Final Edit - PRAx Pod

The Patricia Valiant Research Center for the Creative Arts (PRACS) is a new arts building on the southeast end of the OSU campus. It includes a concert hall, black box theater, and sound-oriented exhibits. The construction began in 2021 and cost $70 million. The PRACS has received positive feedback from the OSU community, but there are also concerns about limitations, such as the lack of a larger performance space. The building is designed to be open and accessible, with lots of natural light. It includes a gallery and features unique exhibits and performances, such as the Optron and theremin. Overall, the PRACS is seen as a valuable addition to the campus, but some improvements may be needed for certain types of performances. On the southeast end of campus at OSU, there is a new arts building. It's called the Patricia Valiant Research Center for the Creative Arts, or the PRACS. Among other things, it holds a concert hall, black box theater, and sound-oriented exhibits. According to OSU, its construction began in 2021, and three years and $70 million later, we have a new facility for the expression of numerous art forms. Okay, and so what is PRACS, if you give a good definition? We have a new facility for the expression of numerous art forms. Now that it has been open for almost two months, we were curious to learn what people think of the PRACS. Our reporter, Aidan Wilson, spoke with various members of the OSU community, and we discovered a sense of enthusiasm for the new facilities. However, there were also some limitations and challenges mentioned. So join us as we dive into the people's perspective of the PRACS. First, Aidan talked to a couple of faculty members who were involved in the creation of the PRACS. So my name is Peter Swenson, I'm the Patricia Valiant Researcher and Director of the School of the Arts. This is my second year at OSU, which means that when I first came to campus, PRACS was cinder blocks just kind of emerging from the ground. When I arrived, then I worked very closely with Peter Betchman, who's the Executive Director of PRACS, for all of the integration between the academic programs and the PRACS programming. Could you just introduce yourself and tell me a bit about what you do here at OSU? Yeah, absolutely. I'm Stephen Zelke, and I'm the Director of Choral Studies and Professor of Music. I'm the Patricia Valiant Researcher and Professor of Music, and my work is with choir. You had a role in the creation of the opening of PRACS. Can you describe your role in that? I was part of it from the very, very beginning, but my actual role now is I'm a user, I'm a client, right? You know, we do choir concerts there, and that's really awesome because, you know, that was what my whole goal was, not to be in charge of the building, but to have the building really be instrumental in moving the arts forward, especially choral music arts, or music in general, bands and choirs and so forth, yeah. In what ways do you think the PRACS will shape the choral arts department in years to come? I've already seen it in terms of how it has elevated the student experience to be able to perform in these kinds of spaces regularly, you know. Such an exciting time for the arts. I just feel like we're in this kind of incredible place to showcase what we already do and imagine what we might do next. This is the most important thing that's happened for the arts in forever at Oregon State University. Oregon State University has never built a building that is 100 percent, that is designed for the arts in 150 years, till right now. And so how will it change us? It is going to change us in ways that we cannot imagine. We are going to have things that happen in the arts at OSU that were never possible, and that we do not know what they're going to be. It's going to be amazing. I've got a few more years here. I can't wait to see it. And we couldn't wait to see it either. So we decided to go experience the building for ourselves. Anyone who sees it from the outside will be struck by the design of the exterior. Parts of the building's second floor overhang the first, almost like it's floating. The building is sided with what looks like two-by-fours. Most of them are stained to be black with some natural wood accents. Windows of random sizes are scattered across the front wall. We walked in through the double-glass doors into the big open lobby. Plenty of natural light coming in. A piece of 3D art hung from the ceiling, almost like a futuristic chandelier. Director Peter Swenson says this design is all very intentional. One of the big things was for the whole building to feel very open and accessible. You know, which you literally sort of sense with like all the windows. Yeah, there's lots of... Lots of windows. Even in the gallery, which is very unusual, to have a big window there. Yeah. It's a building that's basically open all day, every day. You know, so students, you know, down the hallway there is like just hanging out studying, for instance. Yeah. It's meant to be very, just part of students' daily life on campus, so I think that's one thing that really has come to fruition. Jumping back to our visit of the Prax, just off the lobby is the Stierich Gallery, which currently holds an audio exhibit. The Stierich Gallery, which is amazing, it's tremendous, I mean, there's nothing like this on our campus. We finally have a first-rate gallery for showings, so that's going to go back and forth between kind of traditional art shows, you know, where you maybe have sculpture or paintings or whatever, and kind of more science and technology, and that's one of the things that's going to make... I mean, that room is completely ready to go any way for science and technology. This space is versatile and will always have something fresh for people to visit and learn about. Back to our visit in the lobby. There was a middle-aged guy standing on this geometric wooden stage, holding a multicolored LED light tube. So, my name is Chet, and this thing right here is called the Optron, and it's actually inspired by... He's wearing a vest and pink skinny jeans and a Dragon Ball Z t-shirt. To go with all of that, he puts on some silver wraparound sunglasses. After cooking a few things on his MacBook, he begins to play his instrument by hovering his hand over different parts of the LED tube. The next day, we also saw a concert of an instrument called the theremin. It is played without physical contact, instead by using your hands to manipulate electromagnetic fields surrounding two metal rods. It creates an eerie but still beautiful sound. Here is some theremin played with piano. And according to executives and professors like Dr. Zilke, this is the kind of thing that we should expect from the practice going forward. This is not a competition for the arts trying to get space on the STEM campus. This is a way for a STEM campus to realize its full potential. They need us more than we need them. They desperately need us. So, after speaking with some of the people involved in the practice and experiencing it for ourselves, it is clear that the new building is a great addition to the campus. The facilities are high quality, and the performances we saw demonstrated the potential of this place. But the student performers who we spoke with also had some concerns with the limitations of the facility. Next year, it's most, if not almost all of the theater performances are in that Ed Ray Theater, right? How do you see that working, you know? It's, I'm a little skeptical if I'm going to be honest. As a stage manager for the One Axe this spring, fourth year theater student Noah Fox has had a chance to experience the Black Box firsthand. That is a Black Box theater, and Black Box theaters are made for very small, intimate shows. What I'm questioning, or what I'm interested to see is, are we able to do big name shows that will require big sets? Right now, I'm not sure if we have the ability to do that, so I'm just worried that we're not going, or I'm just skeptical to see how that's going to play out. If we want to do big main stage productions, how are they going to use that space? I was a little disheartened when they were like, oh, we have this great main stage, main concert hall. I was like, great, awesome, this is going to be a beautiful proscenium that we're going to be able to do. And they're like, oh, it's just for like performing, and like a band, and choir, and oh, oh, okay. But that's good for them, that's what they needed, that's what they've been asking for for years. So, I totally understand that. Aidan brought up these concerns with director Peter Swenson. Theater students are very excited and grateful to have this new facility, and the black box is amazing. However, there are some concerns with the fact that there isn't a larger scale performance space, say a tech fly system. Right. Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's a question that sort of theater as a whole is grappling with right now. And in a venue like this, one of the fundamental questions is, is what you gain and what you give up by making those sorts of spaces. So in the concert hall space, for instance, to have a full proscenium with fly space and everything else, you give up some of the acoustic tunability, right, and so the precision of the listening experience in the concert hall is lessened by adding that flexibility. I wouldn't claim that like one is better than the other, either for us or anybody else. An awful lot happens in this kind of black box setting in the professional theater world right now. So I think it's good for our students to be in a world where they can shape and create what that experience is like for the production case by case. But we'll see. I see the reasoning and the logic on both sides of that. It's worth mentioning that there are other options on and off of campus for these larger performances. I mean, technically speaking, LaSalle's is a giant proscenium theater. Can it be used for a theater? It could be, but it's really too big, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. To my mind, you know. It's a very big space. It's a very big space. It's tricky to find that in between, so the opera production that we just did, we actually used the Ashbrook School, which is across town, and that's kind of a nice sort of medium-sized proscenium space with fly space, you know, and it might be that that kind of arrangement is actually the best fit for us when we know we have a show that needs those things. We do have theaters in Corvallis, you know, Ashbrook being one of them, and a couple in town that can be utilized when we need to supplement what we have here. We'll also get back by the end of next academic year, the Lab Theater in Lithicone, which is a sort of different kind of black box space, where the student productions and a bunch of our classes will happen, so we'll have a little more wiggle room with that, too. At one point, some expected a big proscenium at the Prax. When it was still in the early days of planning and eventually under construction, general expectations were high for what the building would have. One-year music student Mo Campbell says there was a lot of hype around the scale of the facilities. At least my whole freshman year, they were talking about like, oh, Prax this, Prax that, like it's going to be so much fun. You're going to get new lockers. You're going to get new classrooms. You're going to get da-da-da-da, and it's like new rehearsal space, and it's like we didn't get anything that they told us that we'd actually get. Unfulfilled promises. Yeah. It's like they hyped it up, and then like they changed their minds, but we still thought it was going to be awesome. We were so excited. Dr. Zielke says this hype was built up because of the ambition of the original plans for the Prax. I think maybe the first building that we looked at was $125 million, and so I think the original goal for the building was that it would become an academic and performance home for art and music. I mean, sorry, theater and music. I think the early expectations were that the facility would actually do a lot more than it is now doing. The project budget was basically between $70 and $75 million, and I think our expectations were unreasonable. We budgeted the most that we believed was possible. We didn't budget what you wanted. We didn't even budget what you needed. We budgeted what was possible, and so we immediately had to completely rethink the scope of the project because there was no way we were going to find a way to put in crappy flooring and get that project down to $75 million. If you need to reduce the budget, there's only one way to reduce the budget, and that is to do what they call, the designers, you reduce the program, meaning what you hope to do with the building. From our point of view, we were reducing the scope of it, that the building would end up being a little bit less academic-focused than we had originally hoped, which, of course, was discouraging. I mean, the process was full of moments of discouragement, but you know you have to take what you have and make something impactful, meaningful, beautiful. But second-year music student Mo Campbell feels as though the building has turned into less of a learning environment. From a person who was behind all of it and made decisions about it and knew what was happening, I feel like it's a pretty good building. It's doing what it's supposed to do, everything's going according to plan. I know what they're doing for the students, and I know that it's good. It just feels like it's not for us, which is kind of upsetting. I think like stepping into Prax like that first time, I was getting my tickets for the Williams Humble Classroom, and I stepped in there, and I was like, this does not look like classrooms to me. It looks like a bunch of open space and a bunch of little money-making things. It should be said that there are a couple of smaller-sized classrooms, but some students were hoping for more in terms of learning space. In summary, the Prax did have a lot of high expectations during the construction process, but budget cuts meant a reduced scope of the project. Despite the flaws of the Prax, students are still optimistic for the opportunities that it will give them in the arts. It is a beautiful, beautiful building, and I was just, my jaw was a drop when I came in here, and I saw it for the first time, and I toured around it, and it was just amazing to think that this is something that's going to be here for the rest of time. This is going to be something that is going to be the new home for the performing arts at OSU, and we've been blessed with this beautiful space and this amazing equipment, and it's incredibly advanced, it's incredibly high-tech, all of the stuff we have is brand spanking new. Working in here has been really, really fun, which is really great because that's what college is. It's supposed to get you geared and get some experience under your belt and ready for the professional world, and so we're taking that next step with this for sure, and that's what it feels like, is that we're going from one level to a completely other level, and it's a beautiful next step for the OSU Theater Department, and I think this is only just the beginning. I think that Prax could be the heart, but we need to start building other parts of this body as well, and connecting it to the rest of the campus. The Prax here at OSU may not be perfect, and there are different perspectives on the way the building has been put together. That being said, it will undoubtedly be crucial for the arts going forward, but don't take our word for it. Instead, go see it for yourself. Check out the Sonic Boom exhibit, see a concert, or even a play in the Black Box Theater, and build your own perspective of the Prax. We hope you have enjoyed our episode about the Prax at OSU. Again, the interviews were done by our reporter, Aidan Wilson. Our editor is Gracie Winchell. Our writer and narrator is me, Noah Kleinhans. Special thanks to our interviewees, Mo Campbell, Noah Fox, Peter Swanson, and Stephen Zilke. Thank you for listening.