Global Arts Live opens its first permanent space in Kendall Square

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Kate Brodkin

November 06, 2026

After more than three decades of presenting performances in theaters around the city, Global Arts Live is opening a venue of its own this weekend.

Since Maure Aronson founded the organization as World Music in 1990, the nonprofit has staged shows in nearly every venue in Boston, from 200-seat rooms to 3,500-seat halls. On Saturday, Global Arts Live opens The Platform, a 45,000-square-foot, three-story performing arts center in Kendall Square, with a free public opening day.

The Platform is intended to be more than just a home for Global Arts Live. The building includes a 125-seat cabaret stage, two bars and a cafe, a rehearsal studio and the 404-seat Takeda Theater, named for the project’s lead sponsor.

“It’s purposely designed at 400 seats because that is called a midsized theater, and midsize theaters have been lacking in Boston,” Aronson said. “It’s the right size for many artists to draw an audience.”

BioMed Realty, the building’s developer, began talks with Global Arts Live in late 2020 about operating a theater inside the biotech research building it was constructing. Aronson called putting a cultural center in a biotech building both a unique approach and a challenging one, but one that brings “two very innovative disciplines working side by side: pharmaceutical research and artistic creation.” Takeda, a pharmaceutical company, will occupy the floors above the performing arts center.

Connie C. Chin, CEO of Global Arts Live and The Platform, said there has been a dire need for space to rehearse and perform, and that The Platform is designed to serve both the public and the artists who use it. The main lobby of The Platform, known as the ground-floor commons, is a gathering space that’s open to the community.

“You walk along this area, and it’s meant to be an urban living room for everybody, and it’s meant to welcome everyone,” Chin said.

The attention to artists extends backstage, where the center has multiple dressing rooms along the second and third floors, makeup tables, showers and wardrobe rooms. Backstage, Chin said, is where it’s clear the venue was designed to honor artists.

Global Arts Live also plans to present about 100 nights of programming annually, with roughly 200 additional nights made available to artists and art organizations at subsidized rental rates.

“And we have done everything we can to keep those rental rates — you know, underwritten by our fundraising — as low as possible,” Chin said.

The organization is also offering 25 free rental nights to the community.

Even from the street, The Platform is designed to invite people in. Chin said the facade draws on a New England sunset, with roughly 50 custom-designed tile colors arranged in an ombre pattern that shimmers. Its vertical lines evoke a theater curtain, and the glass is meant to be transparent, she said, so passersby can see in.

Melecio Estrella, artistic director of BANDALOOP, a dance company known for its aerial and vertical performances, said this is the first theater-curtain facade in the world the company has danced with.

“We like to say we dance with the facade and not on the facade,” he said.

BANDALOOP, founded by Amelia Rudolph, has spent decades performing on cliffs and building exteriors, using unconventional spaces to explore the relationship between dance and the natural environment. That intersection of art, science and the natural environment makes The Platform, a building that houses both biotech research and performing arts, a natural pairing, Estrella said.

At 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Saturday, the opening day, BANDALOOP will perform a piece inspired by bird migration and human migration, drawing on research into migratory patterns and stories of people’s family histories.

“Here, public art is literally for everyone,” Estrella said. “I think that’s what’s kept me in this company for 25 years: How can art and dance be a gift rather than a commodity?”

That idea is central to The Platform’s ambitions. The goal, Chin said, is to create a place where artists, scientists and residents can come together, whether they’re attending a performance or stopping by for a drink.

“The whole thing is so well-designed to be welcoming, to be literally transparent so people can see in and for the community to use it,” she said.

This story is part of a partnership between WBUR and the Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom Initiative.

Performing Arts