In a time of global depression and melting snow sculptures, it was life-affirming to listen to visionary director and Montgomery Fellow Peter Sellars lecture on arts in the age of Obama. But it was all a front. Dartmouth has once again traded substance for image. We can now add Sellars to the list of famous people used to buoy Dartmouth's prestige -- and its hypocrisy. Sellars is a risk-taker; Dartmouth is not. As we race to distinguish the College by the terms set by our peer institutions (in this case, access to today's most highly respected intellectual leaders), we're missing our chance to truly set Dartmouth apart.
Although administrators and faculty relentlessly praised Sellars' achievements, their proclaimed belief in the necessity of his visionary process was a lie. If the administration and faculty actually took Sellars seriously, the arts at Dartmouth would look and feel completely different.
At the moment, arts at the College have little vitality or urgency because our arts administrators neglect to take Dartmouth students seriously. Throughout his time here, Sellars endlessly reiterated that the purpose of art is to hold a mirror to our lives so that we can be shocked into discussion about both our ignorance and our idealism.
Do Dartmouth students see themselves or their lives in the work presented at the Hop, the arts "center" on campus? Students are the metaphorical heart of the College, but they have never been truly and directly asked what art and culture they would like to see, and how it could transform their lives and environment. And, if when asked this question, students don't have an answer that fits a pre-set programming mold, then Dartmouth needs to start experimenting and creating something entirely new.
What would it look like if Dartmouth dedicated its resources to commission a play that not only used our campus space in radical ways, but also had Dartmouth as its subject? Instead of rehashing the same arguments about the gender divide, sexual assault and alcoholism at panels, in The Dartmouth and over Blitz, why doesn't the Hop or the theater department work with Greek houses to put the social life of Dartmouth on stage?
Last Friday, before the Glee Club's production of "The Pirates of Penzance," Sellars brilliantly challenged us to rethink the purpose of art in his incisive introduction to W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's work. But the production itself was recycled and antithetical to the message Sellars was brought to campus to trumpet. "Pirates" displayed much vocal talent, but what does it have to do with Dartmouth or America today? As Sellars made clear, Gilbert and Sullivan place contemporary American imperialism in perspective, but the performance was stuck in the past. There were not even any textual updates (a celebrated tradition among Gilbert and Sullivan aficionados) that might have popped the production's overly-precious time capsule.
Some of the theater department's most recent productions staged anti-war activism ("Hair"), a broken empire ("Julius Caesar") and homophobic violence ("Stop Kiss"). But, if we as directors, performers and audience members are unambitiously letting the plays do the work for us because the themes resonate today, aren't we just rehashing someone else's art? Aren't we accepting this as sufficient because we have no other models at Dartmouth to show us another way?
What would Sellars do, if he were here for longer? Imagine a production of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" staged on the Green, in which Eleazar Wheelock was substituted for Prospero. It could directly address the contemporary repercussions of Dartmouth's relations with Native Americans, and the erection of a magical College on the Hill -- an island in the wilderness.
In addition to exposing students to many fields of knowledge, a liberal arts environment is designed to offer practice in all of them. This doesn't mean departmentalized education in a specific craft or discipline. It means pushing students into thinking and working interdisciplinarily to create something that has never been thought or done before.
I am embarrassed that Dartmouth reassures its "top of our game" status by simply bringing to campus people who are at the top of theirs. In his all too brief visit to campus, Sellars inspired us to think about what major new dimensions to the educational experience would look like -- but it is up to Dartmouth to make them possible.
