Theatre with Soul
At a time when science, technology and virtual reality exist alongside meditation, yoga and oxygen bars, Joshua Dachs (theatre designer for the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, the COC’s new home) has struck a fine balance when it comes to designing theatres. This renowned partner of the acclaimed New York firm Fisher Dachs Associates, not only incorporates the tangible necessities in theatre layout but is also compelled and fascinated by the intangible – the soul of a theatre.
He played violin as a child and went to the High School of Music and Art in New York (the film Fame took place in that school). “I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to go into architecture,” Dachs says. “I went to Cornell University and while there I decided to take an elective course, which involved assisting the theatre department in building scenery for class credit. I thought I would try building instead of just drawing all the time. It was tremendously satisfying and I found myself designing lighting and scenery. During that time I took a course in which the lecturer—who happened to be Jules Fisher – talked a lot about architectural lighting design and showed slides of Broadway shows and Rolling Stones tours, etc. as well as some theatres that his firm had been associated with.
“After the lecture I asked if he had any summer work and I spent the summer working for Jules Fisher Lighting (now Fisher Dachs Associates). I worked on the revival of Hair on Broadway, Pippin in Chicago and Beatlemania, but also the lighting of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. When I graduated I came back to work at the firm and I have been there ever since.” The company now has three components: Fisher Marantz Stone only designs architectural lighting; Fisher Dachs only designs theatres; Dachs’ partner, Jules Fisher, who has won seven Tony Awards, continues to light shows on Broadway and rock and roll tours with co-designer Peggy Eisenhauer under the name Third Eye.
Dachs has thought a lot about opera during his 25 years as a theatre designer. “Opera houses, as a building type, have a very long and rich tradition originating in the early days of the Italian renaissance, as early as about 1608,” says Dachs. “There were rooms in Italy that were horseshoe-shaped and had picture frame openings that we would recognize today as a precursor to opera halls. Opera houses essentially developed side by side with the art form of opera, and over the centuries those rooms developed into the grand theatres that we all know and love today—like La Fenice in Venice and La Scala in Milan. They spread around the world quite quickly and by the middle of the 19th century they were everywhere.
“Some of the auditoriums that we looked at together with Richard (Bradshaw) were those that I mentioned, La Fenice and La Scala, but also Munich which has a long, rich tradition to draw upon. In designing our opera house, we are looking for something that is completely contemporary but at the same time shares the most important qualities of the great opera houses of the world.
“What is it that people love? Certainly we want wonderful acoustics but we want a lot more than that. We want to create a room that is a marvellous place in which to share a live performance. Architecture, the geometry that you choose, the colours, the materials; everything about it can either make people feel like they are together in a small room sharing an event, or the opposite, where they feel a great chasm between themselves and the performers.
“Peter Brook, a famous British director who is also one of the few theatre people who have written eloquently about creating theatre spaces, once said, ‘the science of theatre building must come from studying what it is that brings about the most vivid relationship between people.’ That is really foremost in our minds. Every choice that we make in creating a room has to support this idea of bringing people closer together and making their experience in the theatre vivid and alive.”
Several things must be accomplished in order to bring the audience as close as possible to the performance. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve got a vertically organized room in the same way that you do at La Scala or Munich,” says Dachs. “We have several layers, or ‘rings,’ of seating. By organizing people vertically, we bring them closer.
“The second thing that we need to do is to ‘wallpaper’ the room with faces. If you look at traditional opera house models, the audience is not sitting as they are in a movie theatre with everybody on one or two levels, facing front between two blank sidewalls. Rather, the audience wraps around in that wonderful horseshoe-shape and comes right up to the stage. As you sit in the house looking at the stage there are always people in your peripheral vision. You never forget that this is a completely live experience—these moments will never happen again. The wonderful thing about an opera house is that it reflects fundamental human impulses. We always gather around a storyteller or a juggler on the street and the live theatres that we create need to allow us to do that as well.
“The other thing that the geometry does is cause the audience to literally embrace the singer. When performers stands on stage and that wonderful audience rings around them, they feel totally encompassed and it changes how they perform. It truly is a living thing.”
Dachs goes on to say that the room needs to look and feel as small as possible. There are a certain number of seats that have to be accommodated and each one needs to have good sightlines. The room needs to feel a third or a half of the actual size. “One of the ways that we do that,” says Dachs, “ is by architecturally emphasizing the idea that the space contained by those rings of balconies is the actual size of the room. Although all four walls stretch to the front, back and sides, we want everybody to feel that the theatre space is only as big as the space embraced by the balconies.
“We are reinforcing that idea in the way the ceiling is designed. It is not a dome, it is actually an inverted dome, but there is a circular gesture in the ceiling that corresponds to the rings of the balconies. There is even a gesture made on the main floor level, which we call the ‘parterre,’ where a railing wraps around and follows the line of the balconies above. By repeating this horseshoe-shape on the floor and on the ceiling, and by making the outer walls relatively darker and the balcony fronts brighter, we were able to emphasize the intimacy of the room.
“We learned in the ‘bad days’ of the 1950s and '60s that when you put large, blank surfaces around a stage, the stage seems very small and the performer on the stage even smaller. But if you break down the scale of all of the surfaces surrounding the stage, then the stage seems large—it seems like the largest thing in the room. The architectural game that we are playing is to try to do everything possible to make it clear that the stage is the most significant part of the room and that the singers can fill that room with their presence. They are in no way diminished by the architecture, but the architecture enhances their scale. In the end, every plane, every surface, has something that breaks it down in some way closer to the scale of the human face, the human form.
“In the geometry of the room, the materials we choose, the colours, and in the way that we light the room, we’re trying to accomplish the same thing—make the performer seem big, make the stage seem big, make the room seem small, make the audience feel close. I view that as the most important task for the theatre consultant.”
Beyond that, Dachs is also responsible for the seating layouts and the sightlines so that this carefully contrived geometric machine provides extraordinary sightlines. “We have proprietary software that we have developed in our office that enables us to study many alternatives with the design team. We had meetings with Robert Essert (acoustician) and Jack Diamond (architect), his staff and the COC staff and box office personnel. We sat ‘virtually’ in each seat of the auditorium so we could note at what point the seats were not providing the best view and eliminate or correct them. There is no seat in this room that has not been carefully reviewed by us, previewed with the box office personnel and approved as being appropriate to include. We have worked very hard to ensure this.”
Dachs and his staff are also responsible for the efficiency of the production “engine.” Along with the artists, there are a myriad of staff backstage—wardrobe, wigs, stagehands, and production staff. Meticulous thought has to be given to storage, truck loading and unloading, backstage circulation, and dressing room layouts, not only for comfort, but also for maximum space and ease of movement. “For instance,” Dachs says, “the backstage corridors must have extra width because, at times, they will be lined with wardrobe racks. At the same time we are dealing with how the audience amenities are accommodated – how to deal with catering, what happens with the food garbage that shouldn’t clutter up the backstage entrance. You don’t want the corps de ballet in their tutus to be crossing past drippy spaghetti trash in a garbage bag. Careful thought has to be given to the logistics backstage.
“We deal with the rigging system and the stage lighting system—the design of those systems, as well as stage machinery that lifts the orchestra pit and moves the variable acoustical draperies. We have got our finger, one way or another, in a lot of different areas in this building.
“There is a side to what we do which is logistical and functional as well as a side that is all about technology and the integration of technology into the building. Then there is a side which is really more spiritual—making this room feel right. Robert is interested in ensuring that it sounds right and I am interested in how it feels. The entire team is working to ensure that the audience and the performer have the best theatrical experience possible.”
By Suzanne Vanstone, Editor of Publications at the COC.
He played violin as a child and went to the High School of Music and Art in New York (the film Fame took place in that school). “I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to go into architecture,” Dachs says. “I went to Cornell University and while there I decided to take an elective course, which involved assisting the theatre department in building scenery for class credit. I thought I would try building instead of just drawing all the time. It was tremendously satisfying and I found myself designing lighting and scenery. During that time I took a course in which the lecturer—who happened to be Jules Fisher – talked a lot about architectural lighting design and showed slides of Broadway shows and Rolling Stones tours, etc. as well as some theatres that his firm had been associated with.
“After the lecture I asked if he had any summer work and I spent the summer working for Jules Fisher Lighting (now Fisher Dachs Associates). I worked on the revival of Hair on Broadway, Pippin in Chicago and Beatlemania, but also the lighting of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. When I graduated I came back to work at the firm and I have been there ever since.” The company now has three components: Fisher Marantz Stone only designs architectural lighting; Fisher Dachs only designs theatres; Dachs’ partner, Jules Fisher, who has won seven Tony Awards, continues to light shows on Broadway and rock and roll tours with co-designer Peggy Eisenhauer under the name Third Eye.
Dachs has thought a lot about opera during his 25 years as a theatre designer. “Opera houses, as a building type, have a very long and rich tradition originating in the early days of the Italian renaissance, as early as about 1608,” says Dachs. “There were rooms in Italy that were horseshoe-shaped and had picture frame openings that we would recognize today as a precursor to opera halls. Opera houses essentially developed side by side with the art form of opera, and over the centuries those rooms developed into the grand theatres that we all know and love today—like La Fenice in Venice and La Scala in Milan. They spread around the world quite quickly and by the middle of the 19th century they were everywhere.
“Some of the auditoriums that we looked at together with Richard (Bradshaw) were those that I mentioned, La Fenice and La Scala, but also Munich which has a long, rich tradition to draw upon. In designing our opera house, we are looking for something that is completely contemporary but at the same time shares the most important qualities of the great opera houses of the world.
“What is it that people love? Certainly we want wonderful acoustics but we want a lot more than that. We want to create a room that is a marvellous place in which to share a live performance. Architecture, the geometry that you choose, the colours, the materials; everything about it can either make people feel like they are together in a small room sharing an event, or the opposite, where they feel a great chasm between themselves and the performers.
“Peter Brook, a famous British director who is also one of the few theatre people who have written eloquently about creating theatre spaces, once said, ‘the science of theatre building must come from studying what it is that brings about the most vivid relationship between people.’ That is really foremost in our minds. Every choice that we make in creating a room has to support this idea of bringing people closer together and making their experience in the theatre vivid and alive.”
Several things must be accomplished in order to bring the audience as close as possible to the performance. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve got a vertically organized room in the same way that you do at La Scala or Munich,” says Dachs. “We have several layers, or ‘rings,’ of seating. By organizing people vertically, we bring them closer.
“The second thing that we need to do is to ‘wallpaper’ the room with faces. If you look at traditional opera house models, the audience is not sitting as they are in a movie theatre with everybody on one or two levels, facing front between two blank sidewalls. Rather, the audience wraps around in that wonderful horseshoe-shape and comes right up to the stage. As you sit in the house looking at the stage there are always people in your peripheral vision. You never forget that this is a completely live experience—these moments will never happen again. The wonderful thing about an opera house is that it reflects fundamental human impulses. We always gather around a storyteller or a juggler on the street and the live theatres that we create need to allow us to do that as well.
“The other thing that the geometry does is cause the audience to literally embrace the singer. When performers stands on stage and that wonderful audience rings around them, they feel totally encompassed and it changes how they perform. It truly is a living thing.”
Dachs goes on to say that the room needs to look and feel as small as possible. There are a certain number of seats that have to be accommodated and each one needs to have good sightlines. The room needs to feel a third or a half of the actual size. “One of the ways that we do that,” says Dachs, “ is by architecturally emphasizing the idea that the space contained by those rings of balconies is the actual size of the room. Although all four walls stretch to the front, back and sides, we want everybody to feel that the theatre space is only as big as the space embraced by the balconies.
“We are reinforcing that idea in the way the ceiling is designed. It is not a dome, it is actually an inverted dome, but there is a circular gesture in the ceiling that corresponds to the rings of the balconies. There is even a gesture made on the main floor level, which we call the ‘parterre,’ where a railing wraps around and follows the line of the balconies above. By repeating this horseshoe-shape on the floor and on the ceiling, and by making the outer walls relatively darker and the balcony fronts brighter, we were able to emphasize the intimacy of the room.
“We learned in the ‘bad days’ of the 1950s and '60s that when you put large, blank surfaces around a stage, the stage seems very small and the performer on the stage even smaller. But if you break down the scale of all of the surfaces surrounding the stage, then the stage seems large—it seems like the largest thing in the room. The architectural game that we are playing is to try to do everything possible to make it clear that the stage is the most significant part of the room and that the singers can fill that room with their presence. They are in no way diminished by the architecture, but the architecture enhances their scale. In the end, every plane, every surface, has something that breaks it down in some way closer to the scale of the human face, the human form.
“In the geometry of the room, the materials we choose, the colours, and in the way that we light the room, we’re trying to accomplish the same thing—make the performer seem big, make the stage seem big, make the room seem small, make the audience feel close. I view that as the most important task for the theatre consultant.”
Beyond that, Dachs is also responsible for the seating layouts and the sightlines so that this carefully contrived geometric machine provides extraordinary sightlines. “We have proprietary software that we have developed in our office that enables us to study many alternatives with the design team. We had meetings with Robert Essert (acoustician) and Jack Diamond (architect), his staff and the COC staff and box office personnel. We sat ‘virtually’ in each seat of the auditorium so we could note at what point the seats were not providing the best view and eliminate or correct them. There is no seat in this room that has not been carefully reviewed by us, previewed with the box office personnel and approved as being appropriate to include. We have worked very hard to ensure this.”
Dachs and his staff are also responsible for the efficiency of the production “engine.” Along with the artists, there are a myriad of staff backstage—wardrobe, wigs, stagehands, and production staff. Meticulous thought has to be given to storage, truck loading and unloading, backstage circulation, and dressing room layouts, not only for comfort, but also for maximum space and ease of movement. “For instance,” Dachs says, “the backstage corridors must have extra width because, at times, they will be lined with wardrobe racks. At the same time we are dealing with how the audience amenities are accommodated – how to deal with catering, what happens with the food garbage that shouldn’t clutter up the backstage entrance. You don’t want the corps de ballet in their tutus to be crossing past drippy spaghetti trash in a garbage bag. Careful thought has to be given to the logistics backstage.
“We deal with the rigging system and the stage lighting system—the design of those systems, as well as stage machinery that lifts the orchestra pit and moves the variable acoustical draperies. We have got our finger, one way or another, in a lot of different areas in this building.
“There is a side to what we do which is logistical and functional as well as a side that is all about technology and the integration of technology into the building. Then there is a side which is really more spiritual—making this room feel right. Robert is interested in ensuring that it sounds right and I am interested in how it feels. The entire team is working to ensure that the audience and the performer have the best theatrical experience possible.”
By Suzanne Vanstone, Editor of Publications at the COC.
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