Classes began at William and Mary this week. The opening convocation ceremony is scheduled for 7:15 p.m. tonight at the Sir Christopher Wren Building. For this event, faculty, students, and community members come together to celebrate the beginning of a new academic year. New students are officially welcomed into the college community, and it is generally a time of positivity and connection before the rigors of the academic term take over.
At this year’s convocation, the college will be celebrating the “Year of the Arts” as the college opens buildings in the newly dubbed “Arts Quarter.”
The new Arts Quarter sets the stage for an great future for the arts at William & Mary. This is what the Office of Admissions Self-Guided Tour says about this part of the campus:
The heart of this 180,000-square-foot project features a modernized and expanded Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall and a new music building (9), which includes six high-quality performance venues with 1,500 audience seats. The Arts Quarter also includes an extensive expansion to the Muscarelle Museum of Art (26), which has nearly 6,000 items, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Georgia O’Keeffe. Thirty percent of W&M students are involved in the arts, whether as a major, extracurricular or hobby.
I’m pretty excited about this. I’m not usually a big symphony/theater person, but the opportunities these expanded facilities will provide will be enticing. The article talks about the opportunities for synergy among the dance, music, and theater elements of the school’s arts program, as these programs will for the first time operate in close proximity. This project began in 2017, and, although a variety of delays (including COVID), the project has now come to life.
The facilities offer a variety of performance venues. Phi Beta Kappa Hall will feature a 492-seat Proscenium Theater, a 100-seat Lab Theater, a 250-seat Studio Theater, and a 60-seat Dance Recital Theater. The new music building (as yet unnamed, so far as I can tell) will include a 450-seat concert hall and a 125-seat recital hall, in addition to a recording studio, several music labs, practice rooms of various sizes, and more. These two buildings are connected by a tunnel, which will make collaboration even more natural.
The Arts Quarter also included Andrews Hall (15 on the campus map), the home of the Department of Art and Art History. In 2024, the Martha Wren Briggs Center for the Arts, home to the expanded and renovated Muscarelle Museum of Art (26 on the map), is set to open in the same area of campus.
The new building’s first show is a performance of “Nine” by a group of dancers from the Leah Glenn Dance Theater and William & Mary students, slated for Sept. 9 at 7:30 p.m. The show is free and open to the public. Leah Glenn is an Associate Professor of Dance at the College and the Artistic Director of Leah Glenn Dance Theater. She choreographed “Nine” as a tribute to the Little Rock Nine – the nine teenagers who were the first African-American students to enter Little Rock’s Central High School in September 1957.
While the facilities will first and foremost be used by the William & Mary Community, the school plans to make the performance spaces available to the local performing arts community. I sang with the Williamsburg Choral Guild for a few years, and I know the difficulty of finding good performance spaces in town. What’s particularly nice about these new spaces is that they are about a 10-minute drive from my house. Parking will be difficult (it always is) but access to performances will be manageable. The Arts Quarter will be a terrific addition to our little town.
This is great news and an important addition to the Williamsburg community. Enjoy!!
I was so pleased to see the President's announcement that the arts center is finally ready to open. I remember well that Phi Bete was "the finest small theater in the US" when we were there, but had seen its need for renovation over the years. We've seen a lot of Shakespeare there and hope to do that again. Thanks for including this more extensive description.