An astute visitor once said of the feeling you get from the MIT campus, “It crackles.” And it surely does, with path-breaking innovations, ideas and discoveries emerging day and night from its labs and classrooms.
The Institute’s arts program, too, is a fast-changing and vibrant creative presence on campus. The change and growth are partly about our amazing arts faculty, which includes figures recognized nationally and even internationally. They’re also about our students, whose ranks include ever-more talented and motivated achievers in the arts. (One indicator: two-thirds of entering undergraduates report having been deeply and successfully involved in the arts as high school students.) Now, we plan to give those focused on music and theater arts a new and unconventional resource: the MIT Laboratory for the Performing Arts.
Why the need for the Laboratory? The arts have undergone a tremendous expansion on the MIT campus – the number of theater courses offered, for example, has quadrupled in less than two decades. And while there are selected venues for episodic theater, dance, and musical performances, like Kresge’s two auditoriums, there’s been no dedicated space for superb student groups like the MIT Dramashop, MIT Symphony, the MIT Wind and Jazz Ensembles, Dance Theater Ensemble, and the MIT Concert Choir.
The Laboratory will be a center for experimentation, learning, performance and rehearsal, a home for the traditional performing arts, experimental arts, interdisciplinary collaborations, and investigating the boundaries between art, technology and science. Like any facility devoted to creativity, it will be as much about the learning process and trying new things as about presenting finished works. The Laboratory, though, won’t be just “space.” An innovative structure designed with MIT’s performing arts capabilities and priorities in mind, it will be an ideal locale for the experimentation, hard work and group interaction that is at the core of much true creativity – and thus in the great tradition of MIT labs through the decades.
The Laboratory will be a dramatic embodiment of MIT’s commitment to the arts. That commitment is no secret to the campus community. But for the Institute to give concrete and highly visible expression to that commitment will tell artists and arts enthusiasts everywhere that yes, MIT-style creativity does, and always will, encompass the arts.
