Form follows function in Tucson - News - new performing arts center at the University of Arizona in Tucson

Dance Magazine, May, 2003 by Margaret Regan

When a dance theater is on the drawing boards, it pays to hire an architect who used to be a dancer. Donna Barry, who with Jose Daniel Pombo co-designed the new $9 million performing arts center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, didn't dance long--she studied ballet when she was 12--but the experience was enough to shape the project. Set to open this month, the 27,000-square-foot building has "the idea of movement throughout," Barry said.

A wavy, rust-colored stage scrim undulates along the theater walls inside and out, mimicking the gestures of dance. The outside scrim, a theatrical flash of deep orange against the boxy building's dark walls, will ward off the fierce Arizona sun by day and shine at night to announce concerts. Upstairs in a large studio, every demiplie at the ballet barre will be visible at all hours through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

And, perhaps most amazingly, the architect, of the Phoenix firm Gould Evans Associates, based the design of the indoor-outdoor lobby on George Balanchine's 1934 Serenade. "We got a copy of the labanotation and made the floor plan from the starting positions, just as the dancers are on the cusp of movement. We worked with the engineers to create a matrix." Standing in for Balanchine's long-ago dancers are columns that tilt forward from a vertical axis; even the light fixtures and benches echo the dance's movement.

Jory Hancock, the former Pacific Northwest Ballet principal who heads the university's dance division, said that the new theater will kick off with a gala headlined by Ben Vereen October 4. He foresees that the theater will help to build Tucson's dance audience, as well as giving the city's local professional troupes another venue to rent and providing the university's students with more opportunities to dance. Until now, student dancers have had to compete with student musicians for performance time in a concert hall with poor sight lines. However, the dancers will have to share their new theater with opera singers in training. The forty-two-foot-deep stage can accommodate large opera sets but leaves room for just 300 seats. "We did things not to compromise the artistry of the performances," Hancock said.

The new performing arts center, as yet unnamed, also has a scene-building shop, costume and set storage facilities, and an unusual, marley-floored dressing room that will double as a studio and physical therapy/wellness room.

Like most state universities, Arizona is under pressure to make cutbacks. Hancock said that two-thirds of the theater money came from private donors, and just one-third from university coffers. The major donor, who chooses to remain anonymous, "went around the country and looked at ten or twelve of the best university dance programs," Hancock said. "They saw ours and said, 'What do you need?' "With $3 million from this single donor in hand, the university agreed to kick in another $3 million if the dance department could do the same. Tucson businessman Karl Eller gave money for the theater, which will be named for his wife, Stevie, and Mel and Enid Zuckerman, owners of Tucson's Canyon Ranch Resort, paid for the therapy center.

Hancock credits the strength of the division's triple-threat dance program, which places equal emphasis on ballet, modern, and jazz dance, for the donors' willingness to open their wallets. "Some people think, `Build a building and they will come.' We built the program first and now we're about to have a building that matches the quality of the program."