Dance
Facilities
Dance students, faculty, and guests have access to a series of dance studios, multiple public performance spaces. and a fully equipped Pilates Training Center.
Nicholas Music Center (Dance Studios and Soma Center)
85 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Douglass campus
This 704-seat music hall serves as the largest performance space on campus. Designed by the distinguished architect Pietro Belluschi—whose roster of other projects includes Alice Tully Hall in New York City, the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore—the center was built in 1981 and underwent extensive renovations in 2018.
Nicholas Dance Studios
As the main hub for the Dance Department, this facility features three large, airy studios fully equipped with sprung wooden floors and Marley floor covers for ballet work, with live and electronic sound equipment and digital projection.
Soma Center
The mission of the Soma Center at Mason Gross is to provide quality, motion-specific training to dance majors so that they can crosstrain, learn how to ward off common dance injuries, maintain their conditioning while recovering from injuries, and heal at a faster rate when injured. The Soma Center offers members of the Mason Gross dance community opportunities to augment and enhance their technical and artistic growth through progressive attention to principles of movement integration, body-mind awareness, and neuromuscular education in a variety of movement contexts.
Students are able to access customized athletic and wellness training with the Dance Department’s certified athletic trainer; crosstrain on cardio, balance, and free-weight equipment to improve performance; and
train in Pilates under the supervision of certified instructors—with private, duet, and quartet Pilates apparatus sessions available. They may also draw upon the Soma Center as a resource while studying kinesiology, anatomy, Laban Movement Analysis, Bartenieff Fundamentals, and yoga.
The Soma Center is also the home of the Polestar Pilates Teacher Training Program, the first evidence-based comprehensive Pilates teacher training program to be offered in higher education that meets the standards of the Pilates Method Alliance.
Mortensen Hall
85 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Douglass Campus
Robert E. Mortensen Hall, a glass-enclosed, nearly 24,000-square-foot facility within the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center, serves the conservatory’s Music, Dance, and Theater Departments, providing additional rehearsal and performance spaces.
The facility features the following:
- The well-equipped, 3,120-square-foot Shindell Choral Hall with adjacent choral suite for school vocal ensembles (Shindell Choral Hall)
- The Kevin Goetz Studio for Theater and Dance
- A large (2,397 square feet) public atrium
- A technology studio for sound recording and engineering
- The Presser Foundation Practice Suite for music
- Thomas A. and Elizabeth M. Renyi Gallery
- A suite of faculty and administrative offices for the Dance Department
Recording Studio
Shindell Choral Hall
The well-equipped, 3,120-square-foot Richard H. Shindell Choral Hall is housed in Robert E. Mortensen Hall, a glass-enclosed, nearly 24,000-square-foot facility within the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center on Douglass campus. The choral hall is on the first floor of Mortensen Hall and has an adjacent choral suite for school vocal ensembles.
Mastrobuono Theater
85 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Douglass campus (behind Hickman Hall)
This 340-seat theater was built in 1991 and houses a state-of-the-art proscenium stage used for theater and dance.
Loree Dance Theater
70 Lipman Drive
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Douglass campus
Located within the Loree Gymnasium, Loree Dance Theater serves as a satellite classroom space for the Dance and Theater Departments. It features a 220-seat, fully equipped black box studio theater with a sprung dance floor.
For rental information, contact scheduling@mgsa.rutgers.edu.
New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (NBPAC)
11 Livingston Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Downtown New Brunswick
NBPAC is a landmark initiative on Livingston Avenue shaping arts and culture in the city of New Brunswick. This state-of-the-art building includes two performance spaces—the 463-seat Elizabeth Ross Johnson Theater and the 252-seat Arthur Laurents Theater—that provide expanded venues for Mason Gross student and faculty artists to showcase their work, as well as rehearsal studios and elegant space for special events.
Performing Arts Library
8 Chapel Drive
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Douglass campus
The Mabel Smith Douglass Library houses the university’s fine arts collection and features exhibition space for student and faculty work as well as for invitational exhibits.
The Blanche and Irving Laurie Music Library contains approximately 31,000 books, 46,000 scores, and 40,000 recordings, as well as an extensive spoken-word collection.
The Media Center archives more than 22,000 recordings and has playback facilities for a variety of media formats. The nearby graduate seminar room has quality playback equipment.
The Sharon A. Fordham Multimedia Lab Classroom is a joint venture between the Music Department, the Dance Department, and the Library. The lab houses 17 iMac workstations (16 for students and one for an instructor) with a wide range of hardware and software for music/video production. The Multimedia Lab Classroom is open the same hours as the Media Center and is available for public use whenever classes are not being held. Additionally, the library has created the new Fordham Commons, which houses 13 Mac Pro workstations and is available for use whenever the library building is open. It provides the same software and hardware as the computers in the lab.
Corwin Lodge
158 Nichol Avenue
Brunswick, NJ 08901
Douglass campus
A satellite space for the Dance Department just minutes from the main studio spaces, Corwin Lodge houses a sprung floor dance studio, fully-equipped SMART seminar room, and a dance-dedicated computer lab.
