Summary of Idea:
The Department of Theatre and Dance proposes to develop a cultural hub in partnership with the Carlisle Theatre. To do this, we would relocate the entirety of the department (offices, classrooms, studios, and performance space) to the downtown Carlisle Theatre location, and the 25-27 W High Street building. By dividing the large current Carlisle Theatre performance space in to two smaller performance/viewing spaces, additional studio/rehearsal space, flexible community space, and onsite construction space this move would strengthen the capacities for both the Carlisle Theatre and the Department of Theatre and Dance. In the spirit of community engagement and cultural vitality, Dickinson could take a more active role as caretaker of the space, easing the financial concerns of the Carlisle Theatre.
For Dickinson, this proposal would allow T&D to expand their curriculum and their production program while placing Dickinson squarely in the heart of the Carlisle community. This would also centralize our department’s operations which are currently spread out across campus and throughout town. It would allow student life programming to move into Mathers, open up the space for needed HUB expansion, position the department to better contribute to the community while bringing Dickinson students more solidly in to the community, and is a long-term, sustainable solution to the perennial problem of where to put the classrooms and studio spaces of a specialized academic program.
For the community of Carlisle, a move such as this would invigorate an outdated and worn space in the heart of downtown, activating the space and expanding the community arts resources currently available. This common space enables the social and cultural cross-pollination and innovation found only in sustained, organic, place-based interaction between community members and Dickinson faculty, staff, and students.
How does your idea relate to or support the college’s strategic framework?
Contemporary practitioners of civic engagement and civic practice stress the importance of non-hierarchical partnerships that empower the existing strengths and interests of community stakeholders. This requires an approach to curriculum that gives our students confidence in their individual practice, supported by rich, resource-driven interdisciplinary scholarship characteristic to Dickinson and its emphasis on Pioneering Education and Cultivating Community. To that end, by pairing creative work with socially responsible outcomes, we are training our students to think broadly about the impact of their actions and Educating Global Citizen Leaders.
The focus of our revolutionary idea is twofold. While this framework is at the center of our department’s aims, we currently lack the adequate space and resources to fully realize the scope and impact of our efforts to fully Sustain Our Strength as a department. Because theatre and dance rely so intrinsically on time and space, a limit on either impacts our ability to expand enrollment. With Mathers, the Cube and the Site as our primary rehearsal, teaching, and construction spaces, their conflicting needs limit our overall activity. Increased space allows us to fully honor and expand upon the existing pedagogical needs of our department.
Additionally, incorporating the Carlisle Theater into the Dickinson landscape is not just a change of scenery. It is a reorientation to the needs of the contemporary student to merge practice and theory, art and science, campus and community in service to a true cultural hub in the heart of Carlisle. This shift would deepen our commitment to the strategic framework in the following ways:
With greater space, we will broaden our curriculum to include service-learning courses in arts management and entrepreneurship, project management, and civic ideation and collaboration which would pair students with local businesses, and Carlisle community members through coursework and internships.
Such an interdisciplinary synergy at the undergraduate level is both rare and necessary. Skills gained in these courses would leverage the existing creative resources of our department’s faculty to expand our impact beyond the bounds of traditional performance, while still upholding the standard of artistic excellence in our existing mainstage programming.
Students who experience such programming would graduate with the flexibility to apply their skills to a variety of industries, including but not limited to theatre. Not only would they develop the intellectual and emotional agility, collaborative capacity, and intercultural competency central to an education in the performing arts, they would be competitive leaders positioned to meet the needs of an increasingly interdependent professional landscape.
This spatial and curricular shift would make us eligible for additional funding opportunities from granting organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Program, ArtPlace America, and the Levitt Foundation.
What partnerships, on campus and off campus, do you envision?
Partnership is the heart of this proposal. The Department of Theatre and Dance has been in partnership with the Carlisle Theatre for over 20 years as we lease The Cubiculo, the black box space above the theatre, to use as a teaching and performance space. This space has become an essential part of our program – we could not do what we do without it. Likewise, Carlisle Theatre depends upon the rental agreement and money from Dickinson in order to sustain their operations.
Housing the Department of Theatre and Dance at Carlisle Theatre would:
- Build upon this reciprocity
- Ensure its sustainability and viability
- Enable both our institutions to grow
- Foster a shared identity while maintaining some autonomy for both organizations
- Cultivate new audiences for both community and college productions
The Carlisle Theatre has recently named their very first Executive Director, Erika Juran. New leadership in the organization could make this an opportune time to propose a new model of partnership. Positioning our department in the heart of downtown could also lead to more collaboration with other organizations such as the Downtown Carlisle Association, Cumberland Valley Historical Society, REACH! and Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet.
In addition, although throughout this document we continually refer to the entity as the Carlisle Theatre, the actual entity is the Carlisle Regional Performing Arts Center. The space as it is currently configured is not very flexible nor useful as a performance space. A collaborative relationship with Dickinson could re-envision this facility in a way that would make it more performance oriented while still maintaining its role as a movie house.
How will your idea positively affect the education of Dickinson students?
A partnership with the Carlisle Theatre and a closer relationship with the greater Carlisle arts community could allow us to potentially offer further opportunities to our students in the form of internships that could create bridges with the community. These local internships would build on our existing internship opportunities which take students to the professional world under the mentorship of active theatre and dance professionals who are also Dickinson faculty.
This partnership with the Carlisle Theatre would also support curricular opportunities in Arts Management, potentially allowing us to offer hands-on, service learning and interdisciplinary studies collaboration with our colleagues across campus in Business Management, Policy Management, and Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
In this partnership, Dickinson curriculum and community interaction function as one and the same. With the Carlisle Theater as a hub for community and community performing arts projects in addition to Dickinson productions, we intend to train students to see themselves as citizen artists, capable of benefitting whatever community or career they find following graduation. Crucially, the partnership itself requires a long-term commitment to community and college goals, giving students a model of engagement that is sustained over time instead of time-limited projects which can sometimes reinforce the very hierarchical divisions they intend to disrupt.
Finally, this partnership would give greater definition to the existing creative home-place of the Theatre and Dance department. A departmental identity and mission reliant on community integration could help future alums forge closer ties with the college through a closer connection with the greater Carlisle community.
How will your idea positively impact the world beyond Dickinson’s campus?
The Carlisle Theatre partnership offers our students the opportunity to work locally yet tackle pressing issues of the 21st century. Trained as critical thinkers and listeners, students will encounter local/global issues such as a shifting demographic population in Carlisle, income inequality, and the role of educational institutions in small towns.
We train students who can proactively address the seemingly intractable problems affecting their communities through collaboration with community members and, crucially, listening. Not only will students be capable of interdisciplinary approaches to professional performance circumstances, they will recognize the social responsibility of the artist to the community and its context. As nationally recognized arts practitioner and educator Michael Rohd states
[W]e can radically alter our role in our communities if we employ [listening] with greater intentionality and generosity. Arts organizations do not have to engage with non-arts partners solely through a lens of project-based needs. Partnerships can be relationship-based, and projects can originate from a different type of exchange. Producing new work for/in the theater does not have to only mean making new plays. It can mean producing new relationships, producing new forms of events and processes, producing new ways of crossing disciplinary and sector boundaries.
A cultural hub which operates in partnership with the Carlisle Theater serves as a robust training ground to practice relationship-building and theatre-making. We will be modeling practices that require positive engagement with the local community to ensure our students can’t help but view the world in all its complex interdependency and find their role within it. Dickinson has been very focused on creating citizen scholars, this is an opportunity to create citizen artists. The training our students receive in listening and bold ideation carry a positive impact beyond the local. We envision our students adapting their skills to other pressing global issues. The Carlisle Theatre partnership serves as a training ground for students to hone those skills.
Do you anticipate resource needs to prepare a detailed proposal if selected as a finalist? If so, please describe.
Our full proposal will include an outline of potential, sustainable community partnerships that can fill out the broader base of community resources necessary to an effective cultural hub. We will host a series of small events that allow us to listen and collaborate towards relationships that benefit both college and community. The planning grant will support such conversations.
We also require assistance in seeking and preparing the grant proposals to fund the development of the physical space of the Carlisle Theater and the 25-27 High St. Building. We will likely also require grant support of community partnerships beyond the initial stages and so would need the ability to provide grant writing workshops for interested department members.