PianoFight, a beloved community arts venue, rehearsal studio, restaurant, bar and office space in the Bay Area, will shut down its Oakland and S.F. locations this March.
The venue established a 15 year legacy at the center of the San Francisco performing arts scene. PianoFight was founded in 2007 as a producing project by Dan Williams, Rob Ready, and Kevin Fink. In 2014, their S.F. location in the Tenderloin opened as the project’s “palace of off-beat performance,” the venue said in a press release.
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That space stimulated the local economy with $25 million in activity, selling 198,000 tickets across 6,702 performances, and paying Bay Area artists over $1 million directly. The venue took on performing arts projects spanning the spectrum of stage and scene — they hosted “comedy, plays, music, dance, drag, magic, burlesque, circus, podcasts, films, video game tournaments, and game shows,” executive director Dan Williams said in the press release.
“We said yes to everything because we could, we wanted to, and it was more fun than saying no,” said Williams.
The Oakland location opened in May 2020 to a shuttered and masked city. When the pandemic put a pause on live performance, PianoFight persisted. But so did the pandemic, the revenue slowdown and slow-to-return audiences.
In 2022, “Business stayed at about 35% of pre pandemic levels, and the venue, which had hosted 719 shows in 2019, staged only 201 in last year,” the press release said.
