Carolina Performing Arts announces Franklin Street location

Chancellor Carol Folt took the stage at Memorial Hall Wednesday morning, addressing the Carolina Performing Arts advisory board, members of the Board of Trustees, UNC academic leadership, local school and community leaders and Chapel Hill artists and art advocates in the room.

“Every time I’m here, it’s something really wonderful,” she said. “We all come here to think about the arts and participate in it.”

In this instance, Folt was there to participate.

On Wednesday, CPA announced the creation of The Core@Carolina Square, a 8,500-square-foot facility that will focus on the intersection of arts, research and community development.

The Core will cost more than $5 million to develop, $4 million of which Folt committed from UNC, and will be located in the developing Carolina Square space located at 123 W. Franklin St.

“The Core will serve three primary purposes: as a home for Arts@TheCore, as a center for collaborative research and as a community resource,” said Emil Kang, executive director of the arts at CPA.

The Core hopes to foster innovative research that merges arts with science and technology through artist-in-residence programs to bring together the University, the public and artists together to learn more about the connection between the arts and science.

Artists such as theater director Anne Bogart and choreographer Bill Jones have been invited to become artists-in-residence. In the past, Alvin Ailey dancer Hope Boykin has created a movement workshop with pediatric cancer patients at UNC Hospitals to incorporate dance into health care, just one example of the work The Core hopes to continue.

CPA also hopes to bring together leading researchers and artists to develop performances, exhibitions and installations at the intersection of their respective fields. Kang said they had already talked to computer science faculty and the Renaissance Computing Institute to collaborate with an artist to create an installation on big data and internet privacy.

The space will be divided into two components — a 4,000-square-foot black box performance theater, including back of house space and dressing rooms, that will hold 200 people, and a 3,000-square-foot rehearsal studio. Similarly to Memorial Hall, the space will be available to student groups and community members upon reservation.

“It comes from our belief that the arts are a very important part of our educational portfolio and that we know that the arts are one of the best way to connect to people,” Folt said.

The space emerges out of the Arts@TheCore program, launched in 2012, that uses performing arts to connect academics with new and creative ideas.

In the 2014-15 school year, 60 classes from 19 departments — over 1,900 student tickets total — utilized 42 different visiting CPA artists in incorporating the arts into their classrooms through student attendance of performances.

“We have shared goals and a vision about what our community is and what we want it to be,” said Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt.

“The Core represents a unique opportunity to bolster the connection between the University and the rest of our community through pioneering public and private partnership.”

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