The Washington Center for the Performing Arts

Artistic & Community partner program: the center is the official home and box office for our 18 local artistic and community partners such as the Olympia symphony orchestra, masterworks choral ensemble, ballet northwest, Olympia junior programs, student orchestras of greater Olympia, and more. Among the many benefits of this unique collaboration, our artistic and community partners receive scheduling priority of the Washington center stage(s). Our artistic partners hold hundreds of events and performances each year, which account for 49% of all ticket sales at the Washington center. Since our inception, the center has provided a professional staff and theater to these local non-profit arts organizations, as well as others who may rent the venue.

Youth education & outreach: participating in the arts and performing in front of a live audience helps our local youth grow as artists, develop professionalism, and many great attributes and real-world skills. The arts help improve open mindedness, empathy, observation, articulating complex thoughts, focus, reasoning, and self-awareness. Our youth education and outreach program continues to rebuild after COVID-19 closures, loss and change of personnel, and will emerge stronger than ever.

The Washington center for the performing arts presents its own series of national and international touring artists from a broad spectrum of genres and styles. In the last 12 months we have presented world-famous artists such as pink martini, Judy Collins, and Wilco, along with jazz, comedy, nova Scotia, Americana, family-oriented performances, national geographic explorers, and a huge variety of other genres. In addition, we have a long-term collaboration with Indigenous Performance Productions (IPP) to develop new indigenous performances to tour throughout the country and beyond. The collaboration creates world premieres of theater, music, dance, and multi-disciplinary performances by native and indigenous artists. This partnership is the first of its kind in the United States and seeks to fulfill a critical need in the field and help to reverse long standing barriers to indigenous performing artists entering the touring circuit.