Farewell To Holmberg Hall; Say Hello To The Donald

Holmberg Hall is no more. The Donald W. Reynolds Performing Arts Center opened Friday in its place on the University of Oklahoma North Oval.

The arts center is the renovated and enlarged version of Holmberg Hall, which opened in 1918. The Donald trumps the building’s older version with 20,000 square feet for the School of Dance and 5,000-square-foot stage house for modern staging.

A $12.2 million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas, Nev., funded the major project.

Friday night, the center had an invitation-only dedication, in which mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne and students from the OU schools of music and dance performed. The hall’s first public event will be Sooner Scandals, a production by student groups for Mom’s Weekend on April 8-9.

While the auditorium still has its historic look, it was renovated with the latest of fabrics and construction materials and fully meets Americans with Disabilities Act standards. And with its spacious three dance studios, 50 soundproof music practice rooms and European-styled performance hall, students will have the facilities to better learn the performance arts.

This is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary facility. That’s dean talk for a lot of stuff goes on around here,” said Marvin Lamb, dean of the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts.

The renovated building already is getting plenty of use. From the outside, looking at the building from the north, one could see a student in every window practicing his or her music. Lamb said from 7 a.m. until 10p.m., “those rooms have been completely full.”

School of Dance director Mary Margaret Holt said he students are also eager to move in. The school’s present studio at the Carlett Music Center has a low ceiling, which keeps students from jumping or lifting their partners without someone hitting the ceiling.

No such worries with the two practice studios that measure a roomy 63-by-43 feet and have very high ceiling. A third dance studio will be an informal performance space for schoolchildren and others.

Seating for the main performance hall shrank from about 900 seats down to 690, but Lamb said there are good sight lines and acoustics from every seat. The ceiling is higher, the balcony rounded for better visibility and there is a movable music pit that can rise up to stage level. Seat fabrics have a 21st century feel but an autumn-colored 19^th century look.

Architect David Saviola said the same could be said of the whole building.

“We wanted to restore as much historic influence as we could, and you can see that in the fixtures, doorways and windows,” he said. “If you’re outside the building it looks like the windows are 100 years old or more but they’re not, they’re new thermal windows.”

Lamb emphasized art in his comments, saying the college’s priority is training “artist who are practitioners of a particular craft,” instead of merely singers or musicians or dancers.

Mike Larsen painted three large murals that greet visitors entering the performance hall and three more at the School of Dance entrance. The performance hall artwork shows Fredrik Holmberg and his orchestra in the center mural, with murals portraying student events and the hall’s famous visitors on either side.

The center Scholl of Dance mural features school founders Yvonne Chouteau and Miguel Terekhov in a dance pose. It’s surrounded by murals of ballet students and one of contemporary dance, and Larsen painted the subjects in the three murals forming a subtle arch.

“Yvonne and Miguel gave us our past and our present, and this (building) gives us our future,” Holt said.