Following the sudden closure of Philadelphia's University of the Arts in June, Bennington College has enrolled 37 undergraduate and 28 graduate students formerly in UArts dance programs. The arrangement enables the students to continue their studies as planned in new BFA and low-residence MFA programs that will run alongside Bennington's BA program in dance.
Donna Faye Burchfield, former dean of the UArts School of Dance, will direct the new programs at the small Vermont liberal arts college. She recalled that news broke about UArts' closure with about one week's notice, just as the school was poised to send MFA dance students to a residency in France.
"I had the wind in the sails, ready to go, but suddenly we had no university," Burchfield said. "So, you can imagine how fast this had to happen."
Burchfield reached out to Shelton Walker, who was then chief of staff and vice president for strategic initiatives at Bennington College — a role similar to one she had held at UArts. Walker set up a meeting with Bennington president Laura Walker (no relation). "We began to talk about a way to quite literally rescue those programs and imagine them anew," Burchfield said.
Those conversations — buoyed by a $1 million donation from Barbara and Sebastian Scripps, $250,000 from the Ford Foundation, and additional funds from the Transformational Partnerships Fund, according to a Bennington College press release — created a path forward for UArts dance students. They applied and were admitted to Bennington, said Jeffrey Perkins, the college's vice president of communications and marketing. In an email, he added that the college also committed to matching students' costs to attend.
Longtime Bennington prof Dana Reitz, a choreographer, dancer and visual artist, noted that college faculty and curriculum developers have also worked to preserve UArts' BFA courses "so the students aren't so freaked out about having to change everything," she said. Still, Reitz added, "They're calling it 'study abroad.'"
A key component in making the academically displaced students feel at home will be the availability of 14 UArts faculty, by Burchfield's estimate, to teach them. Varied scheduling models, such as co-teaching and short-term residencies, will "accommodate all that complexity in terms of [allowing faculty to maintain] their livelihood and also their connection to their students," Reitz said.
Burchfield agreed that such continuity is vital to the student experience. "[The students], too, had a dream about their own futures. With dancers, a lot of that gets woven into who they're studying with," she said. "We designed [the program] so that students can still see their beloved faculty."
What's more, the BFA program in Bennington is designed to lead back to Philadelphia and a potential Bennington satellite campus there in 2025. The approaching academic year will buy time "to imagine a way to get us back to Philadelphia ... and how that impacts and intermingles with the way that our school had been running," Burchfield said.
When the semester kicks off, two prestigious dance programs will move in concert — and in contrast. Reitz observed that the UArts curriculum has stressed technical training to a different degree than Bennington's, which is marked by interdisciplinarity and an emphasis on making new work. The BFA and BA students may have opportunities to collaborate on dance pieces and take each other's courses. "It'll be interesting to see how those things feed each other," Reitz said.
For Burchfield, the dynamic is alive with possibility. "That in-between is where the kind of magic exists," she said. "It's going to be like a kind of alchemy where the potential is huge for what can happen."
Burchfield's optimism may owe something to her past tenure as dean of the prestigious American Dance Festival in North Carolina, which has roots in Bennington's legendary summer dance program. Images of Bennington's pioneering program, which launched in 1934, adorned her office walls.
"History wrapped itself around a possible future," she said of the next steps. Or, as she has been reassuring the former UArts students, "It's not just anywhere. It's Bennington."