the space in order to get the best understanding of what’s needed. He also plans to work with the city and community redevelopment agency and he’ll have to raise the rest of the money. In the long run, he says it’s a win-win for the city—especially since TLH Arts will be in a government owned building. If the project works, Kiker says great. If not, the city has building with new upgrades and new potential.
