Triangle ArtWorks

Performance space has always been at a premium in the Triangle, but there are several new venues that have recently become available, such as Burning Coal Theater in Raleigh and DPAC in Durham, to name a few.  Now the Town of Cary is building a new 400 seat theater and I got to tour this exciting new facility last week.   The venue will be part of the new Cary Community Arts Center (although the official name for the center is still up in the air).  Once open, the arts center’s location near the downtown cultural district, with its restaurants and businesses, will allow it to be an addition to the Cary Arts Loop, as well as to enliven the downtown area.  Lyman Collins, Cary’s Cultural Arts Manager, say that he “has high expectations that the Center will be a catalyst for generating activity downtown”.

The theater will have a flytower, with a complete rigging system for scenery and lighting, and will include two large dressing rooms and a green room. In addition to the main theater, the facility will have a second performance space that can be used for dance, black box theater or other performances.

The new art’s facility will be a center for the visual arts and performing arts in Cary.  There will be a textile lab, three ceramics studios, indoor and outdoor kiln areas, a construction/woodworking lab, as well as eight flexible classrooms, including one with specialized ventilation for such activities as jewelry and printmaking.  The classrooms can be used for visual arts classes, dance, drama or other arts instruction or rehearsal.  Mr. Collins feels that this blending of performance and visual arts in one building will create exciting opportunities among the visual and performing arts and allow them to “bounce off of one another”.

Adding to this synergy will be the creative groups housed in the Center.  Applause, Cary Youth Theater, will be located in the building and the Town is currently taking requests from other arts organizations to become “resident organizations” some of which will use the center as their offices, but all of which will have priority use of the center’s facilities. The facility will also be used for summer camps and adult and youth classes.   Some of these town programs used to take place at Cary’s Jordan Hall Arts Center which will be considered for other uses once the new facility opens.  However, the nearly 50,000 square feet of the new facility will allow programming to expand, since the entire Jordan Hall Center would fit into the ceramics rooms in the new center.

The Design Team for the renovation includes Clearscapes Architects from Raleigh, as well as public artists Norie Sato, from Seattle, and Jim Hirschfield and Sonya Ishii from Chapel Hill, who were chosen by the Town to design the public art component of the building.  The artists worked on public art throughout the building focusing on the flytower, the theatre, the lobby (including a dramatic artwall in the front lobby), the entry plaza and other outside areas.  That team is creating a longer term art masterplan for the building to allow for future art opportunities.

This new facility will certainly add needed performance and programming space for Cary and the Triangle.

Do you know of other new facilities opening in the Triangle?  Let us know!

Beth

Tags: "creative placemaking", Cary, performance space, venues