 |
Yamaha DC3 Neo Enhances New Notre Dame
Performing Arts Center
The new Marie P. DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Notre Dame is a state-of-the-art facility housing five separate performing arts venues. Each building opens into one epicenter, the Grand Lobby, where a gleaming Yamaha DC3 Neo plays during intermission at all events, during regular daytime hours, and for special functions and receptions.
 |
"The Neo looks like it was born in the Grand Lobby," says John A. Haynes, director of performing arts at the University of Notre Dame. "Its wood and metal match our décor perfectly: our woodwork is cherry-stained maple, and the signs and hardware are all brushed aluminum. All who see and hear it – a highly differentiated audience of arts consumers, estimated at 150,000 each year – are very intrigued by it."
Haynes says he placed the Neo in the lobby partly because of a previous experience in a troubled inner city elementary school.
"We put a grand piano in the school's entrance lobby, engaged 30 volunteer pianists to play it each morning, and witnessed the piano's profoundly calming effect on the children." Though Haynes simply puts Chopin disks in the Neo, he laughingly says, "We don't have a problem with rowdy people in our lobby, but it has the same effect."
 |
Shirk's Piano in Mishawaka, IN, was responsible for the placement of the Neo in the 150,000-square-foot performing arts center this fall. The building is the first new performance venue on campus since 1881, and it houses The Patricia George Decio Mainstage Theatre, The Judd and Mary Lou Leighton Concert Hall, The Regis Philbin Studio Theatre, The Michael Browning Family Cinema and The Chris and Anne Reyes Organ and Choral Hall.
On October 25, Philbin returned to his alma mater to do a live broadcast of NBC's Live with Regis and Kelly, and a production of Dead Man Walking will be offered at the Philbin Theatre in February. Highlights of the eclectic 2004-2005 season include appearances by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the New York Philharmonic, The Chieftains, Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Natalie McMaster, the Second City Comedy Troupe and The Emerson String Quartet. The facility also houses offices for the Department of Film, Television and Theatre, classrooms, editing studios, a recording studio, a scene- and prop-construction shop, a sound stage, a costume shop, a computer-aided design lab, a lighting lab, musical and theater rehearsal halls and more.
The impressive $63.6 million Performing Arts Center originated with a $33 million pledge from mall magnate and philanthropist, Edward J. DeBartolo, and now bears the name of his wife. Notre Dame is ranked among the nation's top 25 institutions of higher learning in surveys conducted by U.S. News & World Report, Princeton Review, Time, Kiplinger's and Kaplan/Newsweek.
