Psychedelphia: a celebration of collaboration and creation, presenting old art and making new art on the spot. Performances by up and coming musicians Videohippos, accompanied by a “paper fight.” A musical based on Jurassic Park. A band once led by a man who truly believed he was from outer space.
These all have one thing in common — they took place at the Rotunda, a community arts space at 4014 Walnut St., tucked behind the 40th St. corridor. Originally a Christian Scientist church, this large white building stands apart from the storefronts that surround it both inside and out. A large, domed sanctuary gives the space its name, though the rest of the building is more modest — a stage and carpeted room reminiscent of a high school auditorium is where most of the action takes place.
The Rotunda is committed to hosting all-ages, drug/alcohol-free, inexpensive events over 300 nights a year, bringing an incredibly diverse collection of artists to West Philadelphia ranging from hip hop performers to jazz quartets, modern dancers to Tuvan throat singers. Many of these artists can’t be seen anywhere else in the city, but thanks to the work of a few Penn students, the Rotunda offers a space for them to be seen and heard, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, a way for them to build community.
Andrew Zitcer was introduced to the idea of the Rotunda in the fall of 1998 in a seminar taught by Dr. Ira Harkavy. In the seminar he was presented with a paper written by Harkavy’s previous students outlining their attempts to open a branch of an established Center City jazz club at 40th and Locust. Having spent the previous summer working for a record label and music festival in New York, Zitcer was interested in the work his classmates were doing, but he had a few suggestions on how to change the plan.
Gina Renzi, current executive director of the Rotunda, recalls that Zitcer thought a jazz club would be “inauthentic.” However, Zitcer agreed that a performing arts space near campus, albeit one with a slightly different focus, would be a critical addition to Penn.
Throughout the fall of 1998, Zitcer worked closely with his classmates to develop a viable plan of action, which they presented to the university along with other projects from the class. Their proposal for what would become the Rotunda was one of the few chosen for execution.
A few months later, on April 15, 1999, the Rotunda opened its doors for the first time, featuring a jazz show attended by over 100 Penn students and community members. “My mentor Al Filreis said, ‘Whatever you want the Rotunda to ultimately look like, make sure it is there the first day,’” Zitcer remembers. “And I said, ‘If that’s the case, we can’t just have one concert’” The first show was followed the next week by “An Extravaganza of Philly’s Dopest Underground Hip Hop,” the second component of the opening.
Zitcer continued scheduling Rotunda shows throughout the rest of his junior and senior years, eventually considering himself more of an event bookie than a student, and remained involved with the Rotunda in some capacity for years to come. “Penn basically said, ‘Hey, you’re a senior, you’re graduating. Do you want to stay and [run the Rotunda]?’” Zitcer did, and he would work for four years under the auspices of the Office of Student Life before becoming the Cultural Asset Manager at Penn’s Divisions of Facilities and Real Estate Services. He is currently pursuing an Urban Planning degree at Rutgers, but still attends events at the Rotunda on a regular basis.
Dressed in a black hoodie and donning a pair of black square framed glasses, Zitcer looks as though he’d be more at home at a West Philly house show than in an office controlling several of Penn’s major investments.
He says, “Penn basically said ‘Take it and run with it.’” Was he nervous? “I was scared out of my mind. I wish I had known that it was all going to work out and that we didn’t need to feel so much like it was always on the brink of collapse and failure. I spent a lot of sleepless nights for almost 10 years.”
Pressure from the University to make money came in waves. “Penn would say, ‘Make money, stop asking for money from us.’ And we’d bring them a business plan and they would evaluate it and eventually say, ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing,’” Zitcer says. “‘The amount of money that the Rotunda could bring in is so small that it’s almost not worth it.’”
Penn has supported the Rotunda in all aspects of its development. The University owns the building, pays the salary of every employee and has never censored the content of performances, some of which can be somewhat controversial. This support means that most events can be completely free.
Zitcer doubts that something like the Rotunda could spring up now. He says, “I think it was a right place, right time sort of thing.” Under former Penn President Judith Rodin, there was an institutional orientation toward “being a good neighbor to West Philadelphia,” which has been replaced with an emphasis on developing the postal lands and looking east. The Rotunda was seen as the centerpiece of an arts and culture approach to community building and Zitcer was responsible for implementing this strategy. The University has simply moved on.
Despite this change in institutional focus, Zitcer isn’t worried about the Rotunda’s future. “Institutional inertia is a very powerful force. One of the reasons the Rotunda is so successful is because we’re so consistent. Universities tend to grow — they don’t shrink. The Rotunda is its own mini-node. And now that we’re here, I think it will be at least another 10 years.”
Although the Rotunda is arguably one of the most successful projects on campus to come out of a student proposal, many students have never set foot in the building. For a space that purportedly “bridges a gap” between Penn and its western neighbors, there still seems to be a great divide.
“After I graduated, I didn’t have the social connection to the students who had been involved with the project — the social dynamic has fallen apart,” says Zitcer. He is excited, though, by the growing committee of student volunteers that has sprung up in the past three years.
“The idea is that the concerts and events should be produced and curated by people in the Philadelphia arts community. Not a lot of [Penn] people ultimately wanted to be involved with that. [At Penn] everyone wants to start their own club and be the president. And if they can’t be the president or the vice president, they just want to start something different. I told my friends ‘We are facilitators — if great events happen, we’ll benefit from being able to get close to them, to be in the audience and learn with them, and be in community with them. But it’s not about us.’”
What Renzi decided to do as executive director was focus on the people who really did want to do it. Students from other schools are heavily involved — the highly successful The Gathering hip hop series has always had involvement from Temple and community college students, as well as people from all over the city, not just those who live in West Philadelphia. The Rotunda exists for “whomever,” independent of a mandate — self-imposed or otherwise — to have “Penn” and “non-Penn” events on the calendar every week.
“There were nights where we’d have a Penn a cappella group do a show and we’d get three hundred Penn students. And the next night something else amazing would come in and there would be zero — and on the night that we had that a cappella group, no one not from Penn would come,” remembers Zitcer. So does the Rotunda succeed in “bridging the gap”? “It would ideally and it does often, but you cannot force those kinds of relationships. I don’t want people to go if they don’t want to go. I want it to be about people really striving to find a place to express the things they want to express.”
Besides, Zitcer laughs, “If [all the students knew about it] we wouldn’t be able to do it. There isn’t very much space in that room, so if 20 students come — that’s a pretty good representation.”
Renzi draws a distinction between “arts and entertainment” and “arts and culture.” In her eyes, the Rotunda strives for the latter. Everything she books and every choice that is made about the Rotunda is driven by the needs and wants of the performers and the people who come to shows, which is a place where one can, as she says, “be in the audience and be a performer — or be performing and join the audience.”
Zitcer recalls a hip hop concert that took place in the early days of the Rotunda. “When we were switching between sets, this guy came up to me and said, ‘Hey, while we’re waiting can I perform?’ And he gave me his cassette and I put it in and pressed play and he just got on the microphone and started doing his thing. It couldn’t happen in very many other places. And it shouldn’t. The Academy of Music is not set up to do that — but the Rotunda is.”
Several aspects of the Rotunda set it apart from other arts spaces: it is all-ages, all the time, and has always been drug and alcohol free. These decisions are closely linked. “It’s a community center, not just a venue, and it can’t be both if there is alcohol present,” Zitcer says. “At jazz shows I’ve seen little kids grow up from age one to age nine or so — they’ve grown up inside the Rotunda.”
“The thing that’s happening on and around the stage is what you come for,” Zitcer continues. “You don’t come there to get drunk, you don’t come there to find the girl you’re going to take home later that night, you don’t come there so that you can tell people all about it because it’s so cool — because it’s really not that ‘cool.’ It’s just great.
“The people who ‘get it’ don’t all look the same and the crowds at different events vary tremendously. But once these different people stand in an audience together, it becomes much easier to get them to talk about things like politics and religion by using the arts as a way to organize their thoughts.
“Someone can say ‘This piece makes me uncomfortable,’ not ‘you make me uncomfortable.’ The Rotunda and the arts are things outside of ourselves that we can use to organize conversation around difference and neighborhood change.”
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Now an established community landmark, where does the Rotunda go from here? The Rotunda is not always a showcase of exemplary art and performance — it can be uncomfortable in its unfamiliarity but each experience is memorable in its own way.
“Sometimes the stuff at the Rotunda is totally terrible,” Zitcer laughs. “But that’s the best thing about it. What I think is terrible you might think is the most revelatory thing you’ve ever seen. There are a lot of options out there, but once people get turned on to the Rotunda they tend to stay.”
Renzi is one example. She’s been with the Rotunda almost since the beginning, and it is through her work that the institution continues to grow. Her cell phone never stops vibrating, and she is constantly answering questions, providing moral support and working out logistics for the almost daily events. “Sometimes I do get to go home at five, six, seven like a sort of normal person. I do have a life — I live in the neighborhood, I own a house, I have something going on outside of the Rotunda. But often, from the moment that I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, in some way, I’m thinking about it,” she says.
“It’s difficult sometimes to walk home, because I run into people who want to book events at all times of the day or who just want to talk about the Rotunda. On my way here I ran into two different people that wanted to book events. I actually had to set my alarm for five minutes just so I knew to stop talking and move on — and then I ran into someone else.” Minor inconveniences in Renzi’s life, perhaps, but a sign that the Rotunda is succeeding in doing exactly what it set out to accomplish.
