A Performance We Can Be Proud Of

I recently attended a showing of “David Copperfield : An Intimate Night of Grand Illusion” at the Fargodome’s Gate City Bank “Theatre”. The show was excellent. The settings however were not. I just can’t see how people can enjoy that type of setting for a show like that. First of all, we were all packed in like sardines. Literally. They used folding chairs for the seats up front. Each seat touched right up against the next seat. Not a whole lot of space to work with, especially if you have to stay in that one spot the entire show. To get rid of the “arena” feel, they draped large black sheets to act as walls. The stage was tiny too. I would assume that he left some of his illusions out due to the size of the stage. The point is, I though it was an awesome show, but was extremely disappointed with the setting it was showed in.

This show should have been in a performing arts center. Yes that’s right. That buzz word city politicians like to throw around as the solution to their city’s problems. The entire metropolitan area is large enough to handle a center like that. There is a large enough group of individuals who are skilled in the arts that could share the center.

Here’s a few I can think of :

FM Opera Company
FM Symphony
FM Community Theatre
(if you want the entire list go here)

What we need is a structure worthy of national performances. We should be able to host musicals, concerts, and other events you would normally see in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, and New York. We should be able to get limited showings of productions such as Cats, Phantom of the Opera, The Producers, Rent, and so on. With a theatre setting I also would see us booking more concerts, which would not originally have gone into the Fargodome, like Dave Matthews Band for example.

What I hope doesn’t happen are the current people handling our “new” downtown library project, get their dirty mitts on this and wreck that as well. The last thing we need is a half-assed attempt at something that should have been done correctly. With once glance at the proposed “building over the current building” plan by the library committee anyone would see why it is important that someone with vision handles a project on this scale. If the types of people referred to earlier get it, they’ll attempt to build us a performing arts center with a budget of maybe $20 million dollars. They’ll throw in an additional $6 million more than the downtown library project because it “should look nice”.

By The People For The People

The other mistake we mustn’t make in this pursuit is attempting to fund it using tax-payer dollars, like the Fargodome and other civic services. A performing arts center is something of a luxury to any city that has one. In essence, the people have to want it badly enough to collectively raise the funds needed for its construction and operation. I think that kind of money and spirit does exist in the metropolitan area. Albeit, it isn’t a massive group, but there are those who really care about the arts and their survival in this region of the country.

So what do I think our performing arts center should look like, what should it cost, and finally, where should it go? Well if you look at other cities our size and slightly larger (remember I’m thinking what I’d like to see up to the year 2050), I believe a performing arts center with a budget of $60-$75 million dollars for construction and then a cushion of an additional fund of $10-$20 million dollars, of which operating costs would be met by the yearly interest and yearly fund drives.

What should the building look like? I would personally prefer to not have something too modern or too futuristic in look, for example, like the new Guthrie in Minneapolis. Not saying I’m not found of their new building, it just isn’t Fargo/Moorhead type architecture, especially if you consider the types of architecture present in both downtown areas. I’d like to see something more or less brick. Sure it can have curtains of glass for excellent views, but it’s going to have to be solid. The inside should be acoustically designed to give the best sounds possible. An arrangement of seating on two levels would suffice and also have box seats arranged along the walls, perhaps 3 levels high for company or wealthier folks to take advantage of. Here’s a picture of something of what I’m hoping for…

Finally, where should this massive structure go? I would hope it would stay in the downtown areas of either Fargo or Moorhead, preferably along the Red River. Two spots in my mind that instantly jump out are the plots of land occupied by Mid-American Steel in downtown Fargo and the area where they are disassembling the current Moorhead Power Plant. The plot in Fargo has the advantage of being able to build up to the shoreline with fancy landscaping and the newly constructed Main Avenue Bridge along side it. The one con is the tracks. They run right through that land, so some heavy duty soundproofing and foundation work would have to be done to mitigate the noise from the passing trains. The Moorhead spot offers a spectacular of a future downtown skyline. I would imagine by 2050 we would have built at least, an additional 10 high-rises. It’s also located snugly in between two of the metropolitan area’s park lands. So it’s quite scenic. Here are the locations I’m talking about…



There you have it. By 2050 if Fargo-Moorhead doesn’t have a performing arts center like this in place, something terrible had to have gone wrong.