On a Friday afternoon on the final day of Might, Donna Faye Burchfield was sitting on her deck in Philadelphia when a newspaper notification popped up on her good friend’s cellphone: College of the Arts, the place Burchfield had been dean of the Faculty of Dance since 2010, was closing its doorways in per week—for good. Have been Burchfield and her colleagues given any warning? “In fact not,” she says with amusing, nonetheless incredulous months after the very fact. “And we had 31 college students scheduled to go away for France in lower than two weeks for the low-residency MFA program.”
Burchfield spent the remainder of the evening pacing her house, making an attempt to course of the shock. The subsequent morning, she began making cellphone calls, counting on mates and colleagues within the discipline to assist her compile a listing of contacts who would possibly be capable to assist. “I didn’t even know what I used to be going to ask for,” she remembers. “It was like being misplaced at sea. I wanted to determine the right way to get to land.”
Ultimately, Burchfield was related to Bennington Faculty president Laura Walker and provost Maurice Corridor, and described her most quick concern: that the 13 UArts low-residency MFA college students anticipated to graduate on the finish of the summer time—lots of whom had already accepted job affords predicated on incomes their levels—would find a way to take action. “I defined that,” says Burchfield, “and Laura mentioned, ‘Don’t cease there. How else can Bennington assist? What else do you want?’ ”
Simply two months later, due to Walker’s heroic fundraising efforts and the generosity of three main donors, The New York Occasions introduced that the UArts Faculty of Dance could be revived at Bennington Faculty. In September, 36 BFA college students, 20 persevering with low-residency MFA college students, and 13 school members matriculated to Bennington, buying and selling UArts’ city Philadelphia setting for Bennington’s pastoral Vermont campus.
Whereas the partnership might sound surprising, each Burchfield and Walker see it as a serendipitous continuation of Bennington’s trendy dance legacy. In 1934, a bunch of artists together with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Charles Weidman helped to launch the Bennington Faculty of Dance, a summer time pageant that acted as each a coaching program and a artistic laboratory. Within the a long time since, dance has continued to play an vital function on the faculty, with notable lecturers together with José Limón, Judith Dunn, and Steve Paxton.
“There’s a direct line from our founding dance school to what we’re doing now,” says Walker. “Bennington was the primary faculty to place the humanities on the middle of the curriculum, and that also informs all the pieces we do.” Different Philadelphia-based faculties, like Temple College and Drexel College, supplied to soak up UArts college students and school. However Burchfield understood that what made UArts’ dance program particular was extra than simply its folks. “We had been in search of a spot the place we might maintain on to the ways in which we’ve taught college students,” she says. “There was already a historical past of experimental pedagogy in place at Bennington.”
A brand new program, made up of former UArts college students and school, now exists alongside Bennington’s BA in dance. Whereas the BFA is extra geared in the direction of making ready dancers for efficiency careers and the BA is primarily targeted on choreography, interdisciplinary analysis, and demanding inquiry, college students are free to take lessons throughout each tracks. Outdoors of their BFA lessons—which can be taught by many former UArts professors (together with Shayla-Vie Jenkins and Jesse Zaritt, who will act as school advisors), largely in a rotating group who will go to Bennington to show in three- and seven-week stints—the switch college students can be totally built-in into life at Bennington, residing in campus housing and selecting their very own BA programs. UArts’ low-residency MFA college students will go to Bennington’s campus over the school’s fall and spring breaks, after which spend six weeks over the summer time in Montpellier, France, simply as they did earlier than the merger.
Whereas Walker and Burchfield hope that the UArts transplants really feel settled in Vermont this 12 months, they’re nonetheless hoping to discover a satellite tv for pc house in Philadelphia the place the BFA program can construct a house. “Philadelphia has such a wealthy cultural life,” says Walker. “I’m actually excited about having an outpost within the metropolis that each one of Bennington Faculty can use.”
Earlier than the beginning of the tutorial 12 months, Burchfield and her workforce laid down a help ground in Bennington’s pupil union, reworking it right into a studio for the BFA college students. “It was like this house was ready for the ground to be laid. All these people and all that labor, it nonetheless lives right here,” says Burchfield, referencing Bennington’s dance historical past. However it’s Burchfield and Walker’s steadfast perception in arts schooling that’s permitting that legacy to proceed to develop. As of press time, dance is the one one in every of UArts’ faculties to discover a manner ahead for a big group of scholars and school.
Walker hopes that this collaboration can function a blueprint for different packages struggling sooner or later. “As the humanities are below assault, we have to discover new fashions to make sure that packages like this, which can be extraordinary, will proceed,” she says. To that finish, Burchfield has hung a quote by Merce Cunningham dancer Viola Farber—one other member of Bennington’s storied dance school—on the door of her new workplace. It reads: “I believe one way or the other all of us who work at dancing encourage each other; whether or not now we have something particularly to do with one another or not.”
