The Project Lodge's new "stewards"

Since it opened in early 2008 on East Johnson Street, the Project Lodge has seen a lot of success and activity for a small venue whose attitude is to basically let outside forces take the initiative to get events going. Founders Kendra Larson and Christopher Buckingham never really treated it like a money-making business, and have simply offered it up as a resource, charging enough to cover their modest overhead. What's surprising is how eagerly people took them up on it, from local bands to independent show promoters to visual artists renting out the space for showings to multimedia and video artists hosting screenings. Larson and Buckingham are moving back to their hometown of Portland by the end of the summer, so they put out an open-ended call for someone to come in and take the Lodge over. Surprisingly, a group of people, most of whom had never met each other before, got together and drew up a proposal for the Lodge's future. Only one of them is well-known at all in Madison music: Bessie Cherry, who currently runs the Forward Music Festival and used to book shows at Café Montmartre, among other things. Her partners are Andrew Berry and Hayley Thornton-Kennedy, both recent graduates of Dartmouth College who just moved to town (Berry grew up here), and Brooke Jackson, who's a classically trained vocalist and a Wisconsin MBA, as well as the new advisor for the Wisconsin Union Directorate's music-booking committee. Thornton-Kennedy and Berry have music-booking experience from their college days, and Thornton-Kennedy also worked for a while with a national booking agency in New York.

The real question is how they'll manage to ramp up a venue for which there's no one easy plan or identity—it's an all-ages, all-purpose kind of place that's a music venue but also an art gallery, it doesn't sell drinks, and a lot of people aren't really sure what it's supposed to be in the first place. As Larson and Buckingham hand over more responsibility to them, the four plan to run the Lodge as a non-profit, get more aggressive about booking bands (with an emphasis on local music), keep up the art shows, and try out other ways to bring some money into the space. In short, it seems they're hoping to keep the Lodge's "DIY space" spirit while running it in a more businesslike way. While some things remain a tad vague and business-speak-y, there are some interesting ideas and good sense backing up the noble intentions here. It's encouraging that Cherry talks of being a "steward" rather than just a venue owner or booker. Curious about this promising yet challenging plan, The A.V. Club sat down with the incoming Project Lodge crew to try and get some more details.

The A.V. Club: Some of you are pretty new to Madison, right?
Hayley Thornton-Kennedy: I said, "Okay, well, I'm going to quit my job and move from New York to Madison, Wis." I wanted to do a smaller thing. I didn't want to be involved with a big booking agency anymore.

Brooke Jackson: Last year, I was working for the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, and the Pitchfork Music Festival, and I liked that. I liked being able to be around musicians but also have some say in how it comes together, and not screw them over, basically. Then I got a job here, and so that's why I was like, "Okay, I'm in."

Andrew Berry: Packing intelligent, creative, and excited minds in a small space and building a community around it spawns really great things. I'd like for that to happen.

AVC: Chris and Kendra's basic idea at the Project Lodge now is that it is whatever people step up and make it, so it depends on people coming to them and taking the initiative. How do you feel about that?

Bessie Cherry: I feel like we need to formalize it a little bit and make it more official, but at the same time not have it lose its sort of looseness... I feel like I have a pretty good stable of local musicians who know me. I don't think a lot of them actually considered it as a venue. It seemed like more of this amorphous, "Do people book there or do we just go in there?"

Possible avenues of collaboration would include other DIY promoters (like Good Style Shop, Kiki's House of Righteous Music, Nottingham Co-op, or [another former Montmartre booker] Justin Bricco), Madison entities with their own venues looking to present smaller shows (High Noon Saloon, Majestic Theatre, Wisconsin Union Directorate), non-profits or any organization looking for meeting or exhibition space, arts organizations hoping to utilize the space for creation, and/or display, and local schools wanting an alternative venue for child or teen activities.

BJ: I am hoping I'll get the chance to encourage the WUD Music Committee to work with me to book smaller, more niche acts at the Project Lodge. For example, this would involve my own personal passion (and pet project), which is to bring up the Chicago jazz and free-jazz scene to Madison. But my priority, of course, will lie with my employer, WUD. I'm hoping there will be synergy here.

AVC: As of now, the calendar on the Lodge's website is looking pretty empty for August and onward. Do you have a lot of shows in the works, or will there be a lull as you get started?

HTK: [We have] quite a few plans in the works beginning late this summer and heading into fall. We hope to make as smooth a transition as possible, but there is the possibility of a sleepier week or two of programming than we anticipate in the future.

AVC: What are the biggest challenges you're anticipating?

BC: One thing I definitely learned at Montmartre is that spending a lot of money to market yourself is not the best way to go when you're a small venue... I'm not gonna name any [local venues that have closed in recent years], but I feel like [it] was detrimental to some of the venues [to have] bartenders who actually really didn't care about the bands and were really vocal about it, or you'd call a venue and the bartender's like, "I have no idea what's going on on Thursday." That's gonna kill your space. You have to have people in there who are really passionate about whatever's going on.