I N T E R A R T S. P R O G R A M

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in January, 1999. Although some of the courses, students, and faculty members referenced in the story may have changed in the meantime, it still provides a full and accurate picture of the InterArts Program. For the most current course information and faculty listing, we encourage you to visit the program's homepage.

EXPLORING ART AND CULTIVATING A SENSE OF WONDER

Associate Professor of Theater and Dance Katharine G. Power eagerly anticipates the beginning of the fall semester of 1999. That’s when a unique multi- and interdisciplinary program at Trinity College will, for the first time, bring together first-year student-artists to study and practice their own particular art forms as they explore a rich variety of other arts. Power, who is the director of the new InterArts Program, envisions "being in a classroom of students—each with a very different artistic background, practice, and craft — who will be bouncing new and interesting ideas off each other and sharing their experiences. It will be exciting because the program will engage first-year students in an important discovery process at an early stage in their artistic and academic experiences. They will see a lot of art, make a lot of art, and talk a lot about art in an arts-rich environment."

Joining Trinity’s other first- and second-year "gateway" programs in Cities, Interdisciplinary Science, and Guided Studies: European Civilization, the InterArts Program is designed for student-artists intent on exploring arts and mastering their own particular craft while pursuing a liberal arts education. Structured similarly to the other gateway programs which give selected students an opportunity to explore key topics in depth while they pursue their general education, the InterArts Program features four common seminars (to be taken in succession), an artists’ colloquium; three arts practice courses from programs in creative writing, studio arts, music, and theater and dance; and, in the final semester, an arts practicum seminar. This broadly multidisciplinary and cohesive program, according to Professor of English Fred Pfeil, one of the teachers in the program, "will open students to the great range of human creativity at the same time as it provides opportunities for them to practice their individual craft." "We hope that the program will really break down barriers," says Power, "not only the barriers between the individual arts but also the barrier between the study and the practice of art."

Power and Pfeil believe that the students will be thrilled with the discovery of new art forms—dancers learning to write poetry, for example—and, according to Pfeil, the exposure to multiple arts could have an even more significant impact by enriching students’ practice of their chosen craft. "It’s a process," explains Pfeil, "of ‘bringing it back home,’ of learning about, studying, and practicing different kinds of creativity and then integrating what has been learned into the particular set of skills, knowledge, and practices that define one’s own artistic medium and expression."

Student inspired

The seed for the InterArts Program was actually sown by students. The students, since graduated, were not arts majors, but they were looking for ways to integrate the arts more extensively into the general curriculum. They conceived an idea for an arts-oriented program akin in structure to Guided Studies: European Civilization and spoke with Associate Academic Dean J. Ronald Spencer. Taken with their ideas, Dean Spencer then called the arts faculty together in the spring of 1997 to begin developing such a program. Working from the students’ vision, faculty, students, and administrators collaboratively designed the program to draw upon faculty members in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to teach its core courses. Perhaps not surprisingly, the program enjoys broad support from many academic disciplines.

Like the other gateway programs upon which it is modeled, the InterArts Program will work with the Admissions Office to identify within the pool of students accepted for admission to Trinity possible candidates and then invite those students to apply to the program. The program, limited to about 25 students in each entering class, is consciously designed to work equally well for students who already know the artistic path they wish to take and for those who are talented in a range of media and have not yet chosen their particular craft. For the first, the InterArts Program will connect them to other practices while they pursue their "first calling." The second group of students will have a chance to hear, as it were, a more compelling "voice" among the several they will encounter as they explore more deeply their multiple fields of creativity.

The art resources of Hartford

The program and, especially, its Artists’ Colloquium, a seminar offered during the second and third semesters of the program, will draw on the many artistic resources available on campus and from the artistic treasures of Hartford—the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Connecticut Opera, the Hartford Symphony, the Hartford Ballet, Hartford Stage, and the City’s many smaller venues for art, music, dance, film, and theater. The Colloquium will feature workshops and presentations by guest-presenters, faculty-led discussions of local art events, and field trips to off-campus venues. "We want," says Power, "to expose students to as many artists as possible." According to Associate Professor of Theater Arthur Feinsod, this exposure to artists is part of "the liberal arts’ more general challenge to cultivate a sense of wonder for the arts." Trinity is particularly well situated to offer students this exposure to artists and diverse forms of art. The College has many active ties to Hartford and its many cultural institutions, and the newly adopted strategic plan calls for strengthening and expanding those educational ties.

Studying and making art

Offering a challenging mix of courses which analyze art and courses devoted to artistic practice, the program will conclude with a final semester seminar, "The Arts Practicum," in which students will engage in their own art-making in preparation for a public presentation. The dual focus of the InterArts Programs enables the College to offer something like a "best-of-both-worlds approach" to an education in the arts. At conservatories, student-artists almost exclusively focus on a single art form; at liberal arts institutions, according to Pfeil, "most of the courses are rightly concerned with analysis and criticism, and many art courses, like those in creative writing, focus on the rhetorical aspects of art. But the InterArts program, with its focus on the analysis and, equally, on the making of art and the vast variety of choices and constraints that all artists face in making art will appreciably expand the dimensions of the art experience at the College."

Exciting times for the arts at Trinity

The launching of this new program comes at a time when the College is engaged in expanding its artistic facilities. The first phase of the Campus Master Plan (a multi-year, $95-million campus revitalization program) calls for construction of a new studio arts complex and the renovation and expansion of the Austin Arts Center. The new studio arts building will provide workspaces, studios, and multimedia labs for students to learn about and refine their practical skills in the visual arts, while the Austin Arts Center will offer new, more commodious and more congenial spaces for theatrical, dance, and musical performances. Both facilities are designed to provide exceptional showcases for student and faculty work.

Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Drew A. Hyland, who will be teaching the second semester seminar "Art and Ideas," says that in his 32 years at Trinity, the most intellectually exciting times have been when the arts are flourishing. All too often and at all too many institutions, according to Hyland, "the arts have to struggle against a common academic prejudice that they are ‘second-class citizens’ in academia." Hyland believes that the confluence of the construction of the new arts facilities and the introduction of the InterArts Program will usher in a new era in which the arts become an even more significant part of the College’s liberal arts education. Talented student-artists with a diverse range of skills and promise, according to Hyland, "will find a congenial home at Trinity because the College so clearly recognizes the intellectual strengths of creativity, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness and affirms them as important intellectual contributions."

-- Leslie Virostek