Performers angle for rooms of their own

A new venue will open on Broadway next week, but students anticipate a scramble for space.

The fifth floor of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium seems part of an earlier era. Wooden exercise ladders and built-in cast-iron weight machines line the walls. A group of mustachioed men in leotards looks out from a torn and yellowed photograph above one door. In room D, the plaster walls show years of water damage, a worn piano stands in one corner, and a collection of old metal rails line one wall. Wear and tear aside, Room D is a fairly well preserved picture of what Yale's gym looked like shortly after its construction. It's also one of two practice spaces shared by Yale's seven dance groups.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

As with the dance rooms, so with the Univer-sity's performance spaces on the whole. None are falling apart, but many are clearly past their prime. All are sought by several groups. And their occupants—the actors, directors, dancers, and musicians who've forged Yale's reputation as a creative community—are disappointed with the venues that the University offers them.

To say that there isn't enough performance space at Yale would be an exaggeration. There's almost always someplace. Dramat President Alex Timbers, ES '01, described the situation as "more a question of quality than quantity." Though the Yale University Theater and the Experimental Theater are fairly large performance spaces, they're available only to Dramat productions. College spaces, such as Trumbull's Nick Chapel, the Stiles Little Theater, Berkeley's multipurpose room, and the Calhoun Cabaret, limit audience size and staging options. Dining halls, with their terrible acoustics, tables and chairs to remove and set up, and complete lack of storage areas or places for lighting, are the last resort. As David Valdez, DC '01, put it, "dining halls are intended for dinners and do not have the design to accommodate most productions."

Over the past two years, Yale has taken steps to alleviate the problem. Yesterday, the University announced a $250 million plan to refurbish its arts facilities. Included in this package is funding to consolidate School of Drama facitilies in a renovated building at 149 York St., which, along with the new Experimental Theater in Green Hall, may free existing space for the Dramat. In the fall of 1998, the Whitney Humanities Center stage opened exclusively for Theater Studies senior projects, helping to lessen the crunch created by the closing of the Silliman Dramatic Attic the previous spring. In addition, the residential college renovations are slowly opening more venues. Though Berkeley's multipurpose room is as much a basketball court as a theater, at least there's no need to haul around chairs to get it ready for breakfast. Once their renovations are complete, both Branford and Saybrook will feature performance spaces.

Far more important than these spaces, at least for the time being, is the soon-to-be-opened Yale College Performance Space (YCPS) behind Toad's. Dubbed "Off Broadway" by the Administration, the YCPS grew out of a November 1998 proposal by the Yale College Council (YCC) that the Broadway redevelopment plan include a new theater space in the former bookstore annex. After being delayed by about a month because of a problem with the floor, the black box theater should open to students early next week. Director of Special Events and Undergraduate Productions Jim Brewczynski, DRA '86, explained that the space will be open to anyone willing to fill out a form explaining how he or she intends to utilize the space.

Opening Yale's black box

Off Broadway is a tremendous improvement on the spaces currently open to the majority of Yale students. The YCPS features an extensive lighting grid and will have its own lighting equipment, which will allow performances to dispense with the rentals that currently inconvenience Sudler shows. And, much to the relief of anyone who's ever sweltered through a performance in Nick Chapel, it boasts a state-of-the-art climate control system. While there are no current plans for a PA system, an addition that would make the space especially attractive to campus bands, Brewczynski "has not ruled out" the possibility of purchasing one.

Students are hardly about to complain that Yale has given them another place to perform, but they disagree about Off Broadway's impact on Yale performers. Singer and Just Add Water member Ryan Iverson, SY '02, believes that "it will help, but it won't stop the fighting. It has its own limitations, which will send some directors scrambling for other spaces." Actor Nate Schenkkan, BR '02, was more optimistic. "With Broadway opening, the number of plays each semester using non-theater-specific spaces will drop by at least six to eight per semester, which will be great for theater here," he said. There's no doubt that the YCPS will prompt some improvement, even if it is a small one.

The kid in the attic?

The new space offers tremendous options for Yale's dance community. The only rehearsal studios open to all dancers on campus are Rooms D and EF on the fifth floor of the gym. The shortage worsened two weeks ago when the gym administration kicked dancers out of a room on the sixth floor after one of its many users repeatedly left the room's floor mat rolled up. Arianna Romairone, ES '03, who had been choreographing a dance there for A Different Drum, maintains that a ballroom class before her time slot removed the mat and nobody in her group knew that it needed to be rolled out after they were done using it. Ed Mockus, who is in charge of the space, intends to keep it closed until he can determine who is responsible.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH Crumbling walls are the backdrop to rehearsal space for Yale dancers.

Outside of dining halls, performance options on campus were virtually nonexistent before the opening of Off Broadway. There is an annual winter charity show in Woolsey Hall featuring all seven campus dance groups, but the space is out of reach for single groups. Nick Chapel and the other small spaces are too cramped for dance. YaleDancers and A Different Drum have gotten around the problem by renting the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) on Audubon Street, and all other dance groups make do with the dining halls. In these spaces, lighting trees restrict movement, flat seating hides performers from the audience, and the floors are too hard for jumping and dancing. The only way around this last problem is to set up a marley floor, a special pad designed for dance. Outside of the gym studios, Yale has one marley floor that's badly damaged, because it freezes and cracks in its current storage area in the Calhoun basement.

YaleDancers member and Alliance for Dance at Yale (ADAY) founder Sidra Bell, SY '01, describes dance as "the stepchild of the arts at Yale." Unlike theater or music, there is no extensive dance curriculum at Yale. Dance thus lacks performance rooms comparable to those employed by Theater Studies and Music majors. The shortage is so acute that Bell has occasionally found herself practicing in the gym's fifth floor hallway. In her view, dance is treated as "an undergraduate pastime, not a serious artistic endeavor. It's necessarily active and technical, not something conducive to theory. If you want to learn about dance, you have to dance." A vicious cycle develops. There's no hands-on dance instruction, so the University doesn't provide spaces for dance. Because there are no spaces for dance, there isn't any place for instruction.

Bell founded ADAY as a freshman to help break this cycle. In addition to pushing the University to create more space, ADAY has worked to raise the profile of dance at Yale. The organization holds its yearly charity performance in Woolsey and brings professional dancers on campus to teach technical classes at an annual symposium. Its goal is "to show that there's a huge number of dancers here who want instruction in technique," Bell said.

Still, few dancers seem satisfied with what Yale offers them. Off Broadway, while an improvement, isn't a dedicated dance space, so dancers will have to compete with actors, musicians, and anyone else who wants access. There is also a desire for more rehearsal space on campus. "It's ridiculous that there are only two studios for us to use when there are a ton of squash courts, a huge weight room, and plenty of pool space," Romairone said. To make the situation worse, YaleDancers has been forced out of ECA by renovations and must therefore hold this year's performances at the extraordinarily expensive Palace Theater on College Street.

Heat, light, and drama

For a director finding space for a play, the problem is a combination of the sheer number of shows occurring on campus and the lack of any coherent system for assigning spaces to productions that aren't senior projects or backed by the Dramat. Because there are so many productions squeezed into relatively few spaces, "If you don't know that you're going to be putting up a theater piece at the very beginning of the semester, it's unlikely that you'll have space," Iverson said.

Nick Chapel, a converted squash court located in the basement of Trumbull, the Stiles Little Theater, and the Calhoun Cabaret are the only theater spaces available to Sudler shows. Although they hold only about 40 people—packed together like sardines—it's possible to stage a good show in all of these spaces. Yale Drama Coalition President Zach Jacobson, JE '02, described the Trumbull space as "a great little black box and a neat space to work in. It's a great place to start exploring and experimenting in theater." Some students noted that the small size actually encourages directors to be more creative with set design and blocking. Additionally, Yale students have found several non-traditional spaces for plays, such as Beinecke Plaza, college courtyards, the Af-Am House, even Beinecke Library.

Despite the resourcefulness of many directors, students have a pile of complaints about the theaters available for Sudler Fund projects. Michael Walker, DC '01, described Nick Chapel as "unbearably hot and crowded every weekend." Valdez called performing in there "an unfair experience for both the actor and audience. The ventilation is really poor." Nicholas Szydlowski, CC '02, added, "Nick Chapel's electrical system is in ill repair. Maintenance is left up to people using it." Tim Hoovin, TC '01, who manages Nick Chapel, admitted that there is no scheduled maintenance during the semester, and that productions have left everything from trash to pieces of sets in the theater.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH Performers hope that a new space opening behind Toad's next week will alleviate the scramble for venues.

The Calhoun Cabaret and the Stiles Little Theater aren't much better. The Cabaret can get hot and stuffy and is also difficult to light, though not nearly as bad as the Little Theater. The Stiles space has no lighting bars, which means technicians have to improvise places to hang lights. Worse still, it lacks the high-power outlets that stage lights require, forcing designers to settle for a series of three-pronged outlets. One lighting designer recalled having to plug each light into three separate outlets while making sure not to put them in outlets that were on the same circuit lest she blow a fuse.

Yale unplugged—permanently?

Not only are the college spaces small and virtually off-limits to anyone who wants to play loudly, but they usually lack equipment. Many are too small to hold a drum kit, which the colleges don't provide anyway. None of the performance spaces on campus have their own PA systems. Musicians sometimes borrow college PAs, which usually provide good sound for the audience but are impossible for the bands themselves to hear. "Without monitors, you can be up on stage without much of an idea of how you sound," Arcaro member Matthew Dunkel, JE '01, explained. Bands often get around these limitations by playing off-campus venues such as Rudy's or the Tune Inn. However, such sites lay out of the way for most students, and guests often have to pay and be over 21 to enter.

Town-gown relations also get in the way of Yale's rock bands. "One of our main problems is that we draw a lot of people from New Haven, and there aren't too many places on campus where New Havenites are welcome," Dunkel said. "We find ourselves cut off from people who can't get into bars or from people who can't get inside Yale."

For a look at an alternate universe, one might turn to Bard. At the small liberal arts college in upstate New York, the venues available for rock and hip-hop concerts alone hold around 2,000 people—for a college of about 1,400 students. Unlike Yale, Bard has equipped all of these spaces, from the smallest on up, with PA systems, and the largest have built-in light and sound control rooms. Soon Bard will add a performing arts center designed by Frank Gehry, the architect responsible for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.

At Bard, many performance spaces are located in its student center. In the mid-'90s,Yale started to plan a student center, but the project was aborted in its early stages when an alumnus revoked a sizable donation. "We went to a certain point in the planning and then were told there was no funding," Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg said. She does not see a revival of the student center plan in the near future. No end in sight Off Broadway and the residential college renovations aside, it seems that the question of performance space is here to stay. Students have suggested building a student center or adding recital halls, theaters, and more YCPS-style black boxes. None of this, it seems, is going to happen any time soon, if ever. As Trachtenberg observed, "We could build Carnegie Hall, and we could build it again and again, and a whole complex to go with it. There still wouldn't be enough space to give everybody at Yale just what he or she wanted." Considering the demands of Yale's extraordinarily wide range of performers, it's hard to disagree.