Cornerstone Arts Initiative - Colorado College

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.

This production triggered the realization among Colorado College faculty that students’ familiarity with collaborative thinking was way ahead of the faculty and facilities at the college. “The students think in terms of collaboration, collision and conversation,” says drama professor Tom Lindblade. “They’re used to the collision of disciplines, to juxtaposing various media. It’s the faculty and the college that have to catch up with them.”

Thus was born the idea of an interdisciplinary arts building, with a foundation in state-of-the-art technology. The arts, driven by new technologies, have ceased to have the same strict boundaries as they did 25 years ago.

Colorado College has a long tradition of innovation, experimentation and excellence in the arts, as evidenced by artistic student activities and the successful creative careers of CC alumni. The process is enhanced by the college’s innovative “Block Plan,” in which students study one course at a time in intensive 3½-week blocks.

The Cornerstone Arts Center is designed to balance traditional academic rigors with new and experimental disciplines, which are often evident in the marketplace.

One example is Thaddeus Phillips, a 1994 Colorado College theater graduate who is continuing the work he began at the college. Now based in New York, he is renowned in avant-garde circles for his one-man productions which utilize art, poetry, video, dance, puppetry and music in a dizzying array of combinations. He is a tap-dance and theater tour-de-force with shows performed around the world to rave reviews.

“It’s really great that the unofficial work the students are doing can become official,” Phillips says. He believes that the proximity of the various arts to one another will suggest possibilities that would never come up in isolation. “It forces the different arts departments to naturally do things differently,” he says.

Another Colorado College collaboration that has moved from campus to the “real world” is Buntport Theater.
 
Erin Rollman, a 1998 Colorado College graduate and co-founder of Buntport, says many in the troupe were influenced by the “Unwhite” production, whether or not they were participants. “How we work probably grew out of that experience,” she says. “What we came away with was a sense of long-term collaboration. I think that spirit is what is driving the building and what the Cornerstone Arts Center is trying to encourage. The building will create spaces that want to be performed in; that want to be used.”

The Cornerstone Arts Center also will facilitate the teaching of interdisciplinary courses; approximately 72 percent of the faculty at Colorado College are involved in teaching such classes.

In fall 2005, Colorado College professors Peggy Berg, of the drama/dance department, and Dan Raffin, of the art department, collaborated on a dance reconstruction class involving dance students and video art students. The only place they could work was in an unsecure basement, so before and after each class they would set up a host of computers, video projectors and other equipment, then put everything away. The logistics of the class were so difficult that it hasn’t been offered again.

“When you have things set up, ready to go, projects can evolve,” Berg says. “We need spaces in which experimental arts can take place. A place where different people from different art forms can come together and create new work.” Berg says rarely now is new work created that is narrowly defined in any of the traditional artistic disciplines. Instead, artists are often reaching beyond the boundaries of their disciplines, to create a multi-layered event.

Increasingly, artists are blending aesthetic media. Exhibits of oil paintings are hung with accompanying soundtracks. Pop performance artists rely on a mixture of poetry, story-telling, synthesized music and video screens. Rock musicians issue CD-ROMs as well as compact discs. Applicants hoping to teach college-level music courses send artwork to accompany their music portfolios.