Trillium Performing Arts Collective

Trillium quickly grew and established itself as an outlet for many local women and men to create original performance art. Dance performances and movement theater served as a great way for many of the area's artists to express ideas and political views. Musicians began to get involved and live music was soon featured in the shows. The Trillium arti... sts soon realized the need for an informal forum for artists of all levels to perform and so they created the Friday Night Alive! series, which continues today. Friday Night Alive! began as an open-mic style venue to allow dancers to show works-in-progress, musicians to unveil new songs, and others to perform their comedic, and often political, skits. Friday Night Alive! is now held eight times a year at the Lewis Theatre. In addition to Friday Night Alive!, Trillium artists also choreographed and produced professional dance concerts on a regular basis. For twenty-six years, they performed at least one concert of original work a year using the spaces available, from Carnegie Hall to the Greenbrier Valley Theatre. In fact, they followed those performance spaces as they grew from a condemned building, in Carnegie Hall's case, and a fledgling barn venue, as was Greenbrier Valley Theatre's original performance space, to the well funded and state-of-the-art spaces they are now. While appreciative of the existing performance spaces, Trillium had to schedule around these organizations existing programming, which limited the number of performance opportunities. As more artists joined in and more performance time was needed, Trillium dreamed of finding a venue of their own. In 2007, three board members, Ann Davis, Lin Preston, and Larry Levine, took a giant step toward making that dream a reality by forming ALL Arts, LLC. to purchase the Lewis Theatre building. ALL Arts serves as the managing body for the facility, including the film business itself. In turn, Trillium is the artist-in-residence company for the theater. They also began a capital campaign to renovate the ...Read More