CRETE, Neb. - After more than a decade of development, this month Doane University broke ground on a space that will play host to an expanded and remodeled home for the school’s fine arts program. It’s an investment into the value that a fine arts education has served Doane students in the past and will continue to serve in the future once construction is completed next year. 

The sights and sounds of construction drift through the campus of Doane University less than two weeks after the school held a groundbreaking ceremony that marked the start of work on the school’s new Performing Arts Center.  

A $23 million dollar project, it will encompass the construction of new spaces for the theatre department while expanding existing facilities for the school’s other fine arts programs, which have long been essential elements of the university’s offerings. 

“Here at Doane, we’re always focused on the student experience. We want to create the best experience that we can, and that means the best faculty, the best facilities, and this is part of us having the best facilities we can have,” Doane president Roger Hughes said. “We need to provide the best student experience possible and make sure our facilities are up to par, and frankly as you look around others have gone past us. We knew this and we needed to get up and compete, so to speak, in that space.” 

“The investment that’s being made in our day-to-day spaces – our rehearsal spaces, our classroom environments – is really going to impact how a typical Doane performing arts student goes about their day, and the way they make music here at the university is going to be truly profound,” said Andy Feyes, Doane’s band director and chair of the band department. 

Expected to be completed in mid-2026, the plans include renovations of existing fine arts spaces such as Heckman Auditorium, and expansions of classrooms and rehearsal spaces for the band and choir programs.  

“We’re going to have microphones in the space where we can actively, instantaneously, record ourselves in small snippets during rehearsals and do playback right away for the students to really hear, assess and learn from what they’re doing actively on a day-to-day basis,” said Feyes. “You think about it as a musician, you’re up on stage, not in the audience’s seat when you are making that music. So just to be able to connect with what the audience is going to be receiving from us gives us an opportunity to hear differently, to listen differently, and ultimately perform differently.” 

The theatre program has lived in a different building on campus but now will be housed in the same space as the other fine arts programs, in a space which will feature a new multi-form theatre able to host different kinds of performances and events. 

“The challenges that we face in our current space basically come from the idea that it’s a space that was designed for something else and turned into a theater, but the new space, the multi-form, has been specifically planned out from the beginning as a theater space, with all the new bells and whistles, safety features, and equipment to make producing theatre and learning really a lot easier,” said Jeff Stander, the chair of Doane’s theatre department. 

This project has been in the pipeline for more than a decade, and now it’s finally coming to fruition. In fact, the long incubation period has helped the planning committee workshop a plan that’s more appealing to investors and more fulfilling for students.  Now, critically, the final proposed plan will physically bring together all the arts departments into one space. 

“Eventually we came to the conclusion that the collaboration between the departments is essential, and the PAC building, the form that it’s taking now, is kind of what we settled on in this last round, and it got more support from donors and the administration, just seeing the possibilities that these two departments can bring to our students in one building,” said Stander, who’s been integral in this planning process since the beginning. 

“When I came to campus about three and a half years ago, this project was on the books, and we had begun our fundraising plans, but it was time [now] to put the project as a priority,” said Hughes. “Our trustees had been looking for an opportunity to finish this project, and so, given this unique time, and the fact that everyone is facing these enrollment issues, facilities matter. There have been other schools in the state who have put money into buildings and they’ve seen an increase in enrollment, so certainly we feel that same thing could happen here once we get the facilities to draw the students. We already have great faculty, we have a theatre department that has won Kennedy awards, national awards, so we want to become the place where fine arts students want to come.” 

Active development always means disruptions in the daily lives of the students and employees currently on campus with walkways shut down, access points reorganized and parking lots walled off, but that’s merely a byproduct of progress as Doane works to complete this new building and rebuff its fine program, which Hughes says will help make good on a promise the school has made to prospective students for years. 

“I think the most exciting part of the whole endeavor was when I got to tell the students who have two or three years left that we were going to be building a new fine arts center, a new theater,” he said. “Of course, they had come here with the idea that we were going to, and now to actually bring this project to fruition, the smiles, the cheers, the excitement from both the students and the faculty was just so rewarding.” 

With the early stages of this renovation process officially underway, soon the sights and sounds of construction will be replaced by sounds that reflect Doane’s dedication to the reinforcement of its fine arts program.  

“It’s truly remarkable, in a day and age where nationally there’s divestment in the arts and things considered ‘extra’ activities, Doane has really stepped up to the plate and decided to invest in the students of our performing arts,” Feyes said. “The benefit of this facility really goes directly to our students. Their day-to-day life in our environment is going to be drastically changed. We see this as us building community through music here at Doane.” 

“There’s a lot of eyes that lit up, in the current department, on the recruiting trail, to see that Doane is taking this step,” said Stander. “The arts are essential at Doane, theatre is essential at Doane, and the president, the trustees, the generous donors, have all reinforced that with this project. There’s no greater time to be a theatre professor at Doane than right now.”