With a flexible seating capacity of up to 250 seats, the Carnival Studio Theater is the Arsht Center’s intimately designed black-box space for a wide variety of smaller-scaled presentations, including theater, dance, cabaret, comedy and more. Located inside the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the theater can be accessed directly from Biscayne Boulevard between N.E. 13th and 14th Streets, as well through the Ziff Ballet Opera House lobby entrance on N.E. 13th Street. In 2012, the luxury travel magazine Departures designated the Carnival Studio Theater one of the “world’s most beautiful theaters.”
Programming
Performances at the Carnival Studio Theater are intimate, unique and personal. Perhaps more than any other venue at the Arsht Center, the Carnival Studio Theater represents the Arsht Center’s philosophy that world-class and community-based are not mutually exclusive. The venue is home to several Arsht Center Signature Programming initiatives, including Theater Up Close, a theater subscription series featuring productions co-presented with theater companies, both local and national, and many of Miami’s premier arts organizations, including Zoetic Stage, City Theatre, Peter London Global Dance Company, Augusto Soledad Brazzdance, International Hispanic Theater Festival of Miami and many more are frequently showcased here.
Design
Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects with maximum flexibility, the Carnival Studio Theater’s seating and stage can be reconfigured according to the specific artistic needs of each production: proscenium, thrust, cabaret, in-the-round and festival seating. In spite of its simple black-box design, the space boasts an aircraft cable grid system suspended at approximately 21 feet above the deck, state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems able to accommodate the most sophisticated designs, including a large-cast play, multi-disciplinary music-and-dance piece or a solo cabaret entertainer.
Visual Arts
Born in Havana in 1914 and for many years a resident of Miami until his death, Cundo Bermudez, the legendary artist whose exuberant tile murals are found on public and private buildings throughout the Americas, was commissioned by Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places to create a site-specific work for the theater lobby. The whimsical Ways of Performing is a floor-to-ceiling glass-mosaic tribute to performing artists and their art, a colorful kaleidoscope of images that illustrates the act of artistic creation itself. It is an extraordinarily youthful creation by a 92-year-old visionary.