Jefferson Performing Arts Center

Dennis G. Assaf founded the Jefferson Performing Arts Society in 1978, and the organization now operates one of the largest professional arts centers in the region. The Jefferson Performing Arts Center in Metairie seats 1,041 and cost $54.5 million to build. The interior was acoustically designed to handle grand opera, musical theater, symphony, ballet, and choral concerts. A 51-foot proscenium arch frames the stage, which has a mechanical orchestra lift and a theatrical fly rigging system. Four star dressing rooms and six ensemble dressing rooms occupy the backstage area. The theater is named after former Louisiana State Senator Ken Hollis, who helped secure funding for the project. The society produces opera, symphony, musical theater, ballet, and plays at the Metairie venue and also operates Teatro Wego! in Westwego. Arts education programs run in Jefferson Parish schools. New Orleans was the largest city in the South at the start of the Civil War and the largest port in the Southern United States throughout the nineteenth century, exporting most of the nation's cotton and other farm products to Western Europe and New England. The Jefferson Performing Arts Society now anchors professional performing arts in Jefferson Parish, offering a venue built to the technical standards required for full-scale opera and symphony work — the mechanical orchestra lift alone signals what repertoire the stage was designed to accommodate.