On November 13, about fifty exhausted Conn students will pile into buses at 4:30 in the morning en route to New York City. After a few hours of attempted napping and/or excessive coffee consumption, they will first attend trapeze school (not your everyday field trip). They, along with their professors, will have the opportunity to experience what it feels like to fly (and hopefully not fall).
Now, you may be thinking, “Is this a joke?” or “Why can’t I go to trapeze school?” Only four classes at Conn have been given the opportunity to take part in this unique experience thanks to a grant by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.
The grant allows faculty and students to join forces in a cross-disciplinary program involving the arts and the humanities. Both the professors and the students are given an opportunity to see how people in other areas think and create art, something that they may not have had the chance to do otherwise.
Why are these 50 students from different classes across different curriculums going to trapeze school? Professor Adele Myers in the dance department says: “[Creativity] is like swinging on a trapeze. You let go, and you’re suspended in air. There’s a point when you can’t tell if you’re falling or flying. You’re not sure of what’s going to happen next, so you stop and appreciate what’s going on around you. That’s the point of creativity.”
Providing resources in a number of areas, the grant allows workshops for faculty enrichment, where the professors learn new skills from each other, and it offers funds for equipment, guest artists and trips, which allow students and professors to gather around one event.
The idea of trapeze school arose from a joke during one of the faculty meetings. One of the professors suggested skydiving as a group trip, which led to the idea of going to trapeze school (same concept, less chance of injury).
Following this exhilarating, albeit semi-nerve-racking, experience, students will have the opportunity to go to MoMA, as well as the Margaret Meade Film Festival, which is being held in the American Museum of Natural History.
“This trip will allow us and the students to have a shared experience and will further define what it means to collaborate. For some, this is a once in a lifetime thing to do,” said Professor Ariana Hamidi, whose Documentary Theory and Production class is one of the four participating classes. “My students have talked to the dancers [in Professor Adele Myers’ class] about fears of flying, so this experience with trapeze will allow the filmmakers to feel empathy for the dancers,” she added.
Before this grant, a different, less sustainable program funded by the same foundation was executed. Four years ago, Conn was chosen as one of two schools to receive a three-year grant, which proposed team-taught courses. Professors would teach classes together, usually created by combining two different areas of study, such as a theater and dance class.
“The foundation created a very successful program, but it was hard to sustain the courses because team-teaching is a very expensive,” said Rob Richter, Director of Arts Programming at Conn.
When this grant was up, Conn reapplied for the next round, which would consist of partner courses rather than team-taught classes in which faculty would work together in independent, already existing classes. This is the program that is currently in place.
In addition to Hamidi’s Documentary Theory and Production course and Schroeder’s Freshman Seminar on Genius, Creativity & the Brain – two other classes are participating in the program this semester: Professor Blanche Boyd’s Narrative Nonfiction class and Professor Adele Myers’ Dance Performance.
Next semester, three more teachers will join the collaboration: Art Professor Ted Hendrickson with a studio art/photography class, Music Professor Dale Wilson with a class in ethnomusicology and English Professor Courtney Baker with a film studies class.
Each year, there will be a theme around which the classes will study and focus. Chosen with the idea of particular guest artists in mind, this year’s theme is documentary and creative investigation – and the abstract idea of falling and flying.
“When I heard that the theme this year was going to be documentary – being a nonfiction filmmaker, my interest was immediately sparked,” said Hamidi. Another aspect that interested her was collaborating with faculty “because you do things you wouldn’t do by yourself.”
The grant allows professors in different disciplines to learn from each other. Boyd said, “We (I, Myers and Hamidi) live in a world of metaphors and movement. Joe [Schroeder] lives in a world of facts. We get to get excited about each others’ work.”
Each class works with its own syllabus but unites for these trips and presentations. Schroeder’s discussion-based class has recently been focusing on the idea of nature versus nurture and how either or both influence creativity or genius.
“The original idea of the seminar is to examine the scientific aspect of the arts. We’re interested in learning what the cognitive process involved in the creative process is and whether creative-minded people’s brains differ from scientists’ brains,” said Schroeder.
Pat Russo ’14 said, “[The seminar] sounded really interesting. I’m kind of into the sciences more as a hobby. After I signed up, I heard a lot of people wanted to be in the class.”
On separate projects, Hamidi and Boyd’s classes have collaborated with Myers’ dance class and have practiced interviewing skills.
“It was interesting getting the opportunity to interview the dance students about the concept of falling and flying and seeing what their reactions were. Throughout this whole collaboration, the students naturally don’t know everything about the teachers’ agenda, so it’s fun to kind of watch everything unfold and see how things turn out,” said Matthew Gentile ’12, one of the film students in Hamidi’s class. The classes have come together for several presentations over the past two months. “We have resources to bring guests who we wouldn’t normally have, which allows an opportunity to deepen exploration [of a subject],” said Myers.
Writer, director, and actor Ain Gordon was the first guest to visit Conn as a part of the grant on September 21, working with the dancers and talking about interviewing techniques.
“I thought he was very interesting. Both his parents are creative people. We talked about the creative process and whether things just come to him or if he works at it through daily writing,” Russo said.
Another esteemed guest visited the campus on October 12. Yvonne Rainer, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, took the time to spend a whole day at Conn, working with some of Myers’ dance classes, holding a discussion for members of the four classes in the collaboration and showing a screening of her film Lives of Performers at Olin.
“[Yvonne Rainer] is an absolute legend in theatrical dance,” said Myers, who teaches dance history and Rainer’s famous piece Trio A. Conn’s dance program developed from the philosophies and work of post-modern dancers, such as Rainer. “It’s mind-blowing to bring in the actual source [responsible for the program]. It was an extremely rich experience for the students.”
“Rainer was my choice. She was a huge influence on me as an undergrad film student,” said Hamidi. “It was especially interesting to see her more in a dance context. There was definitely a mixed reaction from the students, but I believe college is about challenging yourself and stretching your mind out of context, so I think it was good for them,” she added.
After a faculty visit last spring to see the Civilians, an investigative theater company from New York, the committee settled upon the theme of documentary with the hopes of bringing the theater troupe to Conn, which was accomplished on October 22. Seven members of the group, accompanied by Michael Friedman on piano, performed a reading of their play The Great Immensity, which focused around the controversial topic of global warming.
Schroeder’s class had the opportunity to interview Friedman. The students asked questions to try and figure out “how these creative people go about their craft and how they define creativity.”
Russo enjoyed the interview with Friedman. “He was really great. Personally, I could relate to him more because he writes comedy music, which is more relatable to me than modern dance.”
From Schroeder’s perspective as a psychology professor, the events and guest artists that have graced the campus are a “good opportunity to put to use what [the students have] talked about in class.”
On the down side, being the only scientist in a group of artists means bringing his class to observe only artists (Gordon, Rainer, The Civilians), which is helpful to the class, but it also leaves out a scientific perspective, which is vital to his course. To remedy this, Professor Bevil Conway from Wellesley College, a dual neuroscientist and artist who studies the visual system, will be visiting Conn on November 22. His trip is outside of the collaboration of the grant, but it is relevant to the seminar and will be open to any member of the collaboration. Anyone is welcome to attend his discussion “Understanding color through art and neuroscience” from 4:30-5:30 in Silfen Auditorium (Bill 106).
Has the collaboration yielded any more insight into the creative process since its start two months ago? Maybe, but I’ve discovered that both students and professors have different ideas as to how creativity blossoms.
Said Geoff Phaneuf ’14, a student in Schroeder’s class, “I think the best measurement to determine creativity, or a creative person, is by the creative products that person produces … As we find, creativity is a hard process to study scientifically. We can determine if something is creative, but not know exactly why.”
“The first time I was really excited about literature, I didn’t want to explain it. I wanted to create it for other people,” Boyd explained. “People who are highly accomplished in a field are just regular people who have incredible insight.”
“The activities, especially interviews, have yielded some insights into those creative minds, but sometimes those people are so nice that they are too modest to call themselves creative. Or sometimes their creative processes are too subconscious to verbalize,” Phaneuf added.
The journey to define creativity continues. Whether or not questions are answered is up in the air, but one thing is for sure: everyone has been learning a great deal from the collaborative effort — both students and professors.
“We’re kind of stumbling through it, but that’s fine. The point of the program is to wake everyone up creatively,” Boyd said. “It gets people to think outside the box.”
The other professors agreed that everyone working in the program was mostly “rolling with the punches,” as Myers put it. “We’re just using our imaginations and seeing where it leads us. When you just roll with it, something sparks. We have no idea of the outcome, but the process is fascinating.”
