After an eight-year odyssey, Hancher officials look ahead to the inaugural season in a new building.
By Girindra Selleck
After nearly a decade of planning, design, and construction, the new Hancher is finally ready to assume its rightful place on the Iowa City horizon.
Hancher Executive Director Chuck Swanson and his closely knit team never thought it would take this long. When the old Hancher was flooded in the catastrophic deluge of 2008, the crew expected the building would be in need of renovation, but they nonetheless held on to the idea that it ultimately could be salvaged.
When FEMA visited the site for its assessment and, upon finding the facility “beyond 50 percent destroyed,” decided that it must be replaced, members of the Hancher organization and Iowa City community were taken aback.
“It took us a while to even come to terms with it,” said Rob Cline, the Hancher director of marketing and communcations. “In one sense, a building is a building, but in another sense, it’s a repository of memory.”
Cline has a connection to the building that — while more intimate than most — serves to illustrate the role that Hancher has played in the community over the last few decades. Cline, now in his 15th year with the company, met his future wife while on staff as a student usher in the old Hancher.
“When the wrecking ball finally started swinging, a lot of us sat on the hill overlooking the site,” Cline said. “And the only thing that made it bearable was looking from our left to our right to see them working on the new facility while they were knocking the old one down.”
The new Hancher — designed by the esteemed New Haven-based architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli — is located higher and north from the old location, but its stage is elevated a crucial 13 feet higher than that of the old structure.
The building was sustainably built to fit Silver LEED standards, and, according to Pelli Clarke Pelli’s website, has been “designed to [FEMA’s] 500-year-flood criteria.”
Officials chose Pelli Clarke Pelli to spearhead design in September 2010 after an extensive search, in which Hancher received 59 applications from various firms around the world.
After 30 months of drawing up plans and completing the building’s schematic design, the team was ready to bring in the construction crew and begin the heavy lifting.
With the knowledge that more than 40 years ago during the construction of the old Hancher, three construction workers died in a tragic scaffold accident, Swanson and the rest of the Hancher crew wanted to take some extraordinary precautions.
Following the Japanese custom of blessing the ground before beginning construction, the Hancher people decided to bring in their friends and longtime collaborators San Jose Taiko, a Japanese-American drumming collective based in California, to perform an inaugural site ceremony.
“We wanted to transfer all the energy and history from the old building to the site of the new building,” Swanson said. “It was so meaningful and so moving. And so far, we’ve had a safe journey.”
The Taiko ceremony was one of many events Hancher has held on site during construction.
To keep up morale among the construction workers and to thank them for their tireless efforts, Hancher brought in a number of its regular acts to perform for the workers during their lunch breaks.
“We wanted to make this more than a job; we wanted them to realize that they were building something that will affect lives in the future,” Swanson said.
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The idea that Hancher is, ultimately, a space for community pervades the organization’s overall ethic and is visible even in the layout of the new building, which includes a second-floor café and terrace that will be open to the public every Thursday evening, regardless of the building’s performance schedule.
Swanson said that, in addition to serving as the go-to location for performance attendees before and after the shows, he hopes the space can become a destination in which student organizations and local clubs can convene.
“We want to have an academic focus,” he said. “Former [University of Iowa] President Sandy Boyd once said that Hancher is the largest classroom on campus, and we really strive to live up to that.”
The upcoming season appears to be structured with this in mind. Programming Director Jacob Yarrow said half of the artists who will perform at Hancher in the coming months will also do residencies and get involved in various community events, such as classroom discussions, cultural exchanges, and workshops.
The organization is no stranger to collaborating with the greater Iowa City community; over the last eight years, it joined forces with a number of local venues and organizations to continue bringing the class of performers people had come to expect from the Hancher name.
“It wasn’t easy in terms of capacity, but we figured out ways to put the right art in the right room and how to get our audiences to stay involved as we moved around,” Cline said.
It is doubtful whether capacity will be an issue in the new building. Although slightly smaller than the old auditorium, the new Hancher’s 1,800 seats promise to provide ample room for the crowds at even the most anticipated acts.
“It’s important for the artist to stand on stage and feel connected to each member of the audience,” Swanson said. “And you don’t get that if the hall is too big.”
With the new size, he doesn’t think there will be a bad seat in the house.
“We feel like we hit a sweet spot architecturally, aesthetically, and acoustically,” Swanson said. “[The hall] is going to lend itself to one of the finest experiences ever.”
While still in the process of moving in and learning the ropes at their new facility, the Hancher people look forward to their triumphant public reopening at the end of the summer.
Following a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 9, Hancher will hold a couple of community open houses on Sept. 9 and 11, dates that happen to fall on the Iowa-Iowa State football weekend.
“We want thousands of people to come,” Swanson said.
Exactly what will occur with the open houses is still in the works, but Swanson said they would definitely include performances from students in the UI Dance Department.
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Before Hancher’s main-stage season officially kicks off with Steve Martin and Martin Short on Sept. 24, it will welcome the community to a free open-air concert on the Hancher green on Sept. 16 with performances from Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
Looking forward to the opening, Yarrow spoke to the Daily Iowan over the phone about his work assembling the season’s roster.
“My planning process is cyclical, but it’s also ongoing,” he said. “It’s a constant collection of information, a constant discussion of what the artists are up to and how we fit into what they’re doing.”
While a number of first-time Hancher performers can be found throughout the schedule, the season’s core comprises mainly artists with whom Hancher has cultured longstanding relationships over the last few decades, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, singer Renée Fleming, and the Joffrey Ballet.
“We’re always trying to create a rich and varied collection of projects that have multiple points of entry for multiple audiences,” Yarrow said.
One performance likely to please audiences across the board is Hancher’s newly co-commissioned Joffrey Ballet production of The Nutcracker.
“It’s a sort of continuation of the love affair between the Joffrey and Hancher,” Swanson said.
The production, set to open on Dec. 1, features staging from Tony Award-winning choreographer Christopher Wheedon (An American in Paris) and updates to the classic story from lauded writer and illustrator Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret).
There is little doubt, however, whether despite the enviable lineup they scored for the season, Hancher’s staff is most excited to share the space itself with the community.
Now, as Hancher’s final beams — one of which contains the signatures of more than 1,000 local residents — have been lifted into place, the team can only wait for the new playground’s doors to officially open.
“We’ve been patient,” Swanson said. “But the anticipation is still growing.”