Mondavi Center Fact Sheet
The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, now in its seventh season, is UC Davis’ world-class performing arts facility. It is the premier performance venue in Northern California and the regional destination for the best in classical music, dance, distinguished speakers, jazz, theatre, and world music.
The Mondavi Center explores the full range of the performing arts, from the traditional to the innovative, and from diverse cultures and disciplines through presentation, education, public service, and research. As part of the UC Davis mission as a land grant university, the Mondavi Center provides outstanding cultural programming, support for the university’s academic departments, and a professional laboratory to train students in the performing arts. Mondavi Center is committed to maintaining state-of-the art, world-class performance facilities and providing the highest quality experience for both artists and audiences. Our mandate is to maintain a balance between our regional responsibility, fiscal responsibility, artistic integrity, and the educational mission of the University of California.
Resident programs include the UC Davis Department of Music, the UC Davis Department of Theatre & Dance, the Mondavi Center Arts Education Program, and the Mondavi Center Presenting Program, which presents an annual season of events featuring an expansive mix of seasoned masters, emerging artists, and leading cultural figures in approximately 100 performances and lectures each year.
Building Information
Mondavi Center Presenting Program
Audience Demographics
Mondavi Center Arts Education
“Did You Know…?”: Interesting Facts About the Mondavi Center
Building Information
Profile
The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts is a 104,000-square foot facility renowned for its outstanding acoustics and attractive design. The building cost $60.9 million, with construction beginning in May 2000. The first event, a concert by the San Francisco Symphony, took place in October 2002.
Architect
The Mondavi Center was designed by BOORA Architects of Portland, Oregon, an award-winning firm that has designed nearly 60 theaters nationwide
Facilities
The Mondavi Center’s architecture and technology are state-of-the-art. Features include an orchestra shell that rises out onto the main hall’s stage on “air casters,” and acoustic curtains that allow spaces to be tuned for performances ranging from a single spoken voice to a large, amplified band. The facility includes two performance venues supported by a full complement of performance, production support space, and reception areas:
- Barbara K. and W. Turrentine Jackson Hall is a 1,800-seat performance hall.
- The Studio Theater is a versatile space for up to 250 people designed to host dance and choral performances, lectures, banquets, arts education programs, and theater productions.
Project budget
Construction
Operating endowment
Startup costs
Total |
$53.5 million
$5 million
$2.4 million
$60.9 million |
Funding
Capital Campaign
UC Regents’ loan
Campus funds
Total |
$30 million
$15.4 million
$15.5 million
$60.9 million |
Naming History
The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts is named in honor of the distinguished California winemaker and his wife, who made a $35 million gift to UC Davis. A portion of the gift, $10 million, was earmarked for the Center. The remaining $25 million will fund a new Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, scheduled to open in October 2008.
In March of 2001, Barbara K. Jackson donated $5 million to the Center. The 1,800-seat main hall was then named the Barbara K. and W. Turrentine Jackson Hall, in honor of Jackson and her late husband, a former UC Davis history professor.
The Mondavi Center Presenting Program
Profile
In addition to hosting performances and rehearsals of presentations by the UC Davis Department of Music and Department of Theatre & Dance, the Mondavi Center is also home to the Mondavi Center Presenting Program, an educational non-profit organization administrated by UC Davis to present the finest in classical music, dance, distinguished speakers, jazz, theatre, and world music. The program puts on approximately 100 events each artistic “season,” which runs from October to May, with approximately 85,000 attending.
Mission
To explore the full range of the performing arts, from the traditional to the innovative, and from diverse cultures and disciplines, through presentation, education, public service, and research.
2007-08 Season Events Summary
Presenting Program:
Academic Departments: |
66 productions,114 performances
Music: 19 performances, 94 rehearsals
Theatre & Dance: 10 performances, 35 rehearsals |
Budget
The Mondavi Center employs a staff of approximately 47 full- and part-time workers and operates on an annual budget of approximately $7.274 million. The largest single source of income is ticket sales. Budget sources include:
Ticket revenue:
Rentals and other earned income:
Endowments:
Gifts:
Grants:
Other:
|
41 percent
17 percent
22 percent
12 percent
0.5 percent
7.5 percent |
Audience Demographics
The Mondavi Center hosts more than 100 performances each year, with 85,000-100,000 attending. The majority—about 85 percent—come from either the Davis area or Sacramento and its suburbs. Patrons tend to be highly educated, with approximately 70 percent holding a college degree, and the predominant age group is 38-55 years old. Students make up a healthy portion of the Mondavi Center audience, with student-priced tickets accounting for 13.4 percent of all ticket sales in 2007-08.
Mondavi Center Arts Education
The Mondavi Center Arts Education Program is committed to enriching the lives of children and adults through a broad range of arts-related learning opportunities. The program strives to make the arts as informative, accessible, and enjoyable as possible for the audiences in the capital region, reaching more than 35,000 children and adults each year. In 2005-06, Arts Education activities included:
- 16 Pre-performance lectures with 14,00 attending
- 10 Post-performance Q&A’s, with 985 attending
- 19 School Matinee performances, with 21,854 attending
- 62 Pre-Matinee classroom talks in which more than 1,800 students participated
- Classroom visits by artists as part of our Artists on Tour program, in which 940 students participated
The Mondavi Center: “Did you know….?”
Facts About the Facility and Program
- Jackson Hall seats a maximum of 1801, including:
- 1106 in the Orchestra level
- 344 in the Grand Tier
- 354 in the Upper Tier
- The Studio Theatre seats about 250.
- Over the course of its first five seasons, the Mondavi Center presenting program has hosted 466 performances, with more than 500,000 attending.
- Groundbreaking for the Mondavi Center took place in May 2000.
- The first performance took place in October 2002 with a concert by the San Francisco Symphony
- Construction cost $53.5 million, which included funding from a $30 million capital campaign, a $15.4 million loan from the UC Regents, and $15.5 million in campus funds.
- The Mondavi Center is named for Robert and Margrit Mondavi, the distinguished winemaker and UC Davis alumnus and his wife, who gave $10 million for its construction.
- The distance from the forestage to the back of Jackson Hall is only 108 feet, with the farthest seat located only 104 feet from the stage
- Jackson Hall was built in a shoebox shape to mimic the acoustic of classic concert halls in Vienna, Boston, and Amsterdam, using Indian sandstone and reclaimed Douglas fir.
- The Douglas fir used in constructing Jackson Hall came from trees that were logged in the 1800s and had sunk to the bottom of Canada’s Ruby Lake and extracted by a company specializing in timber reclamation. Some of the wood is 400-500 years old.
- Jackson Hall can be “tuned” for different types of performances by adjusting the ceiling curtains—each of which weighs 2,200 pounds—in order to increase or decrease hall resonance. The ceiling curtains are suspended 73 feet above the floor and can be raised or lowered through slots in the ceiling.
- There are also acoustic curtains situated behind the wooden grillage ringing the top of the hall. They range from 12 to 22 feet in length, and may also be moved to “tune” hall resonance.
- Jackson Hall is essentially a “building within a building,” insulated from exterior noise and vibration by a double wall with two feet of insulated air space between layers. A basement space four to six feet in height lies below the orchestra level floor.
- The stage is 120 feet wide and 50 feet deep, with 80 feet of working grid height overhead.
- The Music Shell or Orchestra Enclosure is stored at the back of the stage and move forward for unamplified music performances so that sound is not lost backstage. The shell, which is built in a single structure weighing 25 tons, is moved forward on air casters.
