The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College is a performance hall located in New York's Hudson Valley. The center provides audiences with performances and programs in orchestral, chamber, and jazz music, and in theater, dance, and opera. Designed by architect Frank Gehry, the 110,000-square-foot (10,000 m2) center houses two theaters, four rehearsal studios for dance, theater, and music, and professional support facilities. The total cost of the project reached $62 million. The New Yorker calls it " the best small concert hall in the United States."
The Sosnoff Theater, an intimate, 900-seat theater with an orchestra, parterre, and two balcony sections, features an orchestra pit for opera and acoustics designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, including an acoustic shell that turns the theater into a concert hall for performances of chamber and symphonic music.
The flexible 200-seat Theater Two, houses Bard's Theater and Dance Programs during the academic year. The Fisher Center is also the home of the Bard Music Festival, hosting companies from around the world during Bard SummerScape, a festival of opera, theater, and dance.
The Performing Arts Center is primarily devoted to teaching and college events during the academic year and used as a public performing-arts facility and venue for the college's graduate programs in the arts during the summer months.
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“More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”
—Uta Hagen (b. 1919)
“For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
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A glorious angel. Then if angels fight,
Weak men must fall; for heaven still guards the right.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”
—Dorothy Canfield Fisher (20th century)
“Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin “helping” them. Such a world does not exist—never has.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“Bottom. What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant?
Quince. A lover that kills himself, most gallant, for love.
Bottom. That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)