Acorn Productions & MCMA Receive Grant for Mechanics Hall Renovations

Acorn Productions and the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association (MCMA) are thrilled to announce that MCMA has received a $9,300 grant from the Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust. MCMA is engaged in a multi-phase campaign to repair and refurbish historic Mechanics Hall, located at 519 Congress Street, across from the Maine College of Art in the heart of Portland's Arts District. The Morton-Kelly grant, combined with a sponsorship by Coffee By Design and individual donations, means MCMA and Acorn have exceeded their $10,000 Phase I fundraising goal.

MCMA and Acorn are devoting Phase I funding to life and safety improvements to the third floor Ballroom of Mechanics Hall. With these improvements, MCMA can obtain a public assembly license, so that the Ballroom can be used as a performance venue by members of the Greater Portland's arts community, most notably Acorn's Naked Shakespeare performance series during the First Friday art walks.

Acorn and MCMA expect to begin work in the space over the next few weeks, which should allow the ballroom to receive a public assembly license sometime in January of 2015. Current plans call for a gala opening in mid-February of 2015, with First Friday Naked Shakespeare performances beginning in April. Acorn and MCMA announced their collaboration in the fall and have been working since that time to raise the funds needed to open the venue with a limited audience capacity. An ad hoc fundraising committee, consisting of representatives from local performance entities that anticipate using the space, is finalizing plans for Phases II and III of the fundraising campaign. The committee expects to announce final details for these Phases, along with information about the gala opening of the Ballroom, sometime early in 2015.

Besides Acorn and MCMA, entities that have committed to using the space once it opens include more than a dozen individual dance instructors and music performance ensembles, as well as the following larger companies:

Appartus Dance Theater
Bright Star Dance School
Dark Follies Vaudeville
Hidden Ladder Collective Art Performance
Lorem Ipsum Theater
Portland Adult Education
Portland Conservatory of Music
Snowlion Repertory Company

The new venue in the refurbished Mechanics Hall Ballroom will be flexible, accommodating a wide variety of uses. Portland is a city long on arts organizations but short on venues, and the location of Mechanics Hall in the Arts District means that the proposed 50 to 300-person performance space will be a cultural, social, and educational center for its members and the community. MCMA plans to restore the elegance of the space, while making it available to arts and culture groups at affordable rates. Portland possesses an extremely active creative community with many spaces in use virtually every weekend all year long-but this means smaller, newer groups often get left out. The addition of the Mechanic's Hall Ballroom space to the mix gives currently "homeless" dance and theater companies access to a prime venue. The ballroom also opens up potential partnerships with educational institutions in need of a large space for workshops, classes, performances, or presentations.

Founded in 1815, the Maine Charitable Mechanic Association was part of a movement to set up mechanics' institutes, which operated as craft guilds to promote and support the "mechanic arts," practiced at that time by anyone using tools to ply a trade. Mechanics' institutes also housed lending libraries intended to broaden the education of their members-the MCMA's library is the eighth oldest membership library in the country.

Acorn Productions' mission is to invigorate the community of performing artists in Southern Maine. Acorn seeks to nurture new performance pieces, develop artist collaborations, train new talent, and make the arts accessible to a wide spectrum of the general public. Acorn accomplishes these goals by mounting annual festivals that are open to a variety of artists as well as professional performances by local actors in both traditional and non-traditional venues. The company is best known for its Naked Shakespeare series of performances as well as the annual Maine Playwrights Festival.

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