AMERICAN THEATRE: Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced the opening of its first building dedicated to the arts. The 25,000-square-foot building, called W97, will accommodate the school’s growing theatre arts program. The building will be dedicated on Nov. 16 and open with a production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody.
5 comments:
I really believe that interdisciplinary forms of study are integral in any person's, and especially any artist's, own specific work. When we as artists are able to learn about different forms of sciences, moments in history, types of languages, etc., our own perspectives on the world and on academic expand and we are able to implement those new interests and perspectives into our artistic work. This goes just as much for those students and people who are more interested in the sciences. It is great that MIT is expanding its horizons through the performing arts, and I think that it would be really interesting to see the artistic work that comes out of the Institute.
One of the main reasons I came to CMU was because of the interdisciplinary atmosphere of campus life. I greatly appreciate being surrounded by CS, Math, and Humanities majors. I think theatre is made up of science, math, computing, and writing and I think its important to be in a environment with all of those things, even if I am at a conservatory. I hope that MIT continues to improve their theatre program!
Art, and in particular theatre, is one way to help growth in other academic areas through diversifying one's knowledge and opening up views to other positions. The fact that MIT has a growing and thriving theatre community, shows that theatre can go hand and hand with other programs- particularly STEM- similar to how CMU has done. Theatre is so expansive on the skill set different jobs take, and it's good to see that other schools nurture a similar environment of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning.
To be honest, I had no idea that MIT even had a single arts program on campus, but it makes senses when I think about it further. For technology to be ground-breaking, it has to break ground in all fields. To exclude the arts from what technology can make an impact on is a disservice to the technology itself. And how awesome that the first building on their campus to be dedicated to the arts is a theatre. Theatres are where artists and collaborators can come together and create. I think there is something special about a theatre compared to a different arts facility. With a gallery, you start with an empty room and fill it. But with a theatre, it’s the process of what those collaborators coming to life before the audience’s eyes. I do hope that the facility is treated with respect and not disregarded or forgotten with the university’s main mission of technology.
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