More than 80 percent of students engage in the arts at some point during their four years here, and we invite students from all majors to enroll in fine arts courses - drama, dance, music, and art.
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Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center: The Background
Thaddeus Phillips '94, acclaimed theater innovator At 5 p.m. on May 10, 1996, a group of students and faculty assembled on the stone benches in an old amphitheater behind Cossitt Hall at Colorado College. As the sun began to set behind Pikes Peak, the first act of an experimental student production got under way.
The production was “Unwhite,” a cross-discipline collaboration that mixed modern dance, mystery and comedic improvisation. The show was comprised of three acts scheduled at different times – one at sunset, another late at night, the third at dawn. Word of the student production spread across campus, and by daybreak a capacity crowd had flocked to the amphitheater.
The show’s creators were not a cabal of drama majors: rather, they encompassed music, dance, philosophy, drama and creative writing. The group created the script, venue, stage effects, score and choreography, and wrote, produced and performed the show.
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An "Arts Factory"
A rendering of the new Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center Colorado College’s new Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center represents an innovative concept in the teaching of the arts. The building is designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and to provide the latest in technology.
“The building will offer an atmosphere in which the unpredictable might predictably happen,” says philosophy professor Jonathan Lee, a member of the campus building committee. “This will be a place that shakes up student and faculty expectations about the relationship between teaching and creative work in the arts.”
“It’s a new generation in teaching. It’s an arts factory,” says Tom Lindblade, professor and chair of the Colorado College drama/dance department.
Donna Arnink, a drama and design professor who as chair of the campus building committee has been called “the keeper of the vision,” says the multi-purpose building was designed to be a production space as much as a teaching space. “More than any other facility, this building unifies all the disciplines. It will provide an innovative teaching map for CC; an innovative teaching map that will define our future,” says Arnink.
10 Questions with Professor Lian Sifuentes
When I first meet Lian Sifuentes, the new drama department professor, I almost mistake her for a student. She arrives to the interview directly from a costume fitting for Block 2’s production of “Romeo and Juliet,” in which she plays Romeo’s best friend, Mercutio, explaining: “Since this is a modern take on the play, I’m playing Mercutio as female. Playing the role as female is interesting because it allows you to really look at different relationships, particularly Mercutio’s relationships with Romeo and Tybalt.”
Lian Sifuentes & her dog Sifuentes grew up in a western Massachusetts environment she describes as a “haunted house, Emily Dickinson, dark gray aesthetic.” She initially became interested in theater because she enjoyed “inhabiting another persona” and gaining novel perspectives through the roles she played. She attended the University of Massachusetts and majored in theater, but found herself striving for more. “Although I really enjoyed theatre, I felt limited by always being directed by someone else and telling someone else’s story,” she says.
She received two masters degrees at NYU: one in performance theory and the other in interactive telecommunications. At NYU, Sifuentes began to see technology as a metaphor for performance. She tells me, “I started to become interested in technology in performance, which was something I never expected. I found that I wanted to see not what technology is in performance, but how technology effects the way we make connections between things, or how our minds think in networks and not straight lines.” She continued working on performance projects in New York and even taught an experimental theory class for Trinity College’s drama and dance program in the city.
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"Creativity comes from a broadened mind, and we suggest that a more educated and enlightened student makes a better artist. We believe that creativity is a noble enterprise."
-- Drama and Dance department mission statement
CC hosts an annual Summer Festival of the Arts, including theatre performances, readings, concerts, film screenings, fine art exhibits, and a variety of other events.