The NYC Arts Underground
In recent history, downtown NYC has been considered one of the strongest contributors to American arts and culture. In the 60s and 70s, buildings seized by the city for non-payment of taxes by absentee landlords became incubators for a renaissance in the arts. The availability of cheap rent and large spaces spawned punk rock, the post-modern arts movement and hip-hop, among others. The downtown scene also gave rise to new theater companies. The works produced have alway been of a different feel than the more traditional fare - experimental and fringe, unrestricted by the dictates of big budgets and their accompanying bureaucracy, and characterized by a New York willingness to push the boundries.
Living downtown during the nineties, it seemed like everyone I knew was either an artist, actor, architect, musician, writer, director, photographer or in some way connected to the arts. Walking down any street you could find art; tile mosaics over-growing walls and sign posts, beautiful graffitti, the sound of practicing bands blasting up through sidewalk grating, store front experimental theaters offering a peek at mysteries hidden behind black curtain walls. I think this is why we all lived downtown: there was an unspoken agreement among the residents that downtown's artistic lifestyle would remain alive during our watch. Not just another New York crowd, but a gathering of individuals.
Today those large spaces are no longer affordable. Skyrocketing rents over the last two decades have pushed most of the artists out. As performance spaces downtown lose their fight against meteoric real-estate values, the threat to our living history of arts, theater and music is not an idle one. Last year saw the closing of three more hold-outs, the Ohio Theater in SoHo, Collective: Unconscious performance group and Mo Pitkins' House of Satisfaction, a relatively new establishment which served as a museum of sorts to downtown's recent influence on the arts.
Although we acknowledge that the internet can never capture the experience of live theater, it is the goal of NYC Live Arts to document as much of what remains as we can. We will record perfomances from downtown arts spaces, bars and theater spaces and stream them live over the internet, free of charge. We hope that by doing so we will be easing downtown theater's transition from the physical to the virtual performance space, and continuing the long tradition of encouraging the growth of new ideas about the human condition that only a strong arts community can ensure.