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In 1962 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Hopi Indian artist Charles Loloma brought Lloyd Henri New to Cosanti to discuss New’s plans for an American Institute of Indian Arts theater with Paolo Soleri. [1]

FOUR IMAGINATIONS converged to create the outdoor theater bowl.  Three intersected in 1962 in Scottsdale, Arizona when Loloma brought Lloyd Kiva New to Cosanti to discuss design for an IAIA theater with architect Paolo Soleri.  New was running the Kiva Craft Center,  designing textiles and teaching.  Loloma, whose skill in his high school years Rene d’Harnoncourt, Director of the Museum of Modern Art and Indian Crafts Board member, had already recognized, lived and worked at the Craft Center.[2]  Soleri, who had apprenticed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in 1947-1948 during which time his his bridge designs drew attention, had built four of his Cosanti Foundation earthformed cast concrete buildings on Doubletree Ranch Road by 1962.[3]   Taliesin’s magnetism for artists and designers was palpable;   Loloma had already visited with New  and met Frank Lloyd Wright around 1938 after moving from Hopi to attend the Phoenix Indian School where Lloyd New was teaching.[4]   In the early sixties,  Soleri’s silt-cast bells on exhibit  at the Craft Center had caught the eye of Loloma who was casting silver jewelry in tufa stone molds.[5]

Building a new theater was an ambitious project for a nascent institution.  George Boyce of the Bureau of Indian Affairs provided $10,000.00 to set up an IAIA theater in the unused Indian School chapel at the Cerrillos Road campus.[6]  But obviously, a makeshift and possibly iconographically loaded site didn’t satisfy Lloyd New’s vision which encompassed both a theory of Native drama and its venue.

By the mid-sixties the IAIA was developing both the concept of Native American contemporary drama and the theater to go with it.   New’s Credo for American Indian Theater provided the broad statement of the IAIA framework within which drama instructor Rolland Meinholtz,  dance instructor Rosalie Jones[7] and others developed tenets of Native performance which could derive from ritual but remain secular.

“We believe that young Indian people must be trained in the fullest degree regarding all aspects of theatre;  the history of universal forms, the technical aspects, acting, speech and movement.  Against this understanding they must then be led to examine Indian culture for that which is theatrical, and then find wasys to interpret those unique aspects for contemporary audiences in true theatre settings.”

     from CREDO for AMERICAN INDIAN THEATRE  by Lloyd H. New. Santa Fe, NM.        July, 1969.

New further outlined characteristics of a theater building:

 “…if INDIAN THEATRE is to happen, the emphasis must be upon that which is culturally unique to the American Indian, in terms of performance, actor-audience relationship, and a uniquely conceived architectural setting…  … It must be a highly functional, theatrical machine, designed to encompass the unique needs of Indian Theatre.”

      from “PHYSICAL SETTING”.  Notes on Indian Theatre Page Fifteen.  Lloyd Kiva New, Director.  Institute  of American Indian Arts.

IAIA theater instructor Rolland Meinholtz as the fourth imagination developed precepts of a theater for contemporary Native drama[8] which, as IAIA point man, he communicated directly to the architect, Soleri.  Together with New, Meinholtz travelled and researched the ceremonial settings for various Native groups; plains tribes, southwest pueblos and northwest tribes.  Loloma took them to Hopi to observe a bean dance.  They visited the restored kiva at Aztec Ruins, New Mexico and observed a full deer dance at San Ildefonso Pueblo north of Santa Fe as well as the Taos San Geronimo harvest festival.[9]

From these sources Meinholtz synthesized  program points for the theater for Indigenous drama.[10]

The audience should be crowded together (on the theater’s bench seating) This is to promote a chemistry of audience response… the total effect should not be of an immense space but of a moderate non-claustrophobic confinement.  The audience should feel that that they have been somewhat crowded into a large lodge or partially underground chamber.

The steep bowl seating compresses the physical and psychological distance between audience and performer. Audiences and performers alike note the intimacy fostered by the relation of thrust stage and wrap-around seating. The stage’s enveloping shell with its acoustic faceting and pebbly lower band evoke geologic forms.

The theatre should be designed in such a way that theatrical action is not necessarily localized to the stage area.  Action in the aisles, at the sides, in the midst of and behind the audience should seem feasible…

Two ‘vomitoria’, tunnel from under the seating from which players may emerge onstage at the audience’s feet. One tunnel opens at a fire pit.  It is probable that this arrangement derived from the underground kiva entrances observed at Aztec.  Stage left a long canyon connecting to the earthwork beyond slopes down to the stage providing  an entrance for actors and animals.  The hill is part of  the performance space for actors, animals and wagons, even canisters for launching fusillades of arrows.  A hoodoolike fire tower rises stage right.

The arrangement of spectator and performer should make it plain that the theatre is a three dimensional art.

The theater’s three dimensionality is unique among American designs. The upward path of the subterranean vomitoria translate to hollow columns rising from the stage to support a horned scoop which breaks the curve of the shell to provide an upper performance platform. Two stairways flank the columns and penetrate the shell through irregular openings. Vertical movement can imply transformation in Native stories. The upper stage includes the panoramic bridge running the edge of the shell. The lack of proscenium prompts audiences to perceive the drama as a field of action rather than as formal presentation of a picture in a box.