Norwood News

Even in a borough full of immigrants from distant lands, Eva Bornstein, the charismatic head of the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, is still rather exotic.

With her thick Polish accent and dry European wit, Bornstein stands out. But far from being a detriment, Bornstein says her outsider status has helped her lead the borough’s only performing arts center back to relevance.

Her experience as an outsider, however, doesn’t stem from her childhood in Poland, her early career in Ontario or her ability to speak Russian, German and French. In fact, she says, the biggest adjustment was coming to the Bronx from her last job as executive director of a performing arts center — in suburban New Jersey.

“In so many ways, this opportunity at Lehman is a totally new challenge for me,” Bornstein says.

The Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, NJ, where Bornstein previously worked, was well-established and performances were well attended.

That was not the case at Lehman Center, when Bornstein took the job in 2005.

Since her arrival, however, Lehman’s enjoyed a dramatic turnaround. Attendance at the Bedford Park concert hall has doubled in the last three years to 25,000. The operating budget has also doubled from $1 million to $2 million. And renovations, including a new state-of-the-art sound system and new carpeting, have made the venue considerably more inviting.

Much of that can be attributed to Bornstein’s efforts.

“The turnaround was completely Eva,” says Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Lehman Center’s soon-to-be departing marketing director who has worked there since 2001. “At that time [2001], it was inconceivable we could get to the point where we are now.”

Bornstein, 54, says the most important thing she’s done is learn about the community. “What I did was take stock of my surroundings and thought about what people would want to see, what they would pay to see.”

What she found was a large Latino population and so she started booking salsa shows, which have become staples of the center’s annual lineup. Now, in addition to the 10 or so cultural shows, such as the Moscow ballet or the Dublin Orchestra, the center puts on around 10 salsa shows a year.

She’s also not afraid to take risks.

“We don’t play it safe here,” Bornstein says. “We try to pick groups and performers that add a new dimension.”

This past December, Bornstein brought in reggae pop star Sean Paul, who is popular with younger, MTV-watching, audiences. Though it wasn’t a total disaster, Bornstein said they didn’t sell nearly enough tickets to break even.

Still, Bornstein says she’d do it again, just differently.

Sometimes her risk taking also leads to big-time success, like when she brought in Latin jazz legends Gato Barbieri and Jose Feliciano to be co-headliners in January. Co-headliners cost more money, representing an even bigger risk.

The show, which was the first either Barbieri or Feliciano had ever played in the Bronx, turned out to be one of the most successful in the center’s history. Rice-Gonzalez says the show’s success was typical Eva. “Sometimes, when she brings something up, we think, ‘how can we possibly make that work,’ and then it becomes wildly successful.”

Bornstein says she relies heavily on her talented and versatile employees, who she says are more like family than staff.

She says she hasn’t had to cut any of that staff or reduce her budget, despite the recent economic downturn and cuts in funding — the Department of Cultural Affairs recently slashed the center’s annual grant from $300,000 to $97,000. To compensate, Bornstein says she cut the center’s youth series.

Despite the economy, Bornstein has not scaled back her big plans for the center’s future. She’d like to continue building the local audience and also have Lehman become a destination venue for a diverse audience throughout the city and surrounding suburbs (free parking and close mass transit will help, she says).

“As Obama would say, we want to create a rich fabric of ethnicities and nationalities and combine them under one roof,” Bornstein says.