PAC Embraces Cell Use

We’ve been trained for years to turn off cellphones before a show, but a proposed performing arts center in Bellevue, Wash., has plans to change all that.

The 2,000-seat Tateuchi Center is expected to open in 2014 with a liberal attitude toward electronics.

In fact, the venue will even go so far as embracing nondisruptive cell phone use, executive director John Haynes told the New York Times, and will encourage patrons to text, tweet and update their Facebook statuses during shows.

“This is the wave of the future for the people we worry about attracting,” Haynes said. “Simply forbidding it and embarrassing people is not the way to go. So we are wiring the building in anticipation of finding ways to make it work over time.”

To that end, the Tateuchi Center will include a large antenna to improve indoor cell signals, the paper said. Artists uncomfortable with the venue’s policy will apparently be able to request no cell phones.