Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Coordinates: 39°56′48″N 75°09′56″W / 39.9467°N 75.1656°W / 39.9467; -75.1656

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is a large performing arts venue located at 300 South Broad Street at the corner of Spruce Street, along the stretch known as the "Avenue of the Arts", in Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is owned and operated by Kimmel Center, Inc., an organization which also manages the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The center is named after philanthropist Sidney Kimmel.

The Center is the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of America's "Big Five" symphony orchestras and regarded as one of the best in the world. Kimmel Center is also the home venue of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Philadanco, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and a performance series known as Kimmel Center Presents, which hosts a variety of jazz, classical, and world pop performers.

History

Performing arts

Performing arts are art forms in which artists use their voices and/or the movements of their bodies, often in relation to other objects, to convey artistic expression—as opposed to, for example, purely visual arts, in which artists use paint/canvas or various materials to create physical or static art objects. Performing arts include a variety of disciplines but all are intended to be performed in front of a live audience.

Performers

Artists who participate in performing arts in front of an audience are called performers. Example of this include actors, comedians, dancers, magicians, circus artists, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting, choreography and stagecraft.

A performer who excels in acting, singing, and dancing is commonly referred to as a "triple threat". Well-known examples of historical triple threat artists include Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Judy Garland.

Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with costumes and stage makeup, stage lighting, and sound.

Center

Center or centre may refer to:

Mathematics and science

Sports

Philadelphia Orchestra

The Philadelphia Orchestra is an American symphony orchestra, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, the orchestra is based at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, where it performs its subscription concerts, numbering over 130 annually, in Verizon Hall.

From its founding until 2001, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its concerts at the Academy of Music. The orchestra continues to own the Academy, and returns there one week per year for the Academy of Music's annual gala concert and concerts for school children. The Philadelphia Orchestra's summer home is the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. It also has summer residencies at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and since July 2007 at the Bravo! Vail Valley Festival in Vail, Colorado. The orchestra also performs an annual series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. From its earliest days the orchestra has been active in the recording studio, making extensive numbers of recordings, primarily for RCA Victor and Columbia Records.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia (/ˌfɪləˈdɛlfiə/) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the fifth-most-populous in the United States, with an estimated population in 2014 of 1,560,297. In the Northeastern United States, at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill River, Philadelphia is the economic and cultural anchor of the Delaware Valley, a metropolitan area home to 7.2 million people and the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.

In 1682, William Penn founded the city to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia played an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution in 1787. Philadelphia was one of the nation's capitals in the Revolutionary War, and served as temporary U.S. capital while Washington, D.C., was under construction. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became a major industrial center and railroad hub that grew from an influx of European immigrants. It became a prime destination for African-Americans in the Great Migration and surpassed two million occupants by 1950.