2+2 Equals 3 Log In: Creative Arts Not Equal to Integral Part of Harvard

HOW WOULD you write an equation given the variables: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Loeb Drama Center, Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1970-71, undergraduates in Visual and Environmental Studies, undergraduates in Harvard Dramatic Club, Harvard-Radcliffe undergrads, Director of the Loeb, Director of Carpenter Center, professors of light and communication, professors of history and science?

First you have to determine the applicable variables. Okay, rub out the last eight proposed. You could try writing the equation like this, Norton is greater than Loeb plus Carpenter, or maybe Loeb plus Carpenter equals Norton which might be true, yet what you might hope to get is: Norton plus Loeb plus Carpenter equals integral part of Harvard undergrad's education. Right now, unfortunately, Norton is less than Loeb and Carpenter not equal to Loeb, nor does 4 years at Harvard equal liberal education of undergraduate.

"Few educators realize that dance, music, painting, design, and sculpture are forms of knowledge even though they do not express themselves in words," Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence, pointed out more than a decade ago in a lecture to the National Committee on Art Education. Few educators realize that integration of the creative arts in the curriculum is essential to the development of an individual's sensibility-to his intellect.

Filming the dissecting of an orange is equal to dissecting an earthworm to look at the parts. Dancing the death of Jocasta is equal to reading Oedipus tell of his mother's death. Filming or dancing these experiences brings the ideas home to the doer: they mean something to him personally since he creates the order. Increment dance and film by one dimension until you reach a peak experience.

So take the orange; someone tells you to peel it. Someone tells you to label all the parts. Someone tells you to dance it. Someone tells you to film it. Someone takes the orange away from you.

HARVARD does not have the orange. In 1956, when John N. Brown headed the Committee on the Visual Arts at Harvard, the University conceived the A.N. Whitehead child-"championing of the arts." There were proposals for the "enlarged pattern for the visual arts at Harvard." There were proposals for the "construction of a Design Center." There were proposals for "also a Harvard Theatre." And, there was a specific proposal for the integration of the Harvard Theatre with the other activities of the University. But is it integration when the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer has to plan busing to M.I.T.'s Kresge Auditorium, Sanders Theatre, Burr B, an unfinished building in the Business School, a new law school building, or the Harvard Square Cinema?

To avoid this token integration, the Loeb has changed Charles Eames' third lecture from December 7 to January 14 in order to accommodate him in the Loeb, but the last three lecture dates, though already established with the Drama Center last year, are still undetermined.

"The theater cannot live in splendid isolation. It is in the nature of theatre to borrow from and extend into all fields of theatre. Herein lies its strength. This process should bring the Department of Design into the Theatre and the Theatre into the Department of Design.... In short, the Harvard Theatre should be a magnetic center for attracting varied and combined manifestations of creative effort now existing in numerous undergraduate and graduate activities of the University" -the Brown Report on the Visual Arts at Harvard '56.

FRANCO COLAVECCHIA, lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies and designer-consultant for the Loeb Drama Center, is another example of token integration of the arts at Harvard. We need design for the stage, but how about a stage for design?

Size is another fly buzzing around the orange. Carpenter Center's basement lecture room is hardly enough to hold the VES 100 lectures, and the Loeb's seating capacity of approximately 500 still leaves an irate overflow audience for the Eames' lectures. Is the Loeb the proposed "physical presence of the theatre next to the Design Center that would greatly strengthen the design aspects of theatre production?"

Is the issue really that we just need a theatre to accommodate lecturers advanced in the use of media? Is the proper attention being given to the creative arts if Harold Taylor is right, if "There are as many facts and ideas in art as there are in any other field, and there are as many kinds of art as there are ideas?" Maybe Harvard better starting making films of oranges.