For David Corkill, Waco was a metropolis.
He grew up in La Grange, Texas, a town of 4,000 people roughly halfway between San Antonio and Houston. When it was time to go to college, many of his classmates went to the big cities. He chose Baylor and fell in love right away.
“I like to point out that I liked Waco before everyone else knew it was cool,” he said.
With an exciting new local venue, he’s playing a part in making sure the city gets even cooler.
Corkill is the founder and executive director of the Performing Arts Community Center (PACC), a new creative hub for the city he loves. The PACC, which opened in September 2024, features live music, theater, and dance performances, as well as classes, workshops, and events as varied as a crochet tutorial and a second chance prom. Further, members of the community can book the venue, with varied pricing depending on their event.
Corkill and his small team are putting on these diverse programs with just 6,000 square feet at 924 Austin Avenue, a beautiful brick building in the heart of downtown Waco. But it’s nothing new for Corkill: When he first arrived on campus in 2011, he brought with him a wealth of creativity. Now, his creativity benefits his fellow Bears, as well as anyone who happens to pass through Waco.
Bridging the Gap
Corkill was a talented percussion player in high school, so joining the Baylor drumline was a natural next step. He knew from his La Grange days that drumlines can be “their own little cliques,” often hanging out separate from the band. But he also knew this was a gap that could be bridged.
As a member of the Golden Waco Band Council, he made it his mission to bridge any gaps and foster more connection and collaboration across all the musicians. His efforts were clearly successful: The band invited him to serve as their videographer even after he graduated, and he produced a documentary about the student musicians honing their craft amid the backdrop of some epic Baylor football seasons.
This work of bringing artists together laid the foundation for his founding of the PACC — as did another post-college adventure.
Corkill studied secondary education at Baylor, and his colorful history as an educator includes stints at Rapoport Academy in Waco and Annapolis Christian Academy in Corpus Christi, where he served as the performing arts director.
Picture this: It’s 2020, and an arts enthusiast with boundless energy for curating community must figure out how to best support his students. That was Corkill’s dilemma.
His solution was the Youth Performing Arts Community Center in Corpus Christi. To use his words, it was “a clubhouse for creativity.”
“It was an opportunity for the students to still do things in a safe, positive, and uplifting way,” he said. “We had shows, we had musicals, and we had fun, creative contests every week and weekend.”
The students used what they could — including some rooms in a parent’s home — to create art, dances, and the recording of a Broadway-inspired album. Corkill and his fellow teachers even put on a teacher-led musical that premiered at the local movie theater.
In those months, when the world looked bleak and uncertain due to Covid, he was reminded how art can bring people together for uniquely powerful experiences.
He wanted to continue that work, wherever it took him.
“I always knew that experience was kind of a short-term one,” he says of his time at the “clubhouse” in Corpus Christi. “But I knew that the idea was unique, and the idea could work in the right setting, on a bigger scale.”
Homecoming
That “right setting” turned out to be Corkill’s old haunt, Waco — the place he thought was cool before everyone else.
He and his wife moved back to Waco after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he discovered what he calls “a new landscape of creativity.” More musicians lived in the area; more vibrant murals adorned the walls downtown. Over the last decade, the surge in tourism revenue has allowed for more citywide investment in the arts, paving the way for someone like Corkill to create a place like the PACC.
Of course, he’s not doing it alone. For instance, Alli Somes, a member of the local theater group Silent House Theatre Co., helps teach acting workshops for both children and adults. Creative locals like Somes — people who are eager to share their talents with the community — are a big reason Corkill knows the PACC will succeed. It may have been challenging to first gain traction, but he says the venue attained “major momentum” in the first couple of months of 2025. They saw a major uptick in followers on social media, and thousands of people came to workshops, classes, and shows like a sold-out run of “Grease” (courtesy of Silent House Theatre Co.) and a live, improvised performance of a “Dungeons & Dragons” campaign. Corkill thought “25 to 30” people would show up to see the latter production, but more than one hundred came.
“People were coming from Killeen, Copperas Cove, all around to see that show,” he said. “That had never really happened before, and people told us, ‘You have to do it again.’ So now we’re going to do it every two months.”
These relationships with regular visitors will be key to the PACC’s continued momentum. Other recent shows include a sketch comedy performance, a vaudeville-style show, and the “second chance” prom mentioned above: a chance for anyone to have the magical night they may have missed during their high school years. Corkill is keeping busy with other projects, too. In addition to teaching and curating, he’s also the published author of two fantasy books, a play, a compilation of original songs, and several pieces of sheet music. He’s now at work on a new book based on his thirteen years of performing arts education.
In his words, the book “puts it all in one place so that new teachers and schools looking to start a theater program can have the tools to get things going well.”
The book, Small School Theatre: How to Start, Grow, and Direct A Successful Drama Program, could be published by Routledge Publishing as soon as November 2025, and by that point, the PACC will have hosted even more shows and added to its momentum.
“We’re not exclusive; we’re inclusive,” Corkill said. “We’ve had a Christian musical on stage, then we’ve had the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ We’ve had a rock concert followed by a brass quintet. There’s really something for everybody here.”
