A Metamorphosis in the Arts Makes Itself Quietly Felt; A Year of Changes, Big and Small
Change is the word of the moment at Harvard. Well, actually, many changes (in case you have not been keeping up!). A new President, new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a new undergraduate curriculum, and soon a new college calendar, to name a few examples.
But a different kind of change is happening at Harvard, too. The kind that announces itself by the force of its own momentum.
This change is felt at 10-12 Holyoke Street, where a $33 million state-of-the art complex called the New College Theatre will open its first season in October. This change reveals itself in the first-ever Artist Development Fellowships at Harvard, awarded earlier this year, which foster the creative talents of student artists from film makers and studio artists to composers and dancers and writers—and even a book binder.
This subtle shift ripples into student dance, which offers an extraordinary breadth of instructional and performance opportunities in a first-rate new dance center, the like of which no one would have imagined a few years ago. And in student theater, engagement with professional stage directors is increasingly the norm, driven in large part by the American Repertory Theatre, but also by resident professional directors this fall from the Súgán Company and the Actors Shakespeare Project.
The border between making and studying art has become increasingly permeable. One need only look at the new, joint, five-year program with the New England Conservatory or the establishment of a secondary concentration in drama to see that art-making is viewed more and more at Harvard as a legitimate area of intellectual, scholarly and creative inquiry.
The Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) is alive with exhibitions and presentations on far-ranging topics, fostering dialogue among artists, critics and theorists. The Ceramics Program offers a steady flow of scholarly and practice-based symposia. The Music Department now counts among its ranks traditional western-based theorists, composers and historians, as well as ethnomusicologists, jazz musicians (including the Chair of the Department!), and an electro-acoustic composer.
Now, with the arrival of Harvard’s 28th president, Drew Gilpin Faust, comes the opportunity to ask what the “arts at Harvard” will look like 50 years from now, and what vision will guide us to that realization. As President Faust remarked on the occasion of her appointment, "We need to break down barriers that inhibit collaboration among schools or among disciplines, barriers that divide the sciences and the humanities into what C.P. Snow once famously called two cultures, barriers that separate the practice of the arts from the interpretation of the arts, barriers that lead us to identify ourselves as from one or the other 'side of the river.'"
As exciting as recent years have been for Harvard arts, the most extraordinary is yet to come.
Jack Megan
Director
Office for the Arts at Harvard
