Live Arts

Live Arts currently supports eight full-time and four part-time employees. In 2003, Live Arts moved into three floors of the Center for Contemporary Arts building on Water Street, designed by local firm Bushman/Dreyfus Architects. As the organization grew in scale and ambition it created positions for education, development, production and operations.

Shows often run in both spaces at the same time. The Live Arts Teen Theater Ensemble was begun in 1997 under the direction of Lydia Horan and guidance of Kay Leigh Ferguson, providing arts education for all ages and unique performance opportunities for young people, a commitment that continues under the current director, Ronda Hewitt. . It produces and creates theatre that they label modern, rigorous and risky. They promote themselves as being committed to being a product of its community as well as a process for creating community. Live Arts started in 1989 with a group that included Thane and Will Kerner, Fran Smith, Mark and Karen Schuyler, Michael Parent, Bill Thomas, Larry Goldstein, Gate Pratt and Cate Andrews.

(Dave Matthews, one of the veterans of the early coffeehouses and galas, has gone on to become a well-known musician and actor.) Artistic director John Gibson began work at Live Arts as a volunteer in January 1992 and became the first full-time employee in April 1993. Most of these people are still involved in live performance in downtown Charlottesville. Performances began in the Old Michie Building, a former printing plant turned into a community arts space in the late 1980s.

Live Arts is a nineteen-year-old community theatre in Charlottesville, Virginia. Acid house dance parties provided an early approach to artistically-motivated, experience-based events as fundraising tool.

This form found fuller expression in the annual 9 Lives benefit, a combination of cabaret and promenade theatre forms. A series of coffeehouses under the direction of Fran Sackett, the founding artistic director, provided a stage for local musicians, actors and writers, and were a regular feature of the theatre s first years. Live Arts first production in that 135-seat space was of Sartre s No Exit, in September 1990.

The main theatre is a 200 seat, three-story configurable space with permanent balcony; there is also a 70-seat black box theater.
 
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