Flight Deck arts venue in Oakland faces uncertain future

In the spring of 2014 Ragged Wing Ensemble opened the Flight Deck, a black box theater space in downtown Oakland that quickly became a home to several other performing arts companies such as the Lower Bottom Playaz and Gritty City Repertory Youth Theatre.

Ragged Wing announced on Tuesday that it will not renew the original lease on the Flight Deck when it expires at the end of March, and the 99-seat theater/performance space located in the 1500 block of Broadway in downtown Oakland, will close unless another organization steps in to take over the lease.

The development is bad news for dozens of low-budget performing arts groups that use the facility, as well as for the city of Oakland, which is starved for performing arts spaces, especially those serving low-budget groups.

“Even though the calendar is always full, all of the rental fees combined only cover about half of what it costs to run the space,” Anna Shneiderman, executive director of both RWE and the Flight Deck, said via email.

“Ragged Wing Ensemble has been left with the burden of fundraising the difference every year to subsidize affordable use by all 70 groups and artists using the space. As a result, we have not been able to give proper focus to growing our own artistic programs or adequately paying our leaders, artists and staff.”

The company plans to bid the Flight Deck farewell with a ritual participatory arts project called “The Art of Leaving,” with a ceremonial exit from the venue on March 29.

While Ragged Wing itself plans to go back to performing hither and yon as a nomadic troupe — as it did for 10 years before settling into its new home — the move displaces the Flight Deck’s resident companies as well as the many other organizations that rely on the building as a rare performance space in Oakland.

Ragged Wing is also working on a new venture called Oakland Cultural Space Cooperative, working with other Oakland arts and cultural groups to “network, preserve and activate cultural spaces, with the goal of sustaining culture makers of color facing displacement,” according to Shneiderman’s announcement.

“The idea is to create a network of cultural spaces working together while also being owned by the artists that are using those spaces,” she said. “The idea is to separate the space management from the organizations that are actually creating the art but have the entity that is running the spaces be owned by the artists, not be some totally separate external entity.”

“It’s been in phases over the last couple of months to be honest,” Shneiderman says of the Flight Deck departure. “We knew in the late spring, early summer that Ragged Wing wouldn’t really be able to renew, but we already had this Cultural Space Cooperative in development, and we had this idea that we could just pass (Flight Deck management) off to the Cultural Space Cooperative. And then for a bunch of reasons that ended up not being realistic. So we had to come to the reality that we just had to let it go.”