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The Maine Center for the Arts isn’t being renovated; it’s being reborn.
An $11 million re-imagining of the University of Maine’s cultural center will reach completion in the first week of 2009. A name change to the Collins Center for the Arts (CCA) will come in honor of a $5 million donation from UMaine graduates Richard and Anne Collins.
Avenues unexplored
Philanthropy is a primary responsibility of the center, according to John Patches, executive director of the Maine Center for the Arts. The center’s new era will open uncharted possibilities for reaching out to the community. Two firsts – a film series and a wedding – are already planned.
Details on the movie programming are amorphous at the moment, but Patches is enthusiastic. “We’ll be able to show film that otherwise isn’t shown in this whole region. I think it has potential for really getting interest from students,” he said. Independent and international films will be the focus, using Waterville’s Railroad Square Cinema as a template. “We won’t necessarily duplicate that, but we’re going to go down more that road.”
The year-round series will be made possible by a 30-by-30-foot motorized projection screen and a fully digital projection system. “It has the technical capability to show first-run movies,” said John Rouleau, Pizzagalli Construction Company’s superintendent of the CCA project.
Devon Medeiros and Hillary Leeman – both UMaine grads – got engaged Oct. 10 and chose the center as their nuptial location shortly after. They will have the entire facility to themselves on Aug. 15, 2009.
“The new CCA will be open then, and the whole front end of the building is going to be really nice, now,” said Medeiros, an MCA employee since 2002. “We haven’t decided where in the building we’re doing it yet, or what will be done in each portion of the building.”
His fiancee cut him off: “He’s a big ham, and so getting married on stage seems completely reasonable.”
The couple said they likely would have married in the center regardless of its makeover, but Medeiros said the renovation “makes it a little more special.”
The CCA will introduce a cafe, an area Patches hopes to allocate for smaller performances, such as speakers or jazz musicians.
Transformation
In favor of new, lit aisles in the house, the continental seating plan of the MCA will vanish along with the days of difficult, uncomfortable shuffling past dozens of groaning strangers to claim a seat in the center. In a recent tour of the facility’s progress, Hutchins Concert Hall was devoid of seating, a massive lift taking precedence over the space, nearly reaching the ceiling and seeming to shrink the iconic venue.
“While we’re losing seats, the hall itself will be more commodious in many ways,” Patches said. “More user-friendly, you might say.”
The MCA seated 1,629; the CCA will accommodate 1,436, with the addition of 10 orchestra wheelchair accessible seats and six in the balcony. The MCA had no certifiable handicap seating.
“The first thing [visitors will] notice when they enter the auditorium is how easy it is to get in and out,” Rouleau said. “It’s so much easier to access your seat now. I think it’s going to give people more of a chance to interact before the show or between it, or after it, because you’re not being herded in like cattle.”
Re-installment of the seating began Wednesday with the balcony.
A changed color scheme will be another early focal point for CCA guests. “Gone is all the red. The walls are a darker gray color. The stage is all black,” Rouleau said. “It’s not as anxious . that whole red was just very anxious.” He said the new palette will feature more natural tones.
With the advent of the CCA, the Hudson Museum will have “its own space, its own integrity on the second floor,” Patches said.
Walking through the facility, museum director Gretchen Faulkner contemplated the wide-open area of the second floor, still very much a construction site, and remarked contentedly, “This is a nice space.”
Joining the tour was Mike Scott, a new media professor advising the museum’s future integration of multimedia displays.
Not all the Collins Center’s innovations will be as noticeable as those in the museum. Behind-the-scenes modifications are an enormous part of the project, ranging from full compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act to tons of structural steel mandated by a new Town of Orono seismic code.
“The building is probably going to be the most contemporary building, certainly in this region, of its type,” Patches said.
Brett Zeigler, administrative assistant for the MCA, said a lack of bathroom facilities was a consistent complaint since the center’s 1986 opening. Thus, expanding and spreading out facilities takes the same priority as other components of the renovation.
The CCA will face a quick turnaround from construction site to cultural destination, with the first performance slated for Jan. 27. The first weeks of 2009 will see employees adjusting, the ticket office being outfitted and furniture being brought in. The spring is referred to as a “soft opening,” with the grand opening gala set for Sept. ’09, according to Patches.
Once substantial completion is reached, Rouleau’s attention to detail will continue on a finer scale. “It’s a review of the work and the quality of the work. The ‘punch list’ process gets everything 100 percent,” Rouleau said, pointing out asymmetrical screws in a light switch in his office without missing a beat. “They’re crooked. That’s not acceptable.
“It’s the picky thing, but you don’t notice the details unless they’re not done. And that’s the whole intention.”
Patches has maintained a self-imposed distance from the facility since construction began. He took his first tour recently and was thrilled with what he saw. “I immediately just looked through, around and over everything and saw new possibilities.”
Genesis of metamorphosis
Construction commenced in 2007, 21 years after the facility was built with $7.5 million raised from private donations – $3.5 million less than the cost of the current renovation. Primary construction on the combination concert hall, anthropological museum will conclude on Jan. 6, 2009.
The center’s renewal embodies UMaine’s aesthetic renaissance in recent years, led by the new $25 million Student Recreation and Fitness Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King Plaza.
Jon Bell, a senior civil engineering student, began an internship with Pizzagalli Construction Company this summer, doing his part to transform the MCA of old into the CCA of the future.
“I’ve witnessed the university change over the past four years, from the building of the turf dome to the new Recreation Center,” Bell said in an e-mail interview. “However, working at the Maine Center of the Arts has allowed me to give back to the university with the very skills I set out to acquire.”
John Rouleau, whose resume includes the Student Recreation and Fitness Center and recent renovations to Colvin and Barrows Halls, called the center “an important cultural landmark” both locally and statewide. He feels the CCA task supersedes work on an ordinary job site.
“There’s a great part about working for the university and doing university projects; we’re not making a cube-farm, an office, you know? There’s a sense of purpose here,” Rouleau said. “We’re doing something for the students, something for the faculty and the community.”
Changes in the CCA will be legion: a revamped color scheme and seating plan in Hutchins Concert Hall, an independent vicinity for the Hudson Museum’s vast anthropological collection and a full architectural facelift of the entrance are some of the larger updates.
“I think the entry pavilion is kind of a sparkling way to enter,” said Patches. He said the MCA’s brick build and large wooden doors were imposing.
In his endorsement of the CCA’s glassed-in, brightly lit pavilion, Rouleau remembered past experiences as an MCA patron: “It would be freezing cold. You’d come in through these big, heavy oak doors. It was like going into a dungeon, into a castle.”
“It’s now going to be completely inviting,” Patches said.
Challenges and certainties
“We’re going to be opening this regional cultural center at a time when the world economic situation has been compared to . the Great Depression,” Patches said, gravely acknowledging the fact that hardly anyone has the same expendable income they did several years ago. Entertainment spending is likely to dip.
“We definitely are going to be challenged, probably more than we ever have been, to serve the university community and the state. But those challenges, I think, are, for me, exciting. I’m always for the underdog.”
Rouleau is looking forward to the finish line: “I’ve been a patron for a long time, go to a lot of shows here, so I’m quite anxious to finish so I can become a patron again.”
The CCA will have all the ingredients to lure its constituents out of frugal hiding. “I truly feel that this structure’s second life will undoubtedly outlast its first and be a cornerstone for the university in the years to come,” Bell said in an e-mail.
Patches weighs the value of entertainment profoundly. “The performing arts have always had a real important role to play in societies around the world, particularly in Western society, in all the most difficult periods of history, whether it was because of war, famine or depressions. The arts have played a key role in getting us through those debacles.”
Two months remain until the rebirth of the University of Maine’s cultural center, a structure Patches once referred to as the university’s soul.
“The Bangor Symphony and, I think, our audiences are just dying to get back,” Patches said. The BSO, the nation’s oldest continually performing community orchestra, has a long standing connection with the MCA, dating back to their performance at the center’s 1986 opening with Yo-Yo Ma. The BSO will perform on Feb. 1.
“They are coming back with a renewed fervor to be in their home, so to speak,” Patches said, “Not just to see what we’ve done, but to experience it all.”
Bangor Daily News