This spring, the Tufts Department of Drama and Dance has partnered with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts to create a series of pop-up performances entitled “Arts Flash.” Each 'flash' consists of a 15-minute-long performance that will occur on alternating Tuesdays and Wednesdays in different spaces on both the SMFA Fenway and Medford/Somerville campuses, according to Chair of the Department of Drama and Dance Heather Nathans.
Each performance will highlight a specific department and feature students and faculty from that department. Participating departments and programs range from Film and Media Studies (FMS) to Drama and Dance. The performances will consist of "short films, music, drama, dance and spoken word performances," according to the event's press release.
The series began on Feb. 28 at Dewick-MacPhie Dining Center with a performance that consisted of students representing all departments featured in the series. It will culminate in an open call performance in April.
The theme of the series is The Welcome Table, a reference to the civil rights anthem adopted from the southern gospel song "I’m Gonna Sit at The Welcome Table” (1964), Nathans said.
“We’re borrowing the theme of The Welcome Table from a year-long collaboration that Drama and Dance has been doing with DNAWorks," she said, referring to an arts and service organization that works to encourage both art and dialogue, while focusing on issues like identity, culture and class.
The "Arts Flash" series is completely new to both Medford/Somerville and SMFA campuses. Nathans created the series with current Dean of SMFA Nancy Bauer.
"[Bauer was] interest[ed] in kind of an arts event series that might move the arts beyond the traditional art spaces and draw attention to some of the different kinds of arts that are being done on campus. In a kind of more spontaneous pop-up kind of way, because we know everyone is incredibly busy," Nathans said. "I see stuff on campus all the time that I wish I could go to, and you say, 'I’d love to see that but I can’t,' but what if the dance came to you, but what if the spontaneous piece came to you?”
The "Arts Flash" series presents art in such a way that a student can either intentionally view it by looking up the performance schedule on the series' Facebook page or by stumbling upon a performance. The series removes many of the small steps one usually has to take to see a dance or theater performance. Whether those steps pose a serious barrier to engaging with the arts almost does not matter; when a student is stressed, these minute obstacles and schedule conflicts can be enough to bar someone from engaging with the arts.
According to Nathans, one of the main goals of the series is to increase awareness of the arts on campus.
"Someone [is always] saying, 'I never knew we had X at Tufts' because people get so busy and they get into the thing they get into, and they don’t see that we have a gospel choir and a contact dance improv group," she said. "Maybe their experience is they looked around and they saw something they have never seen before. Then, I hope that the takeaway is how vibrant the arts community is here.”
The physical positioning of these performances is critical to their objective. By placing the arts in everyday spaces like the dining halls, they physically make space for themselves in students’ everyday lives.
Art has a long-established reputation of being elitist and disconnected from the real world, but Nathans said "Arts Flash" attempts to engage with those who view it.
"It goes back to experimental theater in the beginning of the 20th century, where people started saying we can make art that's much more about identity and challenging the status quo and thinking about issues of identity and belonging," Nathans said. "And so, that's what we have invited every program to think about in terms of how does the art that you make engage with the ideas of citizenship, identity and belonging, so that people have the opportunity to think of the arts as something more than just shiny jazz hands."
In addition, “Arts Flash's" theme serves as a way to dispel art's elitist reputation and ground art in issues of the human experience.
“We strive to have things open for everyone and we hope that everyone feels welcome and in fact our theme that we’ve embraced for this ... The Welcome Table, means you make room. And that’s what you do, you make room for people,” she said.
Nathans stressed the arts departments' responsibility to be inclusive and engaging of everyone.
"We recognize that there are members of the community who, for various reasons, don’t feel visible, don’t feel like they have the background they might need to come into a particular kind of class," she said. "That’s something I hope this [series] is; the opportunity to continue that conversation.”
This conversation has been widely discussed in the year-long collaboration between the Drama and Dance department and DNAWorks. Through this collaboration, the Tufts community actively becomes involved with the local community and brings the arts to everyone, according to Nathans. Similarly, through “Arts Flash,” the Drama and Dance Department along with the SMFA aim to highlight the arts within the Tufts community and bring the same dialogue from the DNAWorks collaboration onto campus.
The events during the semester will range from a contact improv dance event in Tisch Library to Tufts musicians playing in the atrium of the SMFA. Students are encouraged to interact with or just immerse themselves in the flash performances, Nathans said.
"As you pass through, you can watch art being made and then dive in and make something of your own. Some people are more comfortable kind of standing and watching, and then some people if they're invited to make a piece of art or to bang a drum if they feel more comfortable doing that," she said. "The goal is not necessarily to start sort of snatching people out of the library and compelling them to dance because that can make people a little afraid."
For their first performance in Dewick, students in a class called Dance Movement and Creative Process along with students from the SMFA, the FMS program, the Experimental College and Tufts improv group Cheap Sox all came together to create a performance experience with postcards to not only commorate the experience, but to provoke political change.
Dance Movement and Creative Process performed improvisational contact dance on the Dewick stage, while FMS students handed out pamphlets about the program and carried around a laptop playing a student film while another student performed a magic trick.
The SMFA made special postcards for the event. The addressee was President Donald Trump, while the front of the card criticized Trump’s potential defunding of the National Education Association and National Endowment for the Humanities and discussed the defunding’s implications.
“Arts Flash” looks to be an exciting addition to the campus atmosphere, and students are encouraged to check out the Facebook event pages for each performance. But if you’re lucky enough, you’ll probably just run into one.
'Arts Flash' brings together various departments to stage pop-up art performances
