Creating the Future of Dance
¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø College President Laura Walker and the Director of the BFA & Low-Residency MFA in Dance Donna Faye Burchfield joined City Cast Philly to discuss how ¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø saved the storied UArts dance program.
City Cast Host Trenae Nuri: Laura, you're the president of ¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø, which for our listeners who don't know, is a small college in beautiful Vermont. You have fewer than a thousand students, and yet you have a renowned dance program. What's the background of dance at ¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø?
President Laura Walker: ¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø was founded in 1932, and one of its incredible contributions to society is that it was the very first liberal arts school to put the arts in the curriculum.
And dance, from the very beginning, was a centerpiece of the arts program here at ¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø. Martha Graham was here. Martha Hill was here. It was a kind of place that was burgeoning with creativity and kind of defined the future of American dance. And one of the things we loved about looking at the University of the Arts program is that we share a heritage–a heritage of putting dance as an important central art form here in the United States, that is a living, breathing art form that students love to study.
At ¿ÐýÃŹÙÍø, the future of dance was created.