First-years and second-years may not know this, but Sayles used to be the ideal performance space on campus. The whole school would congregate for Synchrony and the drag show, filling the balconies and seats in anticipation of wonderful audience interaction and good viewing. Now, Synchrony is relegated to the Great Hall — where only the first two rows get to see anything — and the drag show is hosted in the chapel, where the performers are up on a stage far away from the audience, limiting what makes drag so beautiful. This shift in venue is correlated with dwindling participation (both performer and audience) in both organizations, which a few years ago would pack entire buildings. What happened?
It started with the renovation of Sayles and the extension of the kiosk area to the back wall. I won’t get into the politics of this decision, but after this point, Sayles was closed to student performances with the idea being that these performances may interfere with or damage the new renovations (in particular, the new flooring). This decision would make sense if not for the fact that DJ sets for the Midwinter Ball are hosted in Sayles, where dozens of students (some in heels) are jumping up and down on that very same floor for multiple consecutive hours. By comparison, Synchrony would have to host a show every night for multiple terms to do a comparable amount of harm to the floor.
Another point of contention is the loss of revenue for BonApp due to Sayles being shut down for those performances. Frankly, I don’t think student performances and events should be beholden to the profit incentives of a private company, but even if that were the case, BonApp used to remain open during performances. I would argue that allowing performances in Sayles again would actually increase profits on performance nights. Lastly, the question of set-up and take-down, wherein it becomes an inconvenience to rearrange the space. That also used to be handled by students; I myself volunteered to stack and unstack chairs and bring tables back. There were systems in place that addressed any possible administrative concern with these events, but for some reason, they’re impossible now? I don’t buy it, and neither should you.
Let’s dive deeper into the problems with the Synchrony placement in the Great Hall. First, it is a safety hazard for dancers. The floors in the Great Hall are concrete — a material not used as flooring for any of Carleton’s actual dance studios specifically for safety concerns. The risk of injury to dancers is much higher if someone were to fall on a concrete floor versus a wooden floor. Wood is also a more absorbent material than concrete, and so when dancers move around a lot and sweat onto a wooden floor, the sweat clears much faster. It does that much less easily on concrete, leaving the floor slick and increasing chances for injury to performers. This risk is also heightened by the fact that concrete is quite heat-absorbent: Synchrony dancers perform barefoot, meaning that their feet are cold and likely to remain stiff as they dance, increasing the chance that something goes wrong.
From a choreographer’s perspective, it is also a massive loss since the lateral space for the Great Hall is much smaller in both width and length, which means dances are both smaller in scale and more packed, which means that more creative choreography is constrained. Due to the way that seating works, any dancing on and close to the floor is only seen by the front row, which also limits choreography and makes the dances more difficult and less fun to actually perform. There is something lost when you artificially limit student choreography. You lose the sheer spectacle of a 30-person strong Mandance where everyone is giving it their all to come together for the love of a good show. There isn’t another place you can get that on-campus outside of these performances, due to the barriers to entry that other dance/performance-based organizations have. It discourages people from participating in otherwise fun and community-centered performances when the space is restricted and the event itself is hampered by these unnecessary constraints.
From an audience perspective, it is also a bad deal. Since the space is smaller and there is no seating available on the sides, the only view is front on, which means that past the third row, people really can’t see what’s happening onstage. Anecdotally, from some of the previous Great Hall performances, there were people standing in the back, on the trash cans, just to see a little bit of what was happening. Sustained use of the Great Hall will eventually kill off interest in Synchrony, because that space makes every part of that event more of a hassle and more frustrating, regardless of your involvement in Synchrony. Sayles has a bigger space, more viewing angles with the balcony (now extended thanks to the renovation), has wooden floors, and more options for the seating, like sitting on the floor around the sides. It is the ideal place, and we don’t have access to it now for some reason.
For the drag show, now The House of Dush, one of the most interesting parts of those performances to me was the audience interaction and intimacy. The chapel as a location has a clear delineation between performance space (the stage on top) and the audience seating (the pews) such that it is difficult for the performers to engage with the audience in the same way. Additionally, since Sayles is a much more intimate space than the chapel, the space becomes more involved and energized, where those performing can run into the audience and then back with ease and blur the lines between act and reality. One of my clearest memories as a first-year was sitting in the front row and watching someone do a flip into a perfect split from the stage to the floor and the crowd going absolutely insane over it. You don’t get that same reaction with an audience far away from your performers; it’s a relationship reliant on a space that facilitates those kinds of interactions and closeness that pushes performers to do something truly creative and audiences to bring the energy to that space.
This article is a plea from someone who has seen what those performances in Synchrony and Carleton’s a Drag used to be and wants younger students and future Carls to have the same or even better experiences than I did. Closing Sayles off from student performances deadens lively parts of campus culture, brings the school together less and takes autonomy and decision-making further away from students who are now shut out of spaces for vague or contradictory administrative reasons, as though we cannot be trusted to handle the spaces we’ve performed in for decades. Whether it’s through the Carleton Student Association or further conversations with administration, Sayles as a performance space was a beautiful part of Carleton, and we as students should not give up that part of our culture and history so easily. The Sayles problem is that we as students no longer have it as our own, and we should have it back.
