How to Select a Venue for Community Theater

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com, my name is Stan and I'm here to tell you about theater resources for community theater and finding a performance space. Most of community theater when they start out have to perform in a public building. Our group is the same way, it's a very typical thing. The key in selecting a public building is finding one where you can get the stage for extended periods of time. If you're going to try to use a high school auditorium for example, the problem is usually scheduling in these building because other groups are using the building and you find that you need the stage not just for performance times but for rehearsals and for building the set if you're going to do that. Probably in the beginning, you won't have much of set just because of that problem. Typically, you start out as we did in a public building moving in and out, rehearsing whenever you can schedule it and having to hop scotch your schedule around the schedules of other people that have the building scheduled as well. It became a problem for us in the first public building we were in because we need 3 weekends consecutive for our performance schedule. We do 3 weekends in a row, and we couldn't work out 3 weekends in a row with the public building that we were in over in Cottonwood. We are able to do that over here in Clarkdale, so that's the main reason that we moved over to this building. It is also a better facility for us. It's a much bigger facility. We were able to install things that we really wanted to install for better production. We have a mix shift theater lighting system that one of our members very ingeniously made out of conduit pipe and floodlights. The little shades that he put on the floodlights are made from pie pans, which he painted black, and they work extremely well. It's just amazing what we can do with these inexpensive lights. We just run them through 1,000-watt household dimmers and we're able to achieve quite a lot with this. This building allows us to seat quite a large number of people. There are seats that we have to bring in and bring out though because this building is also used for dances and other events. A typical problem you have in a community building. Every theater dreams of having its own building. In the long term if you're lucky, you may be able to work that out. Several theaters that I know including the one I was involved with back in Wisconsin performed in an old church. Lots of times there are churches that go up for sale when a church falls out of favor with the congregation, and you can pick those buildings up and they convert nicely into performance spaces. In our case, we've looked at lots of buildings around in hopes of finding one, but we were very fortunate that a local company owned an old historic theater which needs to be renovated. It's pretty much empty right now, no seats or anything in it, but they have donated that theater to us. Now we're going to have the luxury of having our own space where we can schedule rehearsals and performances and set foot any time we like without having to worry about what other people may be doing in the building."