When the $4 million facility opened, it was of the highest caliber.
No detail was overlooked in the creation of the Peggy and Yale Gordon Center for Performing Arts, from its masonry block design, lightweight concrete roof, ceiling panels and acoustic curtains — all of which contribute to the venue’s acoustic superiority — to its 550 roomie, sound-absorbent valor seats that wrap around the wide no-bad-seat-in-the-house venue to its hydraulic-powered orchestra pit to its 40-by-17-foot film screen. The 35-by-70-foot stage is large enough for theatrical and dance productions but small enough for intimate musical performances.
“When they built it, they made sure the sight lines were perfect for dance and the acoustics were perfect for music, and we had the second-largest film screen in Maryland,” said Randi Benesch, managing director of the Gordon Center and of arts and culture for the JCC. “We can really do anything in the Gordon.”
Twenty years later, the Gordon Center, located on the Rosenbloom Owings Mills JCC campus, remains the gem it was when it first opened in 1995. Last year, 30,000 people came through its doors.
Its 20th season exemplifies the diverse, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, community center the venue has become, with shows from Chinese acrobatic dancers, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, The Maccabeats, Israeli-Palestinian pianists Duo Amal, the Reduced Shakespeare Company and much more. And that’s not including the classes, the teen and children’s programs, the performing arts camp, open-mic night and other programs Benesch has championed in her three years at the Gordon Center.
“I don’t want this place to be a façade, a venue that people come buy tickets, see a show and leave,” she said. “We want this to be the community’s performing arts center.”
[pullquote]When they built it, they made sure the sight lines were perfect for dance and the acoustics were perfect for music, and we had the second-largest film screen in Maryland. We can really do anything in the Gordon.[/pullquote]
In the Beginning
It was difficult to sell the boards of the JCC and The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore on building a multimillion-dollar performing arts center during the recession of the early 1990s, but the Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust was willing to dedicate $2 million to the project, money that wouldn’t have been available otherwise.
“We thought it was a great opportunity at the time to build a performing arts center. The Jewish community didn’t really have one,” said Joe Meyerhoff, who was on the JCC board when the idea was first presented by the Gordon trust in 1991. “And when you have one group willing to put out that much capital to get the thing built, it was a pretty hard opportunity to say no to.” Meyerhoff would become the first chairman of the Gordon Center when it opened in spring 1995.
[pullquote]The Gordon Center has extremely good acoustics. It’s truly a world-class venue for the design of the theater, especially when you are talking about [a] concert experience. It’s very unique sounding — I can’t think of another place quite like it. It’s kind of a ‘best-kept secret.’[/pullquote]
The Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust was formed in 1980 as a way to support local musicians and classical music. While the trust’s beneficiaries include legendary Baltimore institutions such as the Peabody Institute and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as well as Har Sinai, Oheb Shalom and Baltimore Hebrew congregations, the Gordon Center is held in highest esteem by trust director Phyllis Friedman.
“I think it was the best grant we ever made,” she said. “It puts Yale and Peggy’s interest in the performing arts on a building that has continuity. You make a grant for a concert and they play the concert and it’s finished, but this give [the Gordons] some stature.”
Although the Owings Mills area was rural at the time, it was a Baltimore County-designated growth area, and the JCC saw value in investing in Owings Mills. The growth would later be evident, as Owings Mills JCC, once an outpost in a rural community, had a membership increase of 40 percent in the five years prior to 1995.
Once everyone was on board, the rest of the money for the Gordon Center was raised in about three months, so as to not interfere with The Associated’s annual campaign.
To ensure the venue would be flawlessly designed, Meyerhoff and Nancy Goldberg, the JCC’s cultural arts director who would become Gordon Center director, set out to do some research.
“Joe Meyerhoff and I spent many months traveling the East Coast, anywhere we could find performing arts facilities that were smaller,” Goldberg said. “Finding out what did work, what didn’t work [and asking], ‘If you could do it over again, what would do you do?’”
Out of that research came the idea for the 650-square-foot hydraulic-powered orchestra pit (the only in Maryland at the time), which can accommodate 45 musicians below the stage and be raised to floor level to allow for 48 additional seats. Seats were built to be 20- to 22-inches wide with a generous 38 inches between rows. They opted to have a center aisle rather than have continental seating so that families with young children — one of the venue’s target audiences — would be able to get up and go to the bathroom quickly. The women’s restroom was built with about double the amount of stalls required by law for the same reason. All these features, of course, were in addition to designing the venue so that staging and sound would be perfect for any variety of performance types.
“We really did put a lot of thought into what we were building,” Goldberg said. “We wanted to utilize every penny we had and utilize it in the best way.”
Opening and Development
The Gordon Center officially opened its doors on May 1, 1995 with a performance by Israeli-born jazz singer Achinoam Nini, known as Noa, and guitarist Gil Dor. Because of the recession and contractors needing work, construction costs were less than projected, allowing the Gordon Center to open ahead of schedule and under budget.
The opening month featured an off-Broadway production, author appearances including Theodore Bikel speaking about his autobiography, a national dance company and the Jewish Film Festival, which was moved from the Baltimore Museum of Art to the Gordon Center.
Goldberg said it was one of the most exciting times in her life, from the idea stage to the opening. She ran front of house and sought constant feedback from patrons.
“In the beginning, that really prompted what I did book, and when the people saw that [I was] doing what they’ve requested, they came back,” she said. “So it wasn’t so much getting people in the door, it was getting people in the door and coming back.”
Outside of performances, one of the highlights of Goldberg’s 17-year tenure was holding the first Maccabi Artsfest at the JCC and Gordon Center. Kids came from all over the world, including Baltimore’s sister cities of Odessa, Ukraine and Ashkelon, Israel for the fest, which allowed them to display their final works and stage performances at the JCC and Gordon Center.
“To me, that moment, it was all these years, we’ve done all these things, and now look at what we’ve done for Jewish youth,” Goldberg said.
As Goldberg worked to curate events the community rallied behind, she also took a chance in helping performers along the way. Guitarist Brian Gore, founder of International Guitar Night that plays annually at the Gordon Center (March 5, 2016 is this season’s performance), said Goldberg helped the tour in its earlier days. He said his tour looks for venues to “adopt” IGN and help it build an audience at the venue, and the Gordon Center, along with The Barns at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., helped establish a solid East Coast tour route for IGN.
For a tour of mostly acoustic guitars, the venue couldn’t be better.
“The Gordon Center has extremely good acoustics. It’s truly a world-class venue for the design of the theater, especially when you are talking about [a] concert experience,” Gore said via email. “It’s very unique sounding — I can’t think of another place quite like it. It’s kind of a ‘best-kept secret.’”
He described the Gordon Center audience as “cultivated, yet decidedly down-to-earth.”
“You have a huge number of regulars alongside a healthy dose of newcomers,” he said. “It’s a mix of people including long-term supporters and patrons of the Center who rub shoulders with classical, jazz and rock music fans, all of whom are grateful for the show.”
A New Direction
In the late 2000s, several people involved in arts at the JCC began researching the best ways to move the arts programs forward. JCC executive director Buddy Sapolsky as well as executive vice president Dale Busch, were set to retire soon.
“They both knew they were leaving and they wanted to have a legacy project, and they both loved the arts,” said Jay Wolf Schlossberg-Cohen, a Baltimore-based artist who helped them with the research along with Rabbi Phil Miller, now vice president at the Park Heights JCC, and Goldberg.
The group found statistics that said arts at JCCs were diminishing due to funding.
“That was pretty shocking to everybody. This is one of the areas which make America, historically for Jews, one of the greatest places we’ve ever prospered,” Schlossberg-Cohen said. “The fact that now we’re discovering that something’s reversed [that trend] was pretty alarming.”
Out of research and surveys, the group presented a plan to the JCC board that was built around the changing geography of the Jewish population, what demographics to reach and what kinds of events to have, with a major focus on people of all ages in the community. And with Goldberg retiring in 2012, the door was open for someone to implement this new vision.
That’s when Randi Benesch came into the picture. She had been working at Center Stage for eight years, managing development events and individual giving campaigns when Miller and Schlossberg-Cohen came to speak with the venue’s director about the JCC’s new vision for arts and culture.
“My ears perked up because I grew up at this JCC and I always had an eye on the Gordon Center,” Benesch said.
She grew up in Owings Mills and attended Franklin High School and has been involved in the arts all her life, from studying theater in college to working in the artistic programming department at the Kennedy Center to managing the Columbia Festival for the Arts.
“Randi was hired because she had an amazing background,” Schlossberg-Cohen said. “They wanted someone mature and experienced enough, but also someone young enough to bring new vision to it.”
Rather than branching out on her own and starting a consulting business, she took the helm at the Gordon Center in July 2012.
On Benesch coming to the Gordon Center, Goldberg said, “I told Randi from the beginning, ‘You’re not taking my place. This is about you starting something.’” And start something she did.
“I really felt like we were new, starting from scratch in so many ways,” Benesch said. “I think was an exciting time because we had so much support from the board and from this [arts and culture] council to reinvigorate the arts. I felt like I was starting with this blank slate.”
Under Benesch’s leadership, the JCC’s arts and culture council has greatly expanded family programming, started a dance month in conjunction with Baltimore County’s Commission on Arts and Sciences, expanded its music-presenting season, expanded educational programs and started a monthly open-mic night. The Gordon Center has developed a bluegrass following thanks to a partnership with the Charm City Folk and Bluegrass Festival.
“Randi reinvigorated the place,” said Marilyn Zvili, arts and culture operations assistant at the JCC and Gordon Center. “I think we’re going in a great direction.”
Adults can now take art classes through a partnership with the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and teens can learn from professional artists through YAD, the Young Artists Division. The Maccabi Artsfest delegation has grown, with Baltimore bringing 12 kids from Houston this summer, making it the largest arts delegation. A children’s theater production company for preschool- and elementary school-age dancers was started in conjunction with Towson University Community Dance. The Habimah performing arts camp, which doubled attendance from its first to second summer, has children learning music, theater, dance and singing with experts from Center Stage, the Children’s Chorus of Maryland, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Beatwell and more.
“In the last three of four years I think the Gordon Center is evolving into exactly what it should be and that is a resource for the community to explore performing arts,” Meyerhoff said.
“And the theater gives the community an opportunity to do that in a very high-quality space.”
In addition to its many offerings for the community, the Gordon Center has also been opened to community organizations. CHANA showed a film about domestic violence earlier this month at the Gordon Center, and Krieger Schechter Day School will have its musical at the venue this year. In September, Temple Emanuel held its High Holiday services at the Gordon Center.
Although the theater has been kept in pristine condition, there are always upgrades to be done. In the coming 2016 General Assembly session, the Baltimore Jewish Council will push for a bond bill that would help upgrade the Gordon Center’s devices for those with hearing disabilities as well as its lighting system to more energy-efficient LED lights.
As for Benesch, she wants to continue to do all the things the Gordon Center is doing but do them better. More artist residencies and master classes, more community partnerships, more integration with regional arts organizations.
“I just really want to continue to bring the best of the best to the Gordon in all the different disciplines that we present,” she said.
Highlights from the 20th Season
Sunday, Nov. 8
Eating Delancey: A Delicious
Celebration of Traditional Jewish Food
Authors Aaron Renzy and Jordan Schaps speak about Jewish food at this event, which includes brunch, an autographed copy of the book and a tour of a gallery of food photography.
Sunday, Dec. 13
The Maccabeats Chanukah Concert
The charismatic a cappella group brings its
upbeat mix of popular Jewish, American and Israeli songs fused with inspirational stories.
Sunday, Jan. 17
The Joshua Nelson Band
In a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., the “Prince of Kosher Gospel” teams up with the Bethel AME Choir for an evening of powerful spiritual, celebratory music.
Saturday, Feb. 6
NOA
Israeli-born, American-raised Achinoam Nini (NOA), a superstar in Israel who has shared the stage with Sting and Stevie Wonder among others, brings her eclectic sounds to the Gordon Center, the venue for which she gave the opening performance 20 years ago.
Saturday, Feb. 20
ZviDance in “Dabke”
This New York-based dance troupe, led by Israeli-born choreographer Zvi Gotheiner, combines liquid movement, diversity of ensembles and Middle Eastern themes with Israeli and Arab dance traditions.
For a complete calendar and ticket information, visit gordoncenter.com.
mshapiro@midatlanticmedia.com