A U S T I N. A R T S. C E N T E R

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in March, 1998.  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 Austin Arts Center. For the most current  information, we encourage you to visit the center's homepage.

WHERE ART, IDEAS, AND LEARNING COME TOGETHER

The Austin Arts Center was built in 1964 as a home for Trinity's then-fledgling arts programs and a place for performances and exhibits. Thirty-four years later, the Center has evolved from being just a building to being a crossroads where art, ideas, and learning intersect; where people from all over the campus, the metropolitan community, and the world converge; where collaborative ideas and dynamic dialogue proliferate.

Austin Arts Center Director Jeffry W. Walker takes it as his mission to make the Center a vital part of Trinity College's broad goals as a liberal arts institution. "One aspect of this liberal arts approach is to embrace as many people and disciplines and sets of ideas as we can. The purpose of having an arts center -- as distinguished from simply having individual departments in dance, the performing arts and visual arts -- is to animate the connections between the arts, the broader culture and the other liberal arts disciplines."

In carefully selecting which performing artists and exhibits to present at the Center, Walker often searches for ones that can be woven into the fabric of Trinity's academic life. He may call international studies or modern languages faculty members to brainstorm about how a dance ensemble from Russia could be a vehicle for learning. Or faculty members may call him with their ideas that may result not in one isolated performance but in a series of related events or an integrated program.

Professor of Modern Languages Sonia M. Lee says that for the past eight years she has collaborated with Walker to bring French-language productions to campus. She often enriches her curriculum by requiring her students to attend the performances and to complete related reading or writing assignments. She says, "It's a wonderful opportunity. It's a way to put the arts back into the academic."

One such opportunity was with Ki-Yi M'bock, a Pan-African francophone music and dance troupe that Walker and Lee brought to the Austin Arts in October. The performance, Lee notes, had an academic tie-in not only for French students, but also for African studies students. She says that in addition to offering insights on francophone cultures beyond France, Ki-Yi M'bock's visit gave French-speaking students the opportunity to act as translators and interpreters for the members of the troupe during their stay on campus.

Student participation

Attending events at the Center is not the only way Trinity students integrate the arts into their campus life. While it is run by Walker and his professional staff -- events and operations manager James M. Latzel, office assistant Patricia Maden, and publications assistant Michele A. L'Heureux -- the arts center could not function without its staff of nearly 50 students who are employed as box office personnel, house managers, office workers, and technical production assistants.

Jeremy F. Hough '98 works about eight hours a week backstage as a technical assistant and crew chief. He helps to prepare staging and oversees the student crews who run the lights and sound equipment during performances. An engineering major, Hough likes the way his work at the Austin Arts Center integrates his interest in the performing arts with his skills as an engineer. "The work is technical," he says, "but the result is artistic."

First-year student Liisa A.R. Jackson, who has long been interested in the arts, sells tickets, takes reservations over the phone, and handles money as the arts center's assistant box office manager. "I'm learning people skills and business skills," she says. At the box office, Jackson sees the diverse groups of people who come to performances, and she believes that one of the most important benefits provided by the arts center is that it "opens Trinity up to the world beyond and gives Trinity students the opportunity to interact with the community."

The community connection

One reason that the Austin Arts Center is attracting growing audiences from the Greater Hartford area is because of the relationships it has built with community members. In sponsoring events and developing programs, Walker and many arts faculty members have collaborated with a wide range of groups in the community, from Guakia (a local Puerto Rican cultural organization) to the Connecticut Special Olympics, from area public schools to the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

"The community connection is absolutely vital, because we not only have something to give but also something to learn," says Walker. He points out that Hartford is home to a diverse range of resident arts organizations, schools, and venues for visual and performing arts, and that the Austin Arts Center has a unique responsibility to make a contribution in that larger arts context. "Hartford is on the short list of American cities in terms of the vitality of the arts scene," he says. "So, our standards are very high. We need to ask ourselves, 'What are we doing at the arts center at Trinity to add to this wonderful mix of what happens culturally in Hartford?'"

Mitzi Yates-Waterhouse, general director of the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, attests that the Austin Arts Center succeeds in generating programs that uniquely complement the offerings of the area's other arts organizations. Austin Arts Center, she says, features works that "are not simply a matter of entertainment but provide very diverse artistic experiences."

The academy, which is a program of the Capital Region Educational Council and offers arts education for high school students, has directly benefited from a relationship with Trinity. Last year the academy co-sponsored the Streb/Ringside dance troupe's weeklong residency at Trinity. During this residency academy students attended workshops and performances with Trinity students, a situation which, Yates-Waterhouse notes, cast Trinity's arts center as a special place for arts experimentation for her gifted high school performance students.

Building for the future

While the Austin Arts Center has come a long way from its beginnings, Walker makes it clear that the evolution is far from over. In terms of physical change, the Austin Arts Center is scheduled for a dramatic renovation and expansion to be completed by the year 2002. The renewed arts center will provide long-awaited instructional spaces for the departments of music and theater and dance, and also will provide more versatile, better-equipped spaces for public-minded performances and exhibitions. Walker asserts that the arts are now clearly an integral part of the College's overall strategic plan for campus redesign.

Many across the campus and in the community are now also looking forward to what will be the Austin Arts Center's most ambitious program initiative to date: Walker's proposed "CAPITAL" project designed to commence next Fall. The two-semester project defines Austin Arts as the center of a broad-based, interdisciplinary community learning program likely to involve an array of faculty and students from a variety of academic departments in the research and study of a "people's history" of the city of Hartford. Further blurring the distinctions between where the College ends and the community begins, this project is to be conducted by Trinity collaborators working closely with city-based researchers, area citizens, and Connecticut artists. "CAPITAL" will culminate with a series of original performances in the Fall of 1999; original works of professional artists commissioned by the Austin Arts Center to interpret Hartford histories through theater, dance, music, and visual art for the stage.

Such initiatives place the new Austin Arts Center at the intersection of art, ideas, and fresh approaches to collaborative liberal arts learning at Trinity. "And that," Jeffry Walker assures, "is exactly where we want to be."

-Leslie Virostek