Outside the Box of Traditional Arts Curriculum
May 10, 1996, 5 p.m. The sun is beginning to set behind Pikes Peak as an audience assembles for a student production of "Unwhite." The audience sits on the stone benches that ring the old Greek amphitheater behind Cossitt Hall. Act I: Here Again
Scene 1: [Bill, walking back and forth, with Kate, in synch, walking back and forth on roof. Other players frozen on pillars (statues). Musicians enter. Bill circles space to approach and watch them. Kate continues movement.]
David: The world is teaming. Anything can happen.
By MALCOLM HOWARD
qual parts modern dance, mystery and comedic improvisation, the May '96 debut of "Unwhite" is exactly the kind of cross-discipline collaboration that increasingly defines art at the end of the 20th Century.
An experimental play with each of its three acts scheduled at different times - including one at sunset, one at 9 p.m. and another at dawn - a group of students (including Bill Starr '90, Kate Gibson '97 and David Wilhelm '98) turned the Greek amphitheater behind Cossitt Hall into multi-media mystery that pushed the limits of conventional theatre.
The hard-to-categorize work was billed by its creators, The Project Theatre Company, as "an original ... uh ... experience in three acts."
"Most of us were sick of the limited uses of the theatre," says Erik Edborg '97, one of eight students involved in the production. "You know, the old 'here's the kitchen sink, here's the main character and the love interest.' We really wanted to push it ... to shape a new form of theatre."
But what made "Unwhite" even more interesting to some arts professors was that the performance piece was co-written, produced and performed by students of considerably diverse disciplines.
Not just a brainstorm among performance-bound drama majors, disciples of music, dance, drama, philosophy and creative writing came up with the script, the venue, stage effects, score and choreography.
Collision, collaboration or spontaneous combustion - whatever it is called, this type of team work is nothing new at Colorado College. But it is something that Professor Tom Lindblade, who chairs the drama department, sees more and more of among students and in the world of art.
"The students are used to this," says 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."
But as contemporary arts continue to blend and juxtapose various media, such experimentation at CC often occurs at the fringes, outside traditional curriculum.
And that's one reason why the exuberant, boyish 30-something theatre professor has embarked on an ambitious journey - along with professors in other departments - to more craftily weave inter disciplinary teaching and learning experiences into official curriculum.
Called "The Cornerstone Arts Initiative," the project is very much still in the brainstorming stages. But initial draft proposals reveal an ambitious plan designed to foster collaboration and sharing of resources among all arts departments.
While much of the plan focuses on curriculum, the initiative calls for some capital projects. "Keystone Number One," for example, calls for the creation of a high-tech, multi-media "Arts Center," designed to make collaborative performance and teaching easier and more exciting.
"I think of it as sort of an 'arts brain,'" Lindblade says of the proposed center. "Kind of like the ultimate console of the Starship Enterprise. At the front of the room there's a giant video screen and speakers, which are connected to a mainframe."
Standing at the helm, professors of music, art and drama might co-teach a class on expressionism. At the push of a button, music Professor Michael Grace might call up Berg's "Lyric Suite," while art Professor Gale Murray makes a point about Max Beckmann's etchings.
To round out the discussion, English Professor and film scholar Barry Sarchet casts upon the screen sections of the macabre, black-and-white film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
Such collaborative teaching happens now, albeit in the confines of their own departments. "And it's very clunky," Lindblade says. "The professor has to schlep the slide trays across campus, dim the room correctly, schlep over to the boom boxes and cue them all. If you're doing video, you schlep over the video machine.
"That's 1950s technology, just like our curriculum in many ways is a1950s curriculum," says Lindblade. "There's got to be a fast, central way to make this kind of teaching easy for anybody at CC to access. Today, that's easy with technology."
Performances such as "Unwhite," meanwhile, could use the Arts Center stage as a multi-media production launch pad. While fringe theatre troupes may always want to stay on the margins, staging their productions, say, on the median of Nevada Avenue or in the Honnen Hockey rink, many would likely lunge for multi-media capability.
"It would be very useful to have all the facilities in one building," agrees Starr, who played a leading role as the narrator of "Unwhite." A long-time devotee and photo-chronicler of CC theatre, Starr has seen it dozens of times: Video monitors and microphones carried over from Armstrong to dance studios in Cossitt, where the reverberate wooden floors turn recordings of the events into an acoustic soup.
At the same time, faculty as well as students such as Starr often mourn the fact that there are few video, audio or photographic records of past performances. That's partly because few theatre spaces have built-in video capability.
The Cornerstone plan would change all that. In essence, it would provide the kind of spaces and technologies often available only in professional theatres or in graduate school. Faculty supporters of the plan say it would put the college at the cutting edge of arts learning.
Among some students involved with "Unwhite," there's some concern that a high-tech arts stage would stymie the makeshift spontaneity and creativity that made their production a success. In essence, such facilities could institutionalize the experimental, argues Edborg.
"There could be this thinking that this is how experimental or multi-media theatre is done, and that would be too bad," he says.
Other students, however, sided strongly with the notion that a professionally sized performing arts stage would better prepare them for arts careers.
"We're desperate for a new stage," says Wilhelm, a music major who wrote the score for "Unwhite" and several other campus productions. "For people to learn what's happening out there in the real world, they need a new place experiment that's similar to what's out there in the real world."
May 10. 1996, 9 p.m. The audience sits on blankets while rings of burning candles and logs illuminate stage. Act II: The Funeral
(Five characters/concepts frozen on pillars. Bill and Kate walking back and forth, Kate on roof, Bill below. Musicians wait off stage. Evangelist hides on top of archway.)
Bill: So, where are the musicians?
Kate: They're not here yet.
Fundamentally, however, the Cornerstone plan is about much more than technology and buildings. It's about allocating resources and configuring curriculum in such a way that art education can catch up with the modern art world.
Since the 1950s, artists have increasingly melded aesthetic media. Artists such as Meredith Monk, Myron Krueger, Ping Chong and Robert Wilson have all mixed video audio, drama and dance - even sculpture and architecture.
While traditional theatre, from Shakespeare to Simon, has always mixed music, poesy, dance and visual arts, more and more disciplines that tended toward solitude are reaching out and touching each other.
Exhibits of oil paintings are being hung with accompanying sound tracks. Pop performance artists such as Laurie Anderson, meanwhile, rely on a steady diet of poetry, story-telling, synthesized music and video screens. Rock musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Bush, meanwhile, are issuing CD-Rom discs as well as regular compact discs. Plugged into a personal computer, the CD-Rom takes fans on a visual, musical and narrative journey.
In many cases, artists are now doing this simply because they can. Video monitors and computers are now the canvas of everyday life. Whether any specific technology - the CD-Rom or the laser disk-ultimately catches on is almost besides the point. Contemporary culture is increasingly expressing itself in ways that mix and match previously disconnected media.
"That's partly because of the MTV generation," says Lindblade. "It's much more natural for students to say, 'Oh, let's see what happens when we juxtapose a Watteau print with an R.E.M. song.' It's no longer unusual, for example, to have video screen on stage during a play."
All this may explain why drama-student Edborg found himself attracted to working with a non-traditional cast in "Unwhite" - outside the box of traditional drama curriculum.
"I'd been wary of working with people outside theatre because they don't have experience," says Edborg. "They don't know the basics - things like projection, or just being seen on stage. On the other hand, a lot of drama majors get trapped in a mindset about how theatre works. But people from the outside aren't trapped by those conventions."
Spurred in part by the campus master plan and the promise of a capital campaign, the Cornerstone Arts Initiative is billed in draft proposals as "a progressive and interdisciplinary arts program ...that will become a national model for its interdisciplinary, technological and curricular innovations."
To create that model, faculty formed their own multi-discipline working group. Comprised of professors from drama, dance, philosophy, music, art and English, the committee does not intend to "jettison the traditional parameters of our fields," according to draft reports.
But recognizing that "interdisciplinary teaching of the arts represents the future of our respective disciplines," the working group hopes to create more efficient mechanisms for collaboration.
The move is pedagogical as well as pragmatic. "Art departments are notoriously turf oriented," says Lindblade. "Because they're always competing for scarce resources. As a result, there's a 'this-is-mine, this-is-not-yours,' mentality."
The Cornerstone, Lindblade says, is the anti-thesis of the territory trap. That's because at its heart, the new initiative fundamentally rethinks the way space is used by arts departments at the college.
While certain areas would remain the primary province of one department, sharing of performance, study and exhibit space would increase under the proposal. After all, the backbone of the Cornerstone plan - the proposed Arts Center - would be shared by all.
The Arts Center, a fully equipped 300-seat, centerpiece theatre, would be available for dance, music and drama performances. Abutting the main stage, two galleries would display student and faculty art. Outside, the plan calls for a partially covered sculpture garden. It would also house three "arts technology labs," where computer and software systems would be employed for music composition, film and video editing and scoring, graphic arts - even choreography.
The central nervous system for much of this is the Colorado College Arts Archive, a CD-ROM repository of college arts productions and events. The computer brains behind the archive would also store the art history slide collection, costume slides, the BBC sound effects library and, eventually, the music library's collection.
This nervous system then would be hardwired into at least two "interdisciplinary teaching rooms, large enough to accommodate team taught classes and equipped with cable/direct TV, video capability, a CR-ROM terminus, and computer access to the internet, World Wide Web and the college network."
Erecting such a facility will clearly require considerable investment. But such a center, proponents argue, would allow arts departments to obtain a synergy and efficiency hard to attain with existing facilities.
Consider just one small facet of the 21st-Century arts: computer software. As artistic disciplines increasingly make use of computer tools, various departments are contemplating their own software and hardware needs. Individually, the departments can't afford their own wish lists.
"There's a software package that I'd love to have for the students," says composer and music Professor Ofer Ben-Amots. "But I could never dream of purchasing it. The package costs $1,500 and I could never justify that for, say, just two students. That's not a good return on investment.
"But let's say there are two students from drama, and three from dance and two students from music - all using the same program. Then it's a worthwhile investment."
The software scenario is one small example. As art departments continue to grow (more students are enrolling as art majors each year), the scenario could be reapplied to space and facilities as well.
And that's one reason why the initiative also calls for reconfiguring and renovating existing space in Cossitt, Packard and Armstrong Halls to promote interdisciplinary teaching and exhibits of student art, dance and music.
Along with its physical manifestations, the Cornerstone plan is also taking a hard look at arts curriculum. While there's no plan to abandon core requirements in art history and aesthetics, the initiative does call for greater collaborative coursework.
In addition, faculty are exploring ways to make out-of-class student collaboration and field work fit the Block Plan. At any school, there's a tension, notes Ben-Amots, between class requirements and whatever extra-curricular ambitions a student may have.
Take the case of David Wilhelm, a music major who composed music for "Unwhite," as well as CC's '96 production of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." To Ben-Amots, Wilhelm was clearly putting into practice the everyday lessons of he learned in the professor's music-theory class.
But because there was no official means of incorporating the extra-class work, it was hard to maximize both learning experiences. "This can result in a situation in which the teacher is frustrated because the student is not doing enough homework and the student is frustrated because he can't do what he wants to," says Ben-Amots.
Wilhelm agrees. "I worked [really hard] but I couldn't not get any academic credit," notes Wilhelm, who thinks such credit would make extra-curricular learning more feasible for students.
"You can learn music theory until you're blue in the face and that knowledge will always be in the back of your mind," he notes. "But for the most part, you throw that out the door [when composing for theatre]. You're doing on emotion, on sound - especially when you're dealing with the kind of experimental textures that we were doing."
Exactly how the Cornerstone Arts Initiative would handle such situations is one of many issues still being hashed out by the committee behind the proposal. But there's a strong desire, committee members say, to better balance the traditional academic rigors with the new and experimental disciplines. Whatever,the come up with, all these "musings" will have to be approved by the full faculty, committee members note.
May 11, 1996. The audience gathers the last time as the sun rises from the east. Act III: Upon Waking
Characters/concepts frozen on pillars. Musicians can be heard playing in the hallway. Bill on ground, Kate on roof, walking.
Kate: There comes a time when I can't be alone up here any longer, a time when my experiences are not sufficient, that I can no longer survive on them alone, that the conceptual becomes integral to thought.
Ultimately, proponents of the plan say the initiative will not only enrich the college experience for arts students, but also the community. Because Colorado College is set far from major artistic centers, the local arts scene doesn't have the critical mass necessary for continuous collaborations.
That's one reason many faculty fly to New York, Los Angeles or Paris to work with peers. "For myself, it's Israel," says Ben-Amots. "For Tom [Lindblade], it's California. But I often wonder why can't we do it here?"
A state-of-the-arts facility could allow for more on-campus collaboration by luring even greater performance luminaries to teach block sessions (something the drama department is already noted for), thus giving students a chance to study directly under artists actively using the new media.
It takes a considerable investment but Lindblade is quick to add that not just arts majors who would benefit. Of 1,900 students in the 1996 graduating class, roughly one-third got directly involved in some sort of theatre, dance or musical performance during their time at CC.
And consider the following: In the past five years, interest in video and film-making courses has tripled. Participation in dance and theatre workshops has doubled and the number of declared majors has steadily increased. Master classes with visiting troupes - from the Chicago Art Institute, for example - have been standing room only.