Home Is Where the Art Is
At Harvard, participating in the arts often requires previous experience, an involved comp process, or a significant time commitment, but within the residential community, there exists lower-stress creative outlets for students. As administrators look to shift Harvard’s social life away from off-campus social organizations, art spaces in the houses serve as new centers for student engagement.On Sept. 30, with two weeks to go before it hosts its first ceramics classes, Cabot Third Space—“It’s not a study space, and it’s not a living space; it’s just a space for art,” says Phoebe C. West ’18-’19—is not yet quite ready.
“As you can see, we’re still putting finishing touches up,” says Tiffanie Ting, Resident Dean of Cabot House, over the loud whine of a drill.
“We’ve kind of had a whirlwind getting this space ready to go,” West, Third Space’s manager, says. Still, the place has already undergone an impressive transformation. Founded in 2013 as a 2-D art studio, its team of student leaders is focused on developing it into a more comprehensive workspace, one that serves social and intellectual functions in addition to its role as a creative haven. To do so, they’ve physically expanded it: Third Space has six brand-new pottery wheels and a new kiln in an area of the basement of Cabot’s Eliot Hall that was, as recently as last semester, dedicated to bike shop Quad Bikes. Soon to follow, its organizers will be students—painting, drawing, throwing pots, or just observing. “It’s this big Cabot push to bring the arts into the forefront,” West says.
The bigger-and-better Third Space joins a rich array of arts institutions within Harvard’s 12 Houses. At Harvard, participating in the arts—whether through extracurricular activities like Hasty Pudding Theatricals or the Harvard Advocate or through academic departments like that of Visual and Environmental Studies—often requires previous experience, an involved comp process, or a significant time commitment. The Houses create lower-stress creative outlets for students. In turn, as administrators look to shift Harvard’s social life away from off-campus social organizations, arts spaces in the Houses serve as new centers for student engagement.
Houses Find Their Role
In a building just north of Third Space sits a very different kind of arts resource: Cabot Theater. Ting guesses most students are more familiar with the place as an entrance to the Aquarium, a party space, than as a performance venue. “It’s been relatively dormant,” she says. (West is more blunt: “It pretty much goes unused beyond being the hallway to the Aquarium.”) Historically, the stage was busier, hosting Cabot’s annual musical—a tradition soon to return, Ting says. She hopes that Cabot Theater, armed with this renewed programming as well as other events like coffeehouses, will join the ranks of other House-supported theaters, like those in Adams or Leverett, as major campus venues. “We’re really using Adams Pool Theater as a model,” she says.
Indeed, the Pool Theater serves as a case study of a House institution playing a vital role in the campus arts scene while serving the goals of the House system. Adams Pool Theater, as its name suggests, stands in the former location of Adams’s indoor pool, which the House replaced in 1990. Concerned about the pool’s high maintenance cost and, perhaps, its reputation for debauchery, administrators decided to fill it and build a theater—a move that dovetailed with Adams’s longstanding reputation as an artistic House.
Today, the Pool Theater is one of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s most frequent staging spaces. This semester alone, it is slated to host four plays as well as Three Letter Acronym’s annual improv festival.
According to Kara E. Roberts ’17, an Adams resident who has worked on eight shows in the Pool Theater, Adams drama tutor Aubry Threlkeld chooses shows with the theater’s distinctive traits in mind. “He looks for projects that kind of fit… the Pool’s niche,” she says—namely student-written or experimental plays with small casts. “I think the Pool Theater is really suited well to a lot of smaller, more intimate projects,” she says, citing her own project, this weekend’s photography-based musical “35mm,” as an example.
The Adams Pool Theater is especially suited for staging small musicals, in part because the Pool Theater’s acoustics trump those of the Loeb Experimental Theater, according to Roberts. “These smaller projects that are done in the Pool are a way for simpler and more intimate musical theater to happen at Harvard,” she says.
Third Space hopes to find a different kind of niche: one of geography. “There are studios in some of the River Houses,” West says, “but that’s a hike.” The distance to the Harvard Ceramics Studio, in Allston, inconvenient even for residents of the Yard and River Houses, can be all but prohibitive for Quadlings, especially at night—for some students the only time that they can fit the arts into their schedules. “So we’re kind of trying to fill a need here in the Quad for supplementary arts,” West says, “and ceramics courses are hard to get to and often late at night, [which are problems] for people who live in the Quad.”
All Welcome, from Moonlighters to Masters
Although some House arts institutions, like Adams Pool Theater, pride themselves on their relatively high-quality output, the most common purpose for House arts programs is that of the open-mic night: a creative outlet without the demands of a typical Harvard academic program or extracurricular activity. As Freshman Class Dean Thomas A. Dingman ’67 told Harvard Magazine in 2013, “The Houses serve as a wonderful ground for amateurism.”
Many Houses, from Mather to Leverett to Lowell, host coffeehouses and open mic nights. Despite its artsy reputation, Adams had no such regular program—until Sept. 24. “The idea kind of came to me from some of the students in the House who were really good musicians and were always looking for a place where they could perform. That was last year,” says Ajay Singh ’18, the secretary of the Adams House Committee.
Early this year, Singh brought the idea to Adams’s music tutors, and within the month, students were gathered in the Upper Common Room to watch their classmates perform in a broad variety of media. “We had musical performances, we had dance, we had poetry, we had a story reading, we had science theater, we had a little bit of everything, which made it a lot of fun,” says Or Gadish ’10-’11, the lead music tutor in Adams, where he also lived as an undergraduate. “And [we had] a really good crowd."
But Adams’s music offerings do not stop at the amateur. “We also want to give students the opportunity to showcase their music at a higher level,” Gadish says, citing the annual Concert (formerly the Classical Concert), Winter Feast, and House Teas as venues for more serious musicians. “All of these are opportunities for both the student musicians to perform and for other students to see the student musicians and to see what Adams House has to offer.”
Other Houses also sponsor serious musical work, like the annual Lowell House Opera or Dunster’s Messiah Sing. In each case, the production is open to students of other Houses, meaning the Houses enable students to join higher-level productions without committing themselves to a year in high-caliber performance groups like the Harvard Glee Club or Bach Society Orchestra.
Ting says Cabot Third Space is developing with a goal of accommodating a range of skill sets. “We’re looking to create entry points for people at all skill levels,” she says. “Whether you have no experience or a lot of experience, there’s something for you in the Third Space.”
West concurs. “It’s about getting people of all different skillsets, of all different comforts with art, to have a space to come and hang out and chill for a little while,” she says. “A lot of things are so intense at Harvard, and [Third Space] is, like, a chill place to be, in that you can commit as much time or as little time as you want to it.”
The House that Plays Together Stays Together
This all-levels-welcome approach, in addition to its aforementioned benefits for individual students’ artistic development, helps House arts organizations—especially House-exclusive institutions like the Kirkland Drama Society—build social ties within the House.
“[KDS] is probably mostly people who have not done other theatre,” says Jacob C. Scherba ’18, KDS president. “There are certainly a couple, myself included, who have been involved in theater in other capacities on campus and before college, but it’s really something we really try to make as open as possible and as welcoming as possible to people.”
'We're hoping that [Third Space] will bring artists and people in the space together,' says Tiffanie Ting, Resident Dean of Cabot House
KDS produces one show per semester: a Shakespeare-inspired farce in the fall and a play or musical in the spring. According to Scherba, these shows aim for inclusivity within the House. “If we have more people audition than we have parts for, we’ll write more parts, because we want anyone who wants to be involved to be involved,” he says. “So I think it’s a really good opportunity for people who haven’t tried theater and who want to do theater to be able to try it in a really low-stress environment.”
Third Space, on the other hand, is not Cabot-exclusive, but Ting says she hopes it will build relationships between its users. “Studio work can be pretty lonely,” she says. “We’re hoping that this space will bring artists and people in the space together, whether they’re there to draw, paint, or just do other work.”
“A personal stake [I have] in Third Space is cultivating a community of like-minded people who are really kind of invested in art and love it,” West says, adding that, as an African-American Studies concentrator, she does not have the curricular kinship in the arts that a concentration like VES might offer.
The space will have arts-based social events as well, according to Kevin J. Friel ’17, another student leader. “We’re working on a live figure-drawing event right now,” he says. “We’re actually putting a calendar together, hopefully with pretty regular events.”
Houses’ arts institutions form another community as well: the audience. Singh says one of his primary goals in planning Adams’s coffeehouse had nothing to do with the performers’ artistic development. He says he remembers telling the tutors, “Let’s create a space from 7:30 to 9 on a Saturday, where parties aren’t really happening yet, and this could be a space for people who don’t like staying out late but are looking for a social event.”
Singh himself appreciated the variety such an event brought to campus social life. “I’m not one who really likes partying a lot. I’m low-key, for the most part; I’m tired by 10:30,” he says. “I’m not sure if there are other people like me, but I thought it would be nice to have this social space beforehand that’s a little different from a mixer, something where there’s something actively going on.”
It Takes a House
By their very nature, House arts institutions uniquely fuse social, intellectual, and creative life. Third Space’s leaders are particularly excited about this flexibility. In addition to serving as a workshop for relaxed artistic work and a social space, West says, Third Space will also host classes with a range of commitment options. “Within the eight-week classes, we’re going to have two-week modules,” she says. A painting class, for example, might have a module on oil painting.
At the Adams coffeehouse, the demonstration Gadish calls “science theater” was perhaps the most overtly intellectual performance, but academic elements snuck their way into other acts, too. “When we had the coffeehouse night, Sean Palfrey, one of the Faculty Deans here, was there; he read a couple poems,” Gadish says, “and he was there watching everybody else do it.”
To Gadish, Palfrey’s presence shows the House’s belief in the purpose of art. “[The deans] very much think it’s an important part of everybody’s life,” he says, and he agrees with them. “It’s important for people to have a balance of the different parts of their lives, and art in general is just one way to help those things balance—to counterbalance all the work that people put into classes or other extracurriculars. When you practice these creative tasks, it helps you breed creativity in the other aspects of your life,” Gadish says. “That’s why we support it so strongly."
—Staff writer Trevor J. Levin can be reached at trevor.levin@thecrimson.com.