When The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi opened in 2015, Abu Dhabi already had major cultural events. What it didn’t have was a place where contemporary performance happened week after week.

The Arts Center is part of NYU Abu Dhabi, but it isn’t just a university venue. It is a public, multidisciplinary performing arts centre bringing together music, dance, theatre, film and work that moves between disciplines, with artists from the UAE, the wider region and around the world. While students and faculty are part of its programme, most of its audience comes from outside the university.

Bill Bragin, its Executive Artistic Director, describes it as “a place for discovery” — somewhere audiences might come across artists or forms they haven’t encountered before.

That idea has been central to The Arts Center from the beginning. Because when it started programming in 2015, Abu Dhabi wasn’t exactly short on culture. Abu Dhabi Festival was bringing classical music, ballet, jazz and world music to the city. The Cultural Foundation had a history of international programming. Formula One weekends came with major concerts, while events such as Beats on the Beach drew large crowds. What was missing was regularity.

“There wasn’t a place to see an ongoing, nearly weekly, if not more frequent, season of performances,” says Bill Bragin. “We wanted to bring work to Abu Dhabi that complemented the existing episodic offerings, bring artists and works which largely hadn’t been seen in the UAE before.”

That idea shaped what The Arts Center became. Instead of treating performance as an occasional special event, the idea was to make going to see dance, theatre or live music something people could do regularly — and, eventually, without necessarily knowing the artist’s name beforehand.

For the first two years, tickets to The Arts Center were free. Each show had a set booking time, and Bragin remembers performances filling up in less than an hour.

“People would stop meetings in their offices so that they could jump onto our website before we were sold out,” Bill says.

When paid ticketing was introduced, prices were kept relatively low. The aim was to avoid turning every performance into a once-a-year splurge and instead make repeat visits realistic.

It also helped The Arts Center develop something useful for a venue programming contemporary work: trust.

Many of the artists it presents are not household names. The programme moves between music, theatre, dance, film and work that sits somewhere between disciplines. Bill Bragin says they deliberately kept the programming varied because, at the beginning, they weren’t sure what kind of audience would emerge — so they wanted to give people a wide range of things to choose from.

What he found, though, was something more interesting: people were surprisingly comfortable with not knowing exactly what they were walking into.

“Although much of the work we present is unfamiliar to most of our audiences, I have found the audiences here are incredibly open and curious, and willing to engage with the unfamiliar,” he says.

And importantly, this is not primarily a university audience. Although The Arts Center is part of NYU Abu Dhabi and works closely with students and faculty, Bragin says the majority of its audiences come from the wider public.

For Bragin, getting people into the room is only the beginning. He makes a clear distinction between building an audience and building a community: one is transactional, the other is relational.

“We’re not just trying to sell tickets and fill seats. We’re trying to bring people together in temporary communities at each show where the audiences are in dialogue with the artists and with each other, and with us.”

That means moving the conversation beyond whether someone simply liked a performance or not. Bragin is more interested in what it made people feel, think about, or talk about afterwards — including with the person who happened to be sitting next to them.

This idea also helps explain why so much of The Arts Center’s work happens outside the performance itself. Workshops, talks, residencies and artist development programmes all extend those relationships beyond a single night in the theatre.

The Arts Center is now in its 12th season, a programme built around ideas of renewal, connection and collective experience. It opened with Gulf debuts by The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Fanfaraï, followed by the Middle East premiere of The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave, which extended beyond the performance itself into late-night DJ sets with Dubai’s Analog Room. Across the season, the programme continues to move between music, dance, film, workshops and artist development.

Upcoming works show that range clearly. Youness Atbane’s Untitled 14km, a UAE premiere combining dance, theatre, performance and installation, examines how the contemporary art world frames Arab identity; Fouad Boussouf’s Näss brings together hip-hop and North African musical traditions, with a related public workshop and school matinee.

The season also reflects how The Arts Center’s role has expanded beyond presenting finished work. Sam Green’s TREES will bring a live documentary together with the UAE National Orchestra, while Knot, by Emirati artist Afra Al Dhaheri and choreographer Dovydas Strimaitis, is being co-commissioned by The Arts Center.

But Bragin is also thinking about what is still missing.

One priority is smaller-scale work. The centre has presented ambitious productions with substantial technical requirements, but Bragin also wants artists based in the UAE to see examples of strong work that can be made with far fewer resources.

The hope is that programmes such as Numoo, workshops and the connections formed between artists will eventually lead to more UAE-rooted productions — at The Arts Center and elsewhere in the country.

And then there is another gap: getting that work beyond the UAE.

“When I go to festivals around the world, even festivals which focus on Arab work, performance from the UAE is decidedly under-represented,” Bragin says.

“I’d love to see more stories about the UAE on the global stage, coming from the perspectives of those of us who call this place home, to give a richer, more nuanced picture of our lives and who we are.”

That might also be the clearest way to understand The Arts Center’s role in Abu Dhabi so far.

It did not create the city’s performing arts scene on its own. What it helped create were some of the conditions a scene needs to grow: somewhere to see work regularly, an audience willing to take chances, opportunities for artists to meet and develop, and connections between people and institutions that did not exist in quite the same way before.

Or, as Bragin puts it: “I think we’ve opened the dialogue about what’s possible.”

Of course, The Arts Center has not been developing alone.

Abu Dhabi’s cultural landscape now looks very different from the one Bragin encountered when he arrived. He points to the growth of Saadiyat Cultural District, Louvre Abu Dhabi, 421, teamLab Phenomena, new museums and institutions, as well as the establishment of the UAE National Orchestra.

“What I love most is that as the ecosystem grows, we haven’t become competitive.”

A good example of what that expanded ecosystem makes possible is Sam Green’s upcoming Trees. The live documentary will be performed in Abu Dhabi with the UAE National Orchestra, with music by composer Caroline Shaw.

For years, Bragin says, projects requiring an orchestra were difficult to realise locally because The Arts Center did not have access to an ensemble suited to them. The arrival of the UAE National Orchestra changes that.

It is a small but concrete example of what “building an ecosystem” actually means: one new institution makes an entirely different kind of project possible for another.