CONNECTIONS
News and notes from the alumni community
The Bones of a Building Rob Richards, chair of the Theater and Dance Department
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tanding on the edge of South Campus, watching the foundation of the new Goel Center for Theater and Dance go up, evokes a powerful feeling. The seed of the design for the building came out of our department’s vision, the vision for our program, and it will be an incredibly inspiring space — one that puts a real buoyancy in our stride. When the facility is complete, I think we’ll feel a culture shift. The arts are so important to education, and to learning creatively, and I think they’ll feel much more front and center. To have a playful spirit and to be collaborative are core strengths that our students can apply to whatever field they choose to pursue, and to every aspect of their lives. One of the big, amazing gifts for me is that theater will finally be in the same building as dance. We will physically be the Theater and Dance Department with the ability to work more synergistically. And we will all have more places that invite us to be spirits of invention and innovation, like the costume area on the garden level or the stagecraft classroom next to it — where I hope to expand my puppetry work with the students. Just having the opportunity to inhabit the big empty space in the rehearsal room, with all of its possibility, is going to be a lot of fun. I want to get to know the bones of this building, to see what all of these discussions and all of these sheets of paper will look like in the form of a building. When Tod [Williams], one of our architects, asked what we wanted the building to look like, somebody said, “like a geode.”
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It should sparkle on the inside. There is something to that: the kids in their costumes under the stage lights, their faces, their smiles. That’s the payoff; that’s the wonderful reward. The center’s proximity to our athletics complex, which will expand the South Campus as a destination — not only for our Academy community but for those outside of it — is also a gift. The Goel Center, even the landscaping around it and the new pedestrian walkway, will invite people in — and the performing arts are really meant to bring community together. I am thrilled that we will have the ability to provide greater avenues of connection for our students and for our neighbors in town and the greater Seacoast region. My colleagues and I are eager to welcome each and every member of our Exeter family, as well as our community, to the Goel Center for Theater and Dance when it opens in spring 2018. I am so thankful for the alumni and parent support that has allowed our vision to take form and for the ongoing and additional support that will help to ensure its completion. E For more information on the David E. Goel and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance, including real-time photos of construction and architectural renderings, go to www.exeter.edu/southcampus.
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