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Redefining the traditional theater—from top to bottom

DALLAS, OCT. 15, 2009 — During the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre’s grand opening this week, audiences are discovering a 575-seat, “multi-form” theater that gives one of the country’s most innovative performing arts companies an unprecedented reconfiguration of both house and stage.

Unlike a typical theater, the Wyly positions back-of-house and front-of-house facilities above and beneath the auditorium instead of encircling it. Designed by REX/OMA, Joshua Prince-Ramus (Partner in Charge) and Rem Koolhaas, the new home of the Dallas Theater Center is thereby transformed into one large fly tower that provides an infinite variety of stage configurations, and liberates the performance chamber’s perimeter to allow fantasy and reality to mix when and where desired. The Wyly Theatre’s design was begun in 2004 by OMA New York, a firm owned equally by Prince-Ramus and Koolhaas. In 2006, Prince-Ramus bought Koolhaas out of the company and renamed the existing entity REX.

Prince-Ramus, who will give a lecture in the Wyly Theatre, October 16 at 2 p.m., comments, “The Wyly is a ‘theater machine’ that grants freedom to determine the entire artistic experience, from audience arrival to performance configuration to departure.”

The Dallas Theater Center’s previous accommodation, a makeshift residence located in a galvanized metal shed, liberated its users from the limitations imposed by a fixed-stage configuration and the need to avoid harming expensive interior finishes. The Wyly Theatre’s unprecedented “stacked” design meets two distinct challenges—it retains and refines the same freedoms that made the DTC’s original building a successful theater space and creates a new theatrical structure that combines flexibility with affordability.

The theater can be altered into a wide array of configurations—including proscenium, thrust and flat floor—empowering directors and scenic designers to choose the stage-audience configuration that fulfills their artistic desires, or to invent one of their own. Directors can incorporate the Dallas skyline and streetscape into performances at will, as the auditorium is enclosed by an acoustic glass façade with optional black-out blinds and panels that can be opened to allow patrons or performers to enter the auditorium directly from outside. The performance chamber is intentionally made of materials that are not precious to encourage alterations; the stage and auditorium surfaces can be cut, drilled, painted, welded, sawed, nailed, glued and stitched at limited cost.

On a Friday night, patrons can share Lear’s sorrow in a dark and quiet theater. Then Saturday evening, against the dramatic backdrop of the Dallas cityscape, the audience can join Vladimir and Estragon in their vigil for Godot, in an auditorium now stripped of its comforting cocoon.

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About REX

REX is an internationally renowned architecture and design firm based in New York. In addition to the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, other cultural projects by REX include Museum Plaza, a 62-story mixed-use skyscraper housing a contemporary art center in Louisville, Kentucky, and the new Central Library and Music Conservatory for the city of Kortrijk, Belgium. Current projects also include the Istanbul headquarters for Vakko and Power Media, Turkey’s preeminent fashion and media companies; the University of Louisville’s College of Business campus in Kentucky, and a line of public furniture for Belgian furniture company Quinze & Milan. REX recently placed second in both the international competition for the new Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, and the Finnish Innovation Fund’s Low2No sustainable development competition in Helsinki, Finland.

Joshua Prince-Ramus is President of REX and Principal in Charge of all projects. Prince-Ramus was the founding partner of OMA New York—the American affiliate of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)—and served as its Principal until he renamed the firm REX in 2006. While REX was still known as OMA New York, Prince-Ramus was Partner in Charge of the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas and the Seattle Central Library, hailed as Time magazine’s 2004 Building of the Year and by Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review in more than 30 years of writing about architecture.” In 2005, the Seattle Central Library was awarded the top honors bestowed by the American Institute of Architects.