Goppert Performing Arts Center Grand Opening

Hello, my name is Matt Schweiter Harbour. I’m the Director of Performance Studies here at Avila University and I’m excited to show you around on a little guided tour of our brand new Goppert Performing Arts Center. As you can see, this is our new facade — very beautiful giant windows looking into both our grand lobby and our new music room, which you will really enjoy taking a look at. Let’s go inside.

So we’ll enter our main doors here and check out our main lobby. Ooh — occupied by one of our theatre majors. Hello David, we’re showing off the grand lobby. You want to do a twirl? It is beautiful, thank you.

Sue King Wilcox Music Hall

First stop on our tour after the grand lobby is the Sue King Wilcox Music Hall. You gotta see this. So let’s step inside and take a look at this space. Fantastic opportunity for our choirs and our orchestra. The acoustics in here are incredible. A little viewing area up from the top — we’ll take a look down below. Fantastic station for our professors, our conductors. And you should really hear this when we have our voices in full swing.

Okay, one of the really cool things about this space is we have shades. You can tell, like, if I was trying to teach right now I’d be blinded by the light. So we have a little shade that we can push a button and watch the shades come in. Look at that. As you can see it’s not as bright on me and I’m able to speak to the room without squinting my eyes. Fun.

So that’s our fantastic new music room. Now let’s show you how it moves into the rest of the building. You’ll notice here — this is the area that was the original wall to Goppert. I’ll give you a better picture here. So yeah, this wall here, this brick wall, is actually the original exterior. As you can see as we look out the window here to the outside of the building — we had discussed about covering this wall up and then thought, “Oh, that’s beautiful, let’s keep the brick.” It keeps and honors the history and it’s beautiful. It adds a little dimension.

Down this way are the refurbished music rooms for offices and practice rooms. And let’s go up here — this is the upper lobby. A fantastic elevator going up all the different floors and looking back down on our grand lobby. For the lower lobby here you see the box office in that area, and then here is the upper lobby. So there’s the old meeting the new.

And speaking of the old meeting the new, let’s take a look at this mural. This is our legacy wall, honoring the history of Avila theater dating back to 1974 when it all began. In the 70s and the breaking ground of the original building here of Goppert Theater. Moving through the 70s and into the 80s — you get a great sense of our history and the people who have come through these doors. And then we go into the 1990s and 2000s and our relationship with TYA. Lots of great images on this wall and history as we move through up into the 2020s, where you see here — very exciting — the groundbreaking for the building that we are now touring. So come check out this beautiful wall and be a part of the history.

So you’ll notice here that the legacy wall then moves into the lobby. This is the former lobby and that lobby — the upper lobby — it’s been redone. We’ve got some beautiful clouds hanging from above, some great lighting opportunities. And then we move into what was and still continues to be our main stage of Goppert Theater. Of course we don’t have to tour too much but we love this space so dearly and it is an essential part of that which is the Goppert Performing Arts Center.

Look, what can I say — I’m an actor too and I’ve got to be center stage. So here you are on the main stage of the Goppert Theater. This is what the audience — we see as actors looking at the audience. Normally it’s full of people laughing and crying appropriately.

And let me take you over here to what is our old scene shop, which has now become our paint shop, and then see the new digs.

Paint Shop

Making our way through the old scene shop — now we call this our paint room where we do all of our painting. You might not recognize this — those of you who’ve been here before — this is our new bay doors to an exciting new space, the new scene shop. Our brand new scene shop.

Take it all in. Brand new bay doors going outside, plenty of access to the paint shop. And then this area — which I’ll show you in a minute — is leading to the new black box studio space. But as you can see here, great opportunities for our design and theater tech students to hone their skills, learning how to use first-rate technology, building, designing and painting, constructing. A fantastic space with lots of room to build beautiful gorgeous new sets and stuff for our stages.

Okay, well I think we want to check out the black box studio. Oh, before we do that, why don’t we go ahead and see the new dressing rooms. Coming right off of the scene shop, we go into a new hallway. Down this hallway is our new dressing room space. You can see we’ve got risers sitting here — we’ll explain those in just a second. But walking into our new dressing room space — we haven’t fully moved in here yet, don’t judge us, don’t judge us — but it’s a big beautiful space with restrooms that have been designed to be in accordance with Actors’ Equity Association, so we can have rentals and we can have union productions here. We’ll be getting some mirrors put in and of course makeup tables. But a fantastic beautiful new dressing space.

Then we head back down through the hallway again to show you really what I’m very excited to share with you — our new black box. Let’s have a look. Are you ready?

Black Box Theater

Are you ready? Here is our new black box theater. Now you may be wondering, if you’re not a theater person, what the heck is a black box theater? Well, I’d say — what do you think? It’s a big black box. But what’s really great about a black box theater is that it gives the theater makers an opportunity to move the audience wherever we want them to be. So you see these risers here — they can be taken down and moved in any configuration within this space. The lighting plots can be changed to accommodate whatever we’d like from there as well. So we’ve got state-of-the-art lighting facilities, sound system, and theater space.

Getting a chance to work in a black box studio theater is a great gift. Our students are going to be prepared to be working at professional levels when they have opportunities like this, because many many professional theaters now are focusing a lot of their work in black box studio spaces. It allows for more versatility in storytelling and presentation. As I mentioned before, you can move the audience around, you can move sets around and lighting around, you can create all different styles of performing arts. And our students are getting that opportunity now that we have this space. Cannot wait to see you here watching shows with us.

So yeah, that’s that space. Let’s go out this way. I bet you’re very confused — like, what in the world, where am I, how am I getting around this building? Well if you follow me I’ll show you. Oh, it’s very dark in this room — it’s called a light lock, and that’s so that people who might be showing up late to the show don’t let the light in. Because this comes from — you guessed it — the main lobby again.

But I want to take you upstairs. Let’s go upstairs. Upstairs we have something really really special and very important to all of us — our new rehearsal spaces. They double for rehearsal rooms and they are classrooms. We have one large rehearsal room — it is yet to be named. So if you are interested and would like to honor a family member or put your mark here on Avila University, you can definitely put your name on the large rehearsal room.

Rehearsal Rooms

But let me show you our smaller rehearsal room which has a name — we’re very very proud of it and we love this room. It is the Tompkins Rehearsal Hall, named after Virginia C. and William D. Tompkins.

The Tompkins is going to be a very special place for us because there’s lots that we can do with it. You see, when I say small rehearsal room, that is not really the case. This room has tremendous amounts of great space in it. Great view from outside. We have wonderful shades that we can close if it gets too bright in here. But you’ll notice too we have mirrors so that dance students as well as acting students can practice and get a different perspective. You’ll also notice too that the room is rigged for lighting and sound, so we could do small senior projects, we could also host events in here for special arts at Avila events. So this is a classroom, it is a rehearsal room, it is a practice room, it is a dance room — it is very very very useful space.

But now I want to take you into the large rehearsal room. So let’s go take a look back this way and here we go.

And here we are to the large rehearsal room. In this rehearsal room you will see our stage manager, current stage manager Tina Rivera — hi Tina! She’s a senior this year so she gets to play with these toys and then run off.

But this large rehearsal room is very similar to the Tompkins in that we have mirrors and we have an ability to rig lights and sound. It’s a fantastic space. But this is also an area where we can tape off the ground and have actual rehearsals without having to be on stage, so we can be building on stage and rehearsing in a room like this.

So that is the large rehearsal room and that concludes our tour of the new Performing Arts Center. I’m so glad that you joined us. I hope you’ll come check out the space. I think this is going to be a great place for building our artistic community, our community at Avila University, and the greater Kansas City, Missouri community. So come on out, enjoy some great art, and we hope to see you soon.