JEANNE RUDDY GIVES PHILADELPHIA DANCERS ROOM TO MOVE.

One of the best ways to serve the community may be to serve oneself. For Jeanne Ruddy, director of a new dance company that has struggled to find suitable rehearsal spaces in Philadelphia, the Performance Garage may offer a solution to her ensemble's needs while also providing rehearsal and theater space for local performing artists and dance classes to area schools.

Ruddy, a former Martha Graham soloist, has obtained a prime site in central Philadelphia's Spring Garden neighborhood. Four buildings--one a garage, giving the venue its name--totaling 13,000 square feet will be renovated over the next several years to become the new home for Jeanne Ruddy Dance. Her plan is to institute a lively arts center in a locale that has customarily remained bereft of theatrical activity.

Like Tribeca and SoHo in Manhattan and other areas of Philadelphia once inhabited by working class people and industrial enterprises, the Spring Garden area has experienced gentrification in recent decades. It is contiguous to the up-and-coming Fairmount and Art Museum districts and sits at the tail end of the Cinderella transformation projected for central Philadelphia. The Garage is located near the northern extension of Broad Street's Avenue of the Arts, a major revitalization initiative of new and renovated buildings centered around the downtown Academy of Music. Thus, Ruddy sees her new space as potentially part of the Avenue of the Arts corridor and describes it as "an anchor" between City Hall and the Freedom Theatre (the landmark African American theater school and performance venue in North Philadelphia).

At press time, Ruddy had approached several local companies (Louise Gillette's aerial ensemble, Trapezius; Phrenic, a spin-off experimental arm of the Pennsylvania Ballet; and Group Motion) about making the Garage their new home base. Last year the Kumquat Collective, comprised of Group Motion, SCRAP Performance Group, Rennie Harris PureMovement, and Bald Mermaids, was refused renewal of the lease for its two-story center near South Street, where Group Motion had been housed for the past thirty years. Kumquat is now based in the Community Education Center, a studio and performance space in West Philadelphia.

Ruddy asserts the need for the 100-seat theater that she envisions: an affordable place for emerging artists to "take some chances, without having to fund-raise for a year to do a production." Not a bad idea. For now, her company continues to rehearse and perform at various city venues and will present Mark Dendy's premiere Fear of Flying, Part H, Jane Comfort's Four Screaming Women, and a new Ruddy group work at the Painted Bride, in Philadelphia's Olde City district, November 7-10.