ABSTRACT
At the heart of the performing arts center (PAC) will lie a theater-a theater that may be for music, for drama, for ballet, for opera, for musicals, for popular entertainers, or for a rich mix of entertainment and culture. How can you ensure that the heart of your PAC will inspire, uplift, thrill, and connect with your community? For generations, theater space had evolved based upon considerations not of sight and sound alone but upon a fundamentally different principle: a theater was a place of communication between people. An audience did not passively sit, look, and listen: it participated in the performance-the experience was shared-with actors and audiences interacting together. Theaters were a place in which music, song, drama, or dance could be viscerally conveyed, where ideas, passions, exhilaration would be irresistible. All cultures around the world originally developed theaters that brought their audiences into such a dynamic relationship. However, after World War I and throughout the twentieth century, the vital importance of the three-dimensional relationship between the living performer and lively audience was lost. Cinema-style fan-shaped auditoriums with endless rows of seats facing a proscenium stage produced barren, overlarge, often-cavernous spaces that seem to defy the kindling of human emotion. Over time, a very small number of theater design consultants and architects began to realize that to restore the “magic” into theatre, a fresh understanding of the threedimensional theater spaces of our ancestors was needed. This chapter discusses ways in which exciting theater design and supportive architecture can make a community’s theater space something special indeed-a lively, thrilling heart of the modern performing arts center. A great performance onstage will always help, too!
