University of Alabama's performing arts dream to become reality

After numerous years of models, renderings, plans and dreams, the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance can finally look forward to a consolidated, updated set of facilities within the planned 130,000-square-foot Performing Arts Academic Center.

Spurred by a successful $15 million Campaign for the Performing Arts, chaired by Bill and Mary Battle, with Hollywood star Sela Ward serving as honorary chair, the eventually $50 million-plus PAAC hopes to break ground in the spring, pending approval by the UA board of trustees. Depending on ongoing fundraising and other construction issues, the move-in date may be 2023 or 2024, on what's now called the Bryce campus, formerly home to the state mental hospital.

"Facilities don't win championships, but they allow you to attract coaches and players that can win championships," said Bill Battle, who played end on Paul W. "Bear" Bryant's first national championship football team, in 1961, and who was serving UA as athletic director when he and his wife signed on to help lead the charge. 

"We've got a pretty good line of students and in virtually every form of performing arts," he said, with UA Theatre and Dance graduates working in TV and film, on Broadway and in other prestigious theaters nationally and internationally, employed in performance, design, technical, management and other areas.

The Battles are longtime fans of the performing arts.

"I developed a fondness for the theater when I got stationed at West Point for two years, and got to go to plays free in New York," he said. While they were in Atlanta, where Battle moved his Collegiate Licensing Co., which he'd founded after leaving the head coaching job at the University of Tennessee, they joined and supported theater companies. For work with CLC, the Battles frequently visited other college campuses.

"A lot of the host universities had very, very great performing arts communities," Mary Battle said, "and we saw what it did for the culture of not just the campus, but the community." 

Returning to Tuscaloosa in 2013 for the AD post, the Battles found themselves "amazed" at the quality of local performing arts and artists.

"We saw shows that could, in my mind, have played on Broadway," he said. But they did note the inadequacies of current spaces, and outdated technology. So when they heard then-UA President Judy Bonner was reviving facility plans, a concept that had been around in various forms for decades, the Battles offered to help. Bob Pierce II, vice-president for advancement, leapt on the chance to get them involved.

"Bob did his advancement thing and he said 'Look, I'd like for you to serve on the steering committee' But I said 'No, I don't need to do that. He said, 'It will only meet three times, then you can decide,' " Bill Battle said, laughing.

Their work involved far more than three meetings, of course, but the combination of the beauty of plans for the PAAC, conjoined with the Welcome Center being built at Bryce Main, soon to be the point of introduction to campus for all newcomers, convinced them it was worth the efforts.

"The line that really hooked me," Battle said, was an architect's description of the intertwined facilities as two buildings "flowing and acting like one, moving like a slow couple dancing."

The PAAC will house four performance theaters, along with rehearsal, classroom, workshop and office spaces enough to encompass the entire Theatre and Dance faculty and student body, which at present spreads out over several buildings.

In addition to updating technology, and building spaces for specific functions, rather than adapting them from previously existing edifices, the PAAC will provide ample room to house a program that in the 21st century expanded faster even than the rest of a rapidly-growing UA.

"We certainly are a bit limited in growth, based on our current facilities," said Sarah M. Barry, chair of the department, "and that includes limits on the faculty and staff as well. For dance performance, only so many bodies can fit on the stage we currently have," housed in the recently renamed English Building, formerly Morgan.

Similar problems are presented by Marian Gallaway and Allen Bales theaters, in adjacent Rowand-Johnson Hall, which houses most of the department's offices and classrooms. RoJo, as it's known, wasn't built for theater, constructed in 1955 as the Music and Speech Building.

In the '70s, the Speech Department was reorganized into Communicative Disorders, Speech Communication, and Theatre and Dance. Adaptations began. Speech moved out. Music moved into its own Moody Music Building complex in 1988. Rowand-Johnson, renamed in 1989 for long-time professors of music and speech, also holds classes and offices for English and anthropology.

UA's main dance rehearsal studio is in Clark Hall, though there are also studios and offices in the Fresh Foods building. Theater workshops sprawl across B.B. Comer, the Alice Kidd Building, the Bryce campus, and completely off-campus, in a building near Queen City Boulevard. 

"This will centralize our department, which will really enhance our collaborative abilities," Barry said. 

The PAAC will include a black-box theater with flexible seating for audiences, from 175 to 275; a 350-seat proscenium theater; a 450-seat venue for dance; and a dance studio theater with flexible space, usable for recitals, rehearsals and other smaller performances. All shop and design spaces will be brought under the same roof.

The PAAC and Welcome Center will represent an added aesthetic attraction, said Joseph P. Messina, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for potential new students and faculty.

"We're already a top 20 program" in theater and dance, said Messina, who took the post in summer 2019, following retirement of former dean Bob Olin. "If we're shooting for top 10, or best in the nation, that becomes a possibility with the PAAC."

The PAAC could do for Theatre and Dance what the Moody complex did for UA's School of Music, he said, expanding the complexities and volume of creations offered for campus and community.

"Everyone's going to want to perform here," Messina said.

The $15 million represented a threshold the department needed to pass, a trigger to release further funding from the board of trustees.

"We didn't announce the project until we got $5 million," Bill Battle said, "and we actually got that pretty quickly. We got to about $9 or $10 million, and then hit a wall for about a year."

But efforts led Pierce and Kathy Yarbrough, executive director of principal gifts, sustained the effort as the Battles went to work making calls, reaching out to the UA faithful.

Ward, a UA homecoming queen and cheerleader who graduated from the Capstone in 1977, has starred in TV series including "Sisters," "Westworld," "House," "FBI," "Graves," "CSI: NY," "L.A. Law" and "Once and Again," along with feature films such as "The Fugitive," "The Day After Tomorrow," "The Stepfather" and "Gone Girl." She provided celebrity voiceover work for a campaign video, which featured UA dancers performing inside some existing Bryce spaces, currently being shored up and readied for further construction.

Among top early donors were Laura and Robert Abernathy of Atlanta, who gave $1.5 million; the Battles themselves, who gave $500,000; Janine and Nick Perdomo of Miami, who gave $500,000; and Linda and Bob Shumilas of Tuscaloosa, who gave $500,000. Another 20 gifts totaled $100,000 or more.

One anonymous donor gave $5.25 million; that identity is expected to be revealed closer to the building's opening, as UA begins applying names. 

Though the fund-raising campaign was announced in 2017, the need for the PAAC has been recognized for decades. Bill Teague, who retired as chair of the department in 2019, witnessed and nursed many iterations.

"I came here in fall of 1981, and at that time, in the files, there was a letter from (speech and theater professor) Allen Bales to (then-dean of A&S) Doug Jones, and they wrote David Matthews (president of UA from 1969 to 1980, with 18 months off to serve in the Ford administration), talking about the need for a new theater and performing arts center," Teague said.

"So the need has been demonstrated for, I don't know, 50 years maybe?" he said, laughing.

When Andrew Sorensen became UA president in the mid-'90s, he and provost Nancy Barrett spurred efforts. UA began consulting architectural and theater consultants, figuring what needed to go inside, before working toward concepts.

A physical model was created, one that cost about $100,000 to develop, and plotted for the recreation fields across from the Moody, with the intent to create a kind of arts region of campus. This was before UA had purchased the old Bryce property from from the Alabama Department of Mental Health.

Former A&S Dean James Yarbrough, Kathy Yarbrough's father, used to tell the story of how he had an eight-figure check practically in his hand, on the very week in 2005 when HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy got indicted. After that potential windfall fell through, the project lay fallow for awhile, until a little less than a decade ago, when Bonner visited Teague to say: "Do we need to revive this?"

It was a blessing in disguise the Scrushy building didn't succeed, Teague said, "Because we're five times bigger in both faculty and students than we were then. We would have outgrown it by now."

Around spring of 2013, UA hired Theatre Projects, a consulting firm out of Connecticut, and over the next few years worked multiple concepts. About a year later, UA engaged Turnerbatson, out of Birmingham, and H3 Associates, from New York, to partner on designs. Several deadlines went past, with fundraising ongoing, until the 2017 campaign kicked the project into higher gear.

"We would not have a building if it wasn't for Bill and Mary," Teague said. "A lot of times when you have a chairman of a fund-raising committee, they're honorary....But they worked the phones, made the contacts, pushed it through, harassed all the right folks. And Bill and Mary were very generous in their own right."

In the roughly four years since earlier estimates, costs of steel and concrete have risen, so UA's currently working to finalize figures, and the fund-raising must go on, directed by the board of trustees.

"We're hoping the $15 million will have a spring effect," Teague said. "This is going to be a 50-year building."