The Goel Center for Theater and Dance - Phillips Exeter Academy

Elevating the arts at Exeter

Serving a broad range of students, The Goel Center for Theater and Dance helps to deepen and diversify our students’ experience with performance, design and technical operations.

Space that performs

The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance displays our commitment to elevate the performing arts and place them with other disciplines at the heart of the Exeter experience. More than a quarter of Exeter’s student body participates in theatrical productions each term, and over 150 students take dance lessons or participate in the 16 student-run dance clubs.

With two theater stages and two dance venues (plus technical studios and classrooms), the center deepens and diversifies our students’ experience with performance, design and technical operations. It gives faculty their first teaching spaces designed to the specifications of a modern theater and dance program.

Room to learn and create

This 63,130-square-foot facility serves a broad range of students — from generalist to expert performer — with an array of performing, teaching, rehearsal, technical and public spaces. The mainstage theater is a modified proscenium venue with 350 seats and an orchestra pit to serve drama, musical theater and dance. The Actors’ Lab, with seating for 149 on three sides, serves student productions as well as faculty-directed pieces. Dramat, Exeter’s student-run theater organization, has its own space in the new center. This provides serious theater students with a dedicated location in which to experiment and rehearse.

The dance performance studio, with 119 seats, serves not only as a classroom but also as Exeter’s first performance space designed specifically to dancers’ needs. It offers appropriate sight lines and a sprung floor. A second dance studio is used primarily for classes and rehearsals, as well as small workshop performance.

The center provides theater and dance teachers with their first Harkness teaching spaces, where students can move seamlessly from table discussion to performance exercise. It also includes a scene shop, costume studio, technical galleries and state-of-the-art equipment.

Stories from the Stage

A space that performs: Form and function of The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance.

It feels really great to feel like my school supports something that is so important to me.
Sarah Liberatore ‘19

“Dancing feels like the easiest way to express myself.” – Instructor in Theater and Dance Allison Duke.

More than 150 students participate in dance classes or dance clubs at Exeter each year. Explore our theater & dance department.

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