Entering 41st season, Painted Bride aims to make a splash

In the summer of 1969, in a bridal shop on South Street, substitute teacher Gerry Givnish opened the Painted Bride, a co-op gallery space, with friends from the area's close-knit family of performers, artists, poets, and dancers.

"In Philly then, there were very few nonprofit art galleries, theaters, poetry readings, dance companies, or concert venues, yet plenty of students graduating from the art schools," recalls Givnish, who retired as the Bride's first executive director and chief executive officer in 1999. "A modern-dance performance back then was a rare occurrence."

In fact, anything avant-garde was rare. Givnish and his outré artists lived in a city that offered them few opportunities to reach a public. The rent was $100 a month. Putting adventurous art in a storefront (wedding gowns were still being made in the basement) seemed the way to go.

Whether at its South Street birthplace or eventual Vine Street location - since 1982, before Old City became a gentrified gallery haven - the Painted Bride Art Center long was one of the few places in Philadelphia to see daring art that lined up with Givnish's mantra of diversity and inclusion.

"The Bride was willing to take a chance and present my group for the first time in Philadelphia," free-jazz bassist Dave Holland says of his first solo gig there in 1983. "Although I'd worked extensively as a sideman" - with the likes of Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton - "my first time out leading a band many promoters were initially reluctant to take a chance on booking the group. The Bride was one of the venues that agreed. They've always been supportive of adventurous new projects."

Laurel Raczka, the Bride's executive director and CEO, says the audience size has been stable for the last five years. The center now operates without a deficit. And it still presents rapturously risky and controversial art seldom seen elsewhere.

Yet its 40th-anniversary 2009-10 season passed like a whisper. The schedule of innovative electronic music (Flying Lotus), audacious multi-genre/multiracial work (Cynthia Oliver's Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso), and more played with little fanfare or media attention, though the house typically was close to full.

If the Bride is cutting-edge, popular, and financially stable, why don't we hear more about it? Has it been upstaged by newer presenting venues such as the Kimmel Center, which opened in 2001? Is it marketing? Have the grants dried up? Does the Bride just need to tweet more?

As it prepares to begin its 41st season - on the heels of the principal benefactor of its innovation and daring, the current Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe - the Painted Bride may finally be ready for its closeup.

"We didn't do a large-splash gala or big campaign for our 40th - yet," says Raczka, who says she regards the 41st year simply as an extension of the big birthday.

Even if the Bride so far has been quiet about it, there's plenty to celebrate from the last four decades - a long list of avant-world superstars, local and international, who made their Philadelphia debuts there.

Visionary local curators Lenny Seidman, Billy Ehret, Gil Ott, Major Jackson, and Ludwig Van Trikt brought in the adventuresome Big Mess Theater; the joking juggling pantomime of Asparagus Valley Cultural Society (which became Penn and Teller after the third guy left); wry monologuists such as Spalding Gray; passionately politicized poets such as Amiri Baraka; dynamic jazz from post-bop to the avant-garde in the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine, Olu Dara, and Butch Morris; rarely heard world music with Airto Moreira and Papo Vazquez; provocative multidiscipline artists Diamanda Galas, Urban Bush Women, Karen Finley, and Sekou Sundiata; modern dance from the likes of Headlong Dance Theater; and hip-hoppers including Square Roots, before they became the Roots.

While Ott concentrated on community efforts with Project HOME and the Philadelphia Community Arts Network, Seidman created intercultural residencies that had such Philadelphia artists as his Spoken Hand and choreographer Rennie Harris working with internationally renowned composers including Zakir Hussain and Simon Shaheen.

"Recently, while constructing a Bride time line, I found a calendar from the '80s where within one month we hosted Meredith Monk and Philip Glass," Raczka says.

One can question whether the Bride of late has presented as many notable artists as it did in its first 20 years, but Givnish sees things much as Norma Desmond did in Sunset Boulevard: The pictures got smaller.

"I don't think artists feel empowered as they once were," he says, "so the work being done today is less about social change."

But when there are artists who still carry that spirit, the Bride - Givnish's successor, Raczka, in particular - is good at finding them.

Seidman, who started at the Bride as an accountant in 1983 after playing there, then went on to book its jazz and world music acts, says the last two decades "saw a big but positive shift in our ability to bring preeminent performing artists, and more attention was given to nurturing those emerging artists that we felt could benefit from it, such as Vijay Iyer, Adam Rudolph, Thaddeus Phillips, and such." (Iyer and Phillips are in town this month as featured Live Arts Festival artists.)

Seidman also says the Bride made lemonade from what could have been sour circumstances, creating extended residencies and stretching its resources and those of artists such as Philadelphia's Sun Ra Arkestra by having local performers collaborate with the main-stagers.

"Because of the reduced grant opportunities and the subsequent economic implosion, we chose to use our dwindling resources to maximize the impact of the fewer shows we were able to present," Seidman says.

Whether being a hot local venue until the Kimmel came along was good or bad for the Bride is an open question. In its final decade as the avatar, it was a model for spaces that have emerged in the last 15 years.

"What I love about the Bride's history is that the Bride grew organically - from painters, then poets, musicians, and dancers, so the Bride grew to be multidisciplinary," Raczka says.

While it may have been unique in Philadelphia, similar organizations were sprouting across the country throughout the 1970s and '80s as part of the alternative-space movement. It was inevitable that many avant-garde artists would become mainstream - and that places would open to present them.

"The emergence of the Kimmel provided for the first time a venue that was drawing audiences from the Bride," Seidman says. "Also, the Kimmel ate up a gigantic chunk of the grant cake through its capital and endowment campaigns, which impacted on smaller organizations such the Bride."

Money is always an issue these days. The Painted Bride has had to reduce all its staffs in recent years, which has had an effect on programming, marketing, and advertising.

"I think we got more federal and state money when I was at the Bride," Givnish says. "All agencies operate in a more conservative culture than [they did] then."

But Raczka nevertheless has managed to present adventurous programs and support important artists, and Givnish approves: "In times like these, the arts must act counter to societal trends, like prophets with a difficult message."

So things may get a little boisterous at the Bride in the final months of its 40th-birthday year. Fall season highlights include Holland's return to introduce the Dave Holland Big Band to Philly (Dec. 11) and FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance (Oct. 29-30), featuring iconic dancer-choreographers in signature solo work such as Bebe Miller's Rain, Urban Bush Women innovator Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Bring 'Em Home, and Carmen de Lavallade in a re-creation of her role in Geoffrey Holder's 1972 classic, The Creation.

"We don't want to be quiet any longer," Raczka says. "Shout our name to the rooftops."