Any Conservatory student perusing the Arts sectionof The New York Times will discover, side by side, revivals of ancient Greek and other European classics, classics in the American idiom, and works drawn from global culture ¾ theater, music, and dance from far-flung traditions and alternative worldviews. He or she will also find juxtaposed and sometimes fused with this varied repertoire, postmodern works of theater, dance, and music that juggle widely divergent traditions to cast a questioning eye not only on art, but on contemporary culture itself.
Just as our students expect to develop skills and techniques that will allow them to successfully leap into this world of performance, they should also expect to develop the corresponding intellectual and conceptual skills to grasp the underlying historical, philosophical, and cultural ideas and motivations that inspire and shape these works.
The Conservatory’s Liberal Arts program systematically builds a set of compass points and conceptual maps that allow students to orient themselves to the three general areas mentioned above: our freshman year fuses work in reading, writing, and critical thinking skills with an American Studies curriculum that explores the underlying elements that create the uniqueness of an American voice or American idiom; the sophomore year explores the creative and conflicting forces that produced the complex tensions and ambiguities of the western classic texts that continually prove their relevance to contemporary culture; the junior program explores the crucial movements and forces of modernism and post-modernism, colonialism and post-colonialism, which shape so much of the work considered most innovative and cutting-edge in the performing arts today.
The goal of the Liberal Arts program at The Conservatory is the education of the literate artist: one who has verbal and compositional skills to communicate experience not only through performance, but also through oral and written discourse. The Liberal Arts and Performing Arts have natural points of convergence that our program strongly exploits. Performers are storytellers who play a crucial role in reenacting and revivifying the primal narratives of a culture. To effectively fulfill such a role, performers need a thoroughgoing knowledge of the central “stories” of their own culture, as well as the ever more interconnected global culture. Performers need to be fluent not only in the classics of American and western literature, but also in the central cruxes and tensions of our historical, religious, and philosophical traditions. Our courses focus on a multi-disciplinary “cultural history” that draws from history, literature, and philosophy. Obviously, not all cultural “stories’ or “myths” are useful or socially productive, and artists have been in the forefront of confronting many of false myths of race and class and gender. Thus, an added dimension of the performer’s role as storyteller must include the role of critical thinker and interpreter of culture. Our Liberal Arts program is built to teach performers to balance intellect with imagination, creativity with critical thinking.
The nuts and bolts of this work include methods of research, sophisticated analytic reading skills, and methods of debate and argumentation. In each phase of the curriculum, writing is taught as a mode for organizing and testing thought, as well as credibly advocating each student’s own unique ideas and beliefs.
The Liberal Arts tradition in the west has strong links to the evolution of the performing arts through the concept of dialogue. The interplay of ideas in Socratic dialogue and in Greek theater are two manifestations of the same intellectual and political impulse. Likewise, Stephen Greenblatt’s imaginative biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World shows how the educational tradition of dialogue inspired the fiery energies of Elizabethan drama. Our Liberal Arts classes depend on dialogue and debate to tap students’ performance skills and draw them into an engaged and embodied experience of some of the most relevant intellectual struggles in western culture: the forging of an American identity from difference and diversity, the struggle between human impulses of aggression and altruism, the conflict between the utopian impulse and the countervailing belief in tradition and the intransigence of the human condition. Through debates on the works of brilliant and controversial artists who worked at the cusp of cultural paradigm shifts, students experience history, literature, visual art, and philosophy as contentious and open areas for making meaning and redefining values. From in depth discussion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in the first year, to discussions of the meaning of “eros” in Plato’s Symposium or the Buddhist nature of samsara in Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to Deep North, the fate of humanity in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and the nature of revolutionary struggle in Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade in the second year, to questions of colonialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the third, students will be given tools to enter a public discourse that connects directly with the political and social concerns of our contemporary world.
Liberal Arts education immerses students in other historical moments, other cultural worlds, and stimulates them to reflect upon their own lives and cultures. This intellectual experience gives an awareness of the complexity and multiplicity of human possibilities of choice, belief and action. Such study highlights human invention in the face of the conflicts and crises of individual and historical struggles. It empowers students to see their lives as a unified whole and to make informed and reasoned choices concerning goals and responsibilities.
