Imagine an arts and culture hub where you could see a play one night, an opera concert the next, and then watch a movie at home that was filmed at said hub.
Some creative developers in Las Vegas have plans for such a place. Third Street, announced last year, is a multi-venue, multi-disciplinary campus already occupying the former Downtown Cinemas complex on — you guessed it — Third Street.
The $7 million, 41,500-square-foot campus, currently in the middle of a funding campaign to execute its plans over the next three years, aims to be an arts HQ and economic diversifier for Las Vegas. Among those involved with the project is Teller of Penn & Teller fame.
"We're a city of two-and-a-half million people, and we're kind of unique in the nation in that we do not have the cultural infrastructure that other cities of our size have," Third Street CEO Daz Weller said. "As we build out other entertainment infrastructure in the city, with Sphere and these amazing sporting facilities, [it's important] that we do the same with our cultural infrastructure. So we like to see ourselves as the next piece of that cultural expansion."
Plans include:
- Three performance venues at capacities of 250, 150, and 600. They will host four resident performance companies: Vegas Theater Company (of which Weller is artistic director), Vegas City Opera (of which Third Street COO Ginger Land-van Buuren is executive director), Las Vegas Sinfonietta, and Laugh After Dark. For Vegas City Opera, Land van-Buuren said the new venue expands opportunities. "We've been sort of limited — working with the City of Las Vegas in their spaces, working with the libraries, working with the Winchester [Dondero Cultural Center] — so now we get to have these beautiful spaces and create new works inside them that will adapt for what we want to create."
- Those spaces, and others, will also be available for rent to other local arts organizations — at subsidized rates, according to Weller — as well as the private sector.
- Appropriate for a former cineplex, Third Street endeavors to support filmmakers and the local film industry by offering screening rooms — especially for hosting film festivals — and post-production facilities, such as the city's first dub stage for sound mixing. It will also allow Laugh After Dark to launch a production company for comedy and short-film content, to be featured on its streaming channels.
- A suite of studios will be available for rehearsals, content creation, and media/broadcasting.
- Workforce development and education heavily factor into the facility's mission, starting with a partnership with the College of Southern Nevada (on whose grounds Nevada Public Radio is located). "We've been working with [CSN] to develop a dual enrollment program, and one of the big pieces that they have found working with CCSD is that there's several schools ... that are not able to provide CTE [career and technical] credits in the arts," Land-van Buuren said. "So we would be able to provide those at Third Street." Then, to narrow the gap between schooling and entering the workforce, Weller went on to say, Third Street is "building an apprenticeship model where you turn up, you work with people who are better than you, and you get better at what you're doing. We'll offer paid internships so that those students are not then leaving school and going and working at Chick-fil-A to make the money to pay for the courses they want to do."
Ginger Land-van Buuren COO, Third Street, executive director, Vegas City Opera; Daz Weller CEO, Third Street; artistic director, Vegas Theater Company
