Portland’s Performing Arts Center

For a city the size of Portland it really does have a lot going on in the arts world and we have many wonderful buildings to house it. In this blog, I would like to just concentrate on one of them – what used to be known as the New Theater Building and now called the Antoinette Hatfield Hall. Now why they called it a Hall, I have no idea, because this Hall contains several theaters including the Newmark and Dolores Winningstad theaters.

The building itself is quite remarkable. Built in 1987, it is a modern building, but not one that jars you like some others do. As soon as you walk into the rotunda lobby, you know that this building is all about arts, whimsy and making a statement. It makes you feel as if you are on stage the moment you walk through the doors. You look up expecting to see people applauding your entrance, and then as you look over to your left, you realize that it is all a joke, as the statue with the dripping nose lets you know it was a setup. The glass fragments in the roof can spray colors around the rotunda when it catches the sun in the right way and the other arts pieces here even extend to the surface of the bar.

The picture you see above, it not what it seems. This is a great example of forced perspective.

I would highly recommend the tours that they perform in this building and the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall just across the courtyard. They run them on Wednesday’s at 11:00am and on Saturdays every half hour between 11:00am and 1:00pm. They last approximately 1 hour although the one I took got rather extended with so many questions and picture opportunities.

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Brought to you by Brian Bailey

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