| 03 November 2009

Grand opening - CPAC November 20th
Cuesta Wind Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, Choirs
and Voce to perform - 7:30 p.m. 

Great news this month! Another music venue is opening up on the Central Coast. It is the Cuesta College Cultural and Performing Arts Center, or CPAC, located at the San Luis Obispo campus on Highway 1. I recently had the chance to speak with Ron McCarley, director of jazz studies at Cuesta College, and he let me in on some of the juicier details.

This facility is going to blow your mind. It’s almost absurd how neat it is. First of all, there are two theatres within the building. The main stage is larger, seating 450 people, and the other seats 150 people, and is referred to as the experimental theatre. The main stage will have a hydraulic lift, and according to the necessities of each performance, can either be lowered to allow for an unseen orchestra pit, leveled for extra seating in the audience, or raised for extra room on the stage. “It’s almost an embarrassment of riches, because it’s so awesome,” McCarley said. The room has been built for optimal sound quality, and contains noise baffling built into the concrete walls, allowing for such sound dispersal that it kills all echo and reverberation. Aside from the two main speakers, over 85 speakers are distributed throughout the entire room. Because of that, it can simulate the sound of any hall. The room is so “dead” that there are different settings as to what sort of overall sound one can choose to cater to different performances. There are also close to 100 microphones to catch the performance’s sound and send it through the speakers accordingly. No worries about the two theatres clashing over volume, there is a vacuum seal that blocks sound. An on-site machine shop in the back was installed to construct stage props. Hallelujah!

When asked about the CPAC being used for events other than school-related functions, McCarley expressed a mixture of optimism and concern. “That has been our intention. It’s a community college, so all the funds came from either state money or local money, and that would be our thank you to the community, to have it available for traveling acts. But the situation now is that the state of California has severe problems with the budget, and that’s hitting us; our budget here has been drastically reduced. Until it can be proved that this could be a positive cash flow, the administration wants to be cautious about that.” 
For more information, see the Cuesta Performing Arts website at http://academic.cuesta.edu/performingarts/.
Darien Lohof plays in Depths of Chaos, and enjoys it when amazing new venues open up in the area. Send your idea for a music article to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .