Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts to transform local Waterville cultural landscape

For years, the arts at Colby have been separated across campus. Runnals, at the south end of campus, houses Theater & Dance. Bixler and the Colby Museum of Art, homes of music and visual art, are just north of the heart of campus. Cinema studies has no single place to call home and is scattered throughout campus.

Colby’s approach to the arts has been ripe for a change. This past fall semester, a portion of the Perkins Arboretum was clear-cut, replaced by construction vehicles and raw earth. Weeks later, explosive blasting began, helping carve out a space in the south side of campus for a revolutionary new structure: the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts.

This story began six years earlier, with a team of Colby professors and colleagues in various departments that laid out the groundwork for the Gordon Center. Since then, the center has gone from a simple idea to an imminent campus development. The building was designed by architect Bill Ron, who has worked on a number of other structures for institutions like Williams College and Duke University. Colby plans to begin construction of the Gordon Center this year.

Last week, members of the Colby community had the opportunity to get a firsthand virtual tour of the Gordon Center, guided by guest speakers from the college. In fall 2023, when the center is set to open its doors, the south end of campus will look quite different. Occupying the space which was once the Mary Low parking lot will be the Gordon Center. Facing Mary Low and Foss will be an impressive glass facade designed to invite students inside to participate in the creative process.

“At night, this building is going to glow with the creative process,” Jim Thurston, Resident Designer of the Department of Theater & Dance, said during the virtual event. “There are unique spaces in this building that don’t exist right now on campus. The arts incubator, as a brainstorming space, is a good example, where ideas can be set in motion in a number of ways.”

Thurston was referring to a space on the ground floor of the Gordon Center, which was designed to bring Colby students from different disciplines, both artistic and otherwise, together in new and unique ways. The Gordon Center will provide a space for the artistic disciplines at Colby to cohabitate and influence one another, and much more. It will feature a main performance hall, many settings for musical and dance performances, a screening room for cinema studies, and a recording and production suite. It will also house almost soundproof music practice rooms, but not totally soundproof.

“We are being selective about what kind of sound we do allow out, because we do want this to be a really vibrant, inviting, vivacious space,” Brian Clark, Colby’s Vice President of Planning, said while directing the virtual tour. While it is set to be an ambitious addition, the Gordon Center is not meant to be Waterville’s one-stop-shop for the arts. It will be a part of a network of buildings and organizations which are just beginning to emerge. Colby is in the process of creating two more arts centers in Waterville.

The Paul J Schupf Art Center, a collaboration with Waterville Creates!, is also set to break ground this spring on Main Street. It will serve as a new location for the existing Railroad Square Cinema, and will be deeply involved in the current arts culture in Waterville. Additionally, the Arts Collaborative, adjacent to the new Lockwood Hotel, will open its doors this year. It will provide a space for innovation for the Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby students, and the Waterville community.

This arts ecosystem will be managed by Diamond Family Director of the Arts Teresa McKinney.

“My role is to oversee the artistic and cultural programming across the campus as well as coordinate with community arts programs and facilities,” McKinney said during last week’s virtual event. “The Gordon Center is central to this.”

McKinney, since her recent arrival in Waterville, has worked closely on programming for the Waterville arts ecosystem with a group of students she calls “arts associates.” This group of students, who are both art majors and others, have been actively involved in giving the student body a voice at programming meetings.

Some, like Stella Gonzalez `22, have worked closely with Waterville community leaders to understand how the new arts centers can be of use to them.

“The music department and the performing arts are some of the highest points of community engagement that we get,” Gonzalez said. “There’s a lot of adults in the local community who are part of our orchestra and band, for example. If you go to a concert here, it’s not just Colby students playing the instruments, it’s a lot of Waterville or Central Maine residents.”

Gonzalez and other arts associates have also worked with community leaders from local schools, Waterville Creates!, the Waterville Opera House, and Railroad Square Cinema, and even the Indigo Arts Alliance.

“It’s really cool to be in on those meetings, because I feel like that’s really practical knowledge to have, how much goes into the creation of an office, or of a new space,” Gonzlez explained, “Teresa, our supervisor, is really receptive to our thoughts.”

The Gordon Center will not be open until fall of 2023, so most current Colby students will not interact with that space as students.

“It kind of sucks sitting in on these meetings and looking at all the mockups,” Gonzalez said, “but obviously people went through the same thing. With the athletic center, I’m sure that some people were involved in some capacity in it and they graduated before they actually got to use it. I feel like that’s just what it is like to be a student.”

In the meantime, Gonzalez says, students can look forward to the Arts Collaborative, which will open this year. It will be the first of many changes to the arts as we know it in Waterville.