After sitting vacant for 15 years, Dallas’ historic Forest Theater is undergoing a major renovation.
The venue that once featured notable acts like Tina Turner and B.B. King and will be transformed into a community and education hub.The venue that once featured notable acts like Tina Turner, B.B. King and Dallas’ own Erykah Badu will be transformed into a community and education hub, complete with mixed-income housing nearby.The nonprofit Forest Forward, which acquired the theater in 2017, broke ground Thursday on the more than $75 million expansion.
They will have a seated concert hall and a “black box” studio that also converts to a “white box” studio, giving them the opportunity for CGI projection mapping.“We really want to bring those technologies to our students’ hands,” Wattley said, “to share their talents in a number of varieties of ways.”The expansion involved several zoning requirements. The highway the theater sits on will be transformed into a boulevard with traffic lights and a 35-mph speed limit to increase walkability.
“The thing that we’re trying to hit is as this neighborhood grows, how can families grow in this neighborhood without having to move away?” he said. “We’re going to be able to offer a diversity in housing that will allow families to call this neighborhood home not just for now but for life.” Wattley says the theater’s expansion will preserve the character and history of the South Dallas community, whose input on the project was taken into consideration.
The theater is not a new concept: Spaces like the South Dallas Cultural Center offer free access to a wide variety of visual and performing arts programming. Forest Forward made a commitment to provide complementary access that is not competitive.“It indicates and implies that there’s an oversaturation of arts in south Dallas, and there’s really no such thing as that,” Wattley said.
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