‘62 CENTER FOR THEATRE AND DANCE
Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts built the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, a new performing arts center to house its theatre and dance departments and present professional companies on campus. Williams hired THE OFFICE to design a model for how the professional productions would sit alongside student and faculty work on its stages and how the building would be integrated into the life of the college community. We worked with students, faculty, and administrators to create this model, which focused on the concept of integrated programming, a strategy we developed to incorporate the professional companies coming to campus into professors’ curricula and to use art as a catalyst for scholarship. This shaped the mission of the ‘62 Center and is central to the CenterSeries, which brings dance the theater companies to Williams for residencies and performances. THE OFFICE has programmed the CenterSeries and a wide range of ancillary events since the building opened in 2005.
The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance is a state-of-the-art performance venue that provides student actors, dancers, designers, and ensembles a place to creatively collaborate with each other, renowned dance and theatre companies, and the faculty at Williams.
Photo: Didier Philispart
Photo: Jill Steinberg
‘62 CENTER MISSION
MISSION
The ‘62 Center serves as a nucleus of performing arts and culture for the Williams community and for the entire Berkshires region. The Center provides the student body and faculty with state of the art facilities for student productions and presents the CenterSeries, a program of world-class performing arts that establishes it as a leading cultural institution in the region and beyond. The central mission of the ’62 Center is to cultivate discourse between its presentations and the academic life of the Williams community at large.
The challenge—and opportunity—of this mission is to discover creative ways of integrating the Center’s artistic offerings with curricular goals. CenterSeries artists come to campus for in-depth residencies leading up to their performances on stage, inviting ample opportunity for engagement with the scholarly endeavors of students and faculty and illuminating relationships between the art on stage and work in the classroom. This Integrated Programming--class visits, panel discussions, film screenings, master classes, and other events--happens during the residency and deepens every production’s impact on campus. The Center supports the college’s mission to provide students with an open, creative, and adaptive education by highlighting diverse modes of inquiry in the arts.
While keeping the objectives of academic involvement in sharp focus, the ’62 Center always maintains the highest ambitions for presenting work on a par with the world’s great cultural institutions, while remaining responsive to an evolving cultural landscape. As an arts center that consistently presents challenging and enlightening work of great distinction, the ‘62 Center is a vital resource for the entire Williams learning community: students, faculty, staff, and the surrounding region.
METHOD
The CenterSeries is programmed through a process that that is both transparent and inclusive of different perspectives in the Williams community. A Programming Committee comprising students, administration, and faculty from theatre, visual arts, dance, music, and representatives of Divisions 1, 2 and 3. The student representatives are selected through the recommendation of both College Council and the Minority Coalition. The Programming Committee works to ensure that all presentations serve the college in the ways described in the Mission Statement.
APPLICATION
Access is at the heart of the ‘62 Center endeavor. The Center brings great art to campus and makes it available at low cost, or in many cases for free, to the entire Williams community and surrounding region. The goal of access also involves welcoming all members of the community to all presentations, however specialized the content of a given production. The ‘62 Center strives, in its programming, outreach, and house management, to create an atmosphere where performance can be appreciated and investigated by everyone, and catalyze scholarly inquiry for all.