How Bennington College Saved University of the Arts’ Dance Programs After the School’s Sudden Closure

On a Friday afternoon on the last day of May, Donna Faye Burchfield was sitting on her deck in Philadelphia when a newspaper notification popped up on her friend’s phone: University of the Arts, where Burchfield had been dean of the School of Dance since 2010, was closing its doors in a week—for good. Were Burchfield and her colleagues given any warning? “Of course not,” she says with a laugh, still incredulous months after the fact. “And we had 31 students scheduled to leave for France in less than two weeks for the low-residency MFA program.”

Burchfield spent the rest of the night pacing her apartment, trying to process the shock. The next morning, she started making phone calls, relying on friends and colleagues in the field to help her compile a list of contacts who might be able to help. “I didn’t even know what I was going to ask for,” she remembers. “It was like being lost at sea. I needed to figure how to get to land.”

Eventually, Burchfield was connected to Bennington College president Laura Walker and provost Maurice Hall, and described her most immediate concern: that the 13 UArts low-residency MFA students expected to graduate at the end of the summer—many of whom had already accepted job offers predicated on earning their degrees—would be able to do so. “I explained that,” says Burchfield, “and Laura said, ‘Don’t stop there. How else can Bennington help? What else do you need?’ ”

Just two months later, thanks to Walker’s heroic fundraising efforts and the generosity of three major donors, The New York Times announced that the UArts School of Dance would be revived at Bennington College. In September, 36 BFA students, 20 continuing low-residency MFA students, and 13 faculty members matriculated to Bennington, trading UArts’ urban Philadelphia setting for Bennington’s pastoral Vermont campus.

While the partnership might seem unexpected, both Burchfield and Walker see it as a serendipitous continuation of Bennington’s modern dance legacy. In 1934, a group of artists including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Charles Weidman helped to launch the Bennington School of Dance, a summer festival that acted as both a training program and a creative laboratory. In the decades since, dance has continued to play an important role at the college, with notable teachers including José Limón, Judith Dunn, and Steve Paxton.

“There’s a direct line from our founding dance faculty to what we’re doing now,” says Walker. “Bennington was the first college to put the arts at the center of the curriculum, and that still informs everything we do.” Other Philadelphia-based schools, like Temple University and Drexel University, offered to absorb UArts students and faculty. But Burchfield understood that what made UArts’ dance program special was more than just its people. “We were looking for a place where we could hold on to the ways that we’ve taught students,” she says. “There was already a history of experimental pedagogy in place at Bennington.”

A new program, made up of former UArts students and faculty, now exists alongside Bennington’s BA in dance. While the BFA is more geared towards preparing dancers for performance careers and the BA is primarily focused on choreography, interdisciplinary research, and critical inquiry, students are free to take classes across both tracks. Outside of their BFA classes—which will be taught by many former UArts professors (including Shayla-Vie Jenkins­ and Jesse Zaritt, who will act as faculty­ advisors), mostly in a rotating group who will visit Bennington to teach in three- and seven-week stints—the transfer students will be fully integrated into life at Bennington, living in campus housing and choosing their own BA courses. UArts’ low-residency MFA students will go to Bennington’s campus over the college’s fall and spring breaks, and then spend six weeks over the summer in Montpellier, France, just as they did before the merger.

While Walker and Burchfield hope that the UArts transplants feel settled in Vermont this year, they’re still hoping to find a satellite space in Philadelphia where the BFA program can build a home. “Philadelphia has such a rich cultural life,” says Walker. “I’m really excited­ about having an outpost in the city that all of Bennington College can use.”

Before the start of the academic year, Burchfield and her team laid down a support floor in Bennington’s student union, transforming it into a studio for the BFA students. “It was like this space was waiting for the floor to be laid. All those folks and all that labor, it still lives here,” says Burchfield, referencing Bennington’s dance history. But it’s Burchfield and Walker’s steadfast belief in arts education that’s allowing that legacy to continue to grow. As of press time, dance is the only one of UArts’ schools to find a way forward for a large group of students and faculty.

Walker hopes that this collaboration can serve as a blueprint for other programs suffering in the future. “As the arts are under attack, we need to find new models to ensure that programs like this, that are extraordinary, will continue,” she says. To that end, Burchfield has hung a quote by Merce Cunningham­ dancer Viola Farber—another member of Bennington’s­ storied dance faculty—on the door of her new office.­ It reads: “I think somehow all of us who work at dancing inspire one another; whether we have anything specifically to do with each other or not.”

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