A month and counting at Mayo Street Arts

On Mondays, you can go to Mayo Street Arts at 10 Mayo St. for tango dancing; Tuesdays, it's kids yoga; and Wednesdays and Thursdays, bellydancing. it's all part of a new nonprofit group in the old St. Ansgar's Church of East Bayside.

The new center celebrated its one-month anniversary Monday, but there's not much time being spent looking back.

"We're only a month old, so everything's in the future," said founder Blainor McGough.

"We have tango dance happening here, children's yoga, we'll have puppet shows here on the weekends, I think it's a pretty wide variety of performance, and we're open to a lot of different types of creative performance," said McGough, a puppeteer who worked with the Shoestring Theater and makes puppets for the Maine Children's Museum.

With six artist studios, ongoing dance classes, music and theater performances and arts exhibitions, the center is making its mark in the Portland arts scene. On March 19, the center plans a benefit performance of the Dirty Dishes Burlesque Review, followed on March 21 by a Burlesque for Better Body Image workshop; on April 2, during that month's First Friday Art Walk, the center will host a Japanese Taiko drum performance at 7 p.m.; and the center is staging an opening reception and art exhibition for the Maine African Film Festival on April 6.

"You can't have too many venues, and this space is so cool, you can't not have a venue here," McGough said. "It's just really beautiful and inspiring. I used to come to performances here, and then when I saw this place was up for rent, I was like, 'Let's do this, it's perfect for music, for performance, for a gallery, for everything.' There are so many artists and musicians around Portland it's like, everybody's here, everybody's ready, let's make it happen."

McGough said she was looking for a studio and stumbled upon the old church, vacated by the People's Regional Opportunity Program and overseen by Seaside Properties, a property management company, for one of the owners, arts and environmental benefactor Roxanne Quimby.

The two-story church was built in 1897 by the Danish Lutheran community, and later the Jehovah's Witnesses used the building. "It was kind of a hippie school for dropouts in the '60s, a free school. It was a community kitchen and then A Company of Girls space, a girls theater. PROP had a daycare in here on the East End," McGough recalled.

A group of artists formed a nonprofit group to secure a lease on the building. Besides McGough, they include Brian Arlet, who handles music programming; Megan Grumbling, who plans to host a monthly poetry night called "Lit"; Annie Seikonia, a writer and administrator who works with volunteers and helps with scheduling and organization; Kelly Nesbitt, who handles performance programming; and Robyn Merrill, who works on legal issues.

With 3,850 square feet of space, "it's a perfect place for theater performance," McGough said, noting that someone recently donated theater lights. The artists still need folding chairs and other furnishings, but McGough said she's pleased with their progress.

"We'll have monthly gallery events, like First Friday (Art Walk), weekly performances, music performances, theater performances, we have dance classes here four nights a week, and we have artists studios downstairs," she noted.

"Where I'd like to see it going is to have afterschool programming, and do workshops for kids and just fill it up, have this place in use all the time," McGough said. "It will be diverse here."

For more information, email info@mayostreetarts.org, call 615-3609 or visit www.mayostreetarts.org

 SPECIAL EVENT

Lemi Ghariokwu has designed album covers for artists such as Bob Marley and Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. How did an East Bayside arts center that's barely a month old manage to line up Ghariokwu for an art exhibition and reception on April 6?

It turns out that word of mouth works. Mayo Street Arts, which opened its doors on Feb. 1, held its inaugural fundraiser, the Art with Heart Hootenanny, on Feb. 13. The event became the talk of the Portland arts community, as about 150 people attended. Mayo Street Arts raised $3,700 from the event but perhaps equally important made contacts, said founder Blainor McGough. Those present that night included organizers of the Maine African Film Festival who were arranging Ghariokwu's visit for the April 6-10 festival, McGough explained. Through their involvement the arts center managed to line up Ghariokwu for the April 6 reception. Mayo Street Arts will host Ghariokwu from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Aprll 6 during the Maine African Film Festival.

Today, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Peter A. Mckernan Center on the Southern Maine Community College campus, the Maine African Film Festival plans a fundraising event, according to its Facebook page (www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77234795766).