Creating the Future of Dance
Bennington 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 Bennington saved the storied UArts dance program.
City Cast Host Trenae Nuri: Laura, you're the president of Bennington, 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 Bennington?
President Laura Walker: Bennington 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 Bennington. 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 Bennington, the future of dance was created.