By Vada Arbeiter and Emma Smith-Marrone
700 Beacon Street, a meeting place and rehearsal space for student-run organizations at Boston University, is closed until further notice.
BU Spokesperson Colin Riley wrote in an email he did not know when, or if, student groups will be able to rehearse or use the space at 700 Beacon Street.
“The space is currently not available,” Riley wrote. “I understand it was used for supplies during the pandemic and other purposes during that time.”
Emma Neary, a senior in Wheelock College of Education and president of BU Stage Troupe, said Stage Troupe has held almost all auditions and rehearsals at 700 Beacon Street until this semester because it is the only place where there is no limit on the times of day they could sing or dance in the building.
“For auditions, we ended up having to go into someone’s work building because they were giving us no options that we could do singing or dancing auditions in,” Neary said. “They were telling us we can’t have any noise, so (BU) would give us CAS classrooms but then they would say we can’t use them for auditions.”
Neary said she received various answers from the Student Activities Office about why BU Stage Troupe could no longer use 700 Beacon Street.
“We’re all very confused because they kept saying we would get it back next semester and then next semester and then they just said it’s unsafe and it’s closed indefinitely,” Neary said. “Right now it’s just a weekly struggle of where we can rehearse.”
Josh Nyland, a senior in the College of Communication and vice president of BU On Broadway, said BUOB rehearses around 25 hours per week and rehearsals start before 9 p.m., something that can’t happen in an academic classroom.
“700 Beacon was kind of the hub of OB,” Nyland said. “Anything that involves performance we did there, so auditions, callbacks and then basically all of our rehearsals on the weekdays”
Nyland said BUOB, after reaching out themselves, was never informed about why they could no longer rehearse at 700 Beacon Street and are struggling to find a “permanent, consistent” rehearsal space.
“That was the only space on campus that had multiple rooms that were big enough to hold fully staged rehearsals,” Nyland said.
Nyland said one show is rehearsing in Fenway Campus while the other is in different spaces each rehearsal, including in the George Sherman Union and Morse Auditorium.
“It wasn’t a choice that we made,” Nyland said. “One of my responsibilities as vice president is booking rooms for our rehearsals, and I went to do that in August and 700 Beacon was no longer listed as one of the venues we were allowed to book.”
Zowie Rico, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and president of Wandering Minds, said the club, a student-run theater club focusing on straight plays, did not receive much help in finding new rehearsal spaces on campus.
“We kind of had to figure it out on our own, but mainly because really the only place we could rehearse was in an academic building,” Rico said. “It was up to us to reserve those rooms for the days and times that we needed them.”
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