By James
M. Collins
Anyone who has even just driven by the Notre Dame campus along
Edison Road in South Bend knows that the new Marie P. DeBartolo
Center for the Performing Arts is a striking addition to the local
landscape. Given its dramatic roofline and elaborate façade,
this is clearly a serious building that makes its presence known
in no uncertain terms to both the Notre Dame and South Bend communities.
Judging by the reviews I've heard around campus, in the supermarket
and down at the Farmer's Market, the architectural aspects of
the building are a great success. Everyone seems to know exactly
where it is, and they know they like it. Even the less-than-enthusiastic
fans of neo-Gothic architecture concede that it's the most impressive
example of this style on campus. For this building to be considered
a success from an academic perspective, however, it has to fulfill
a complicated mission -- to move the performing arts from the
margins to a central place in the Notre Dame experience.
The stage is set for the performing arts center to accomplish
that mission in three interdependent ways. First, it will change,
at the most fundamental level, how courses in film, television,
theater and music are taught at this university. The classroom
and other spaces designed primarily for instruction -- including
rehearsal rooms, design labs, editing suites -- will enable students
to refine their creative abilities in ways that weren't possible
in existing antiquated spaces. As someone who teaches courses
in film criticism and history, I'm also exhilarated by the prospect
of Notre Dame having its own art-house cinema. This will give
students the chance to see the best in foreign and independent
films in a state-of-the-art THX-certified projection facility.
That exposure, I believe, will help increase their understanding
of the global culture in which we live.
The public performance spaces -- the concert hall, the 350-seat
theatre, the cinema, the studio theatre, and the organ and choral
hall -- will also function as teaching environments. Their contribution
to the University, however, will be measured by how they change
public life at Notre Dame, which is as much a part of our academic
mission as the classes we teach. Public events have been held
at the University virtually since its inception, but the majority
of such events have been produced by and for specific departments
or colleges. The spiritual mission of the University is honored
through Masses; other public events intended for the entire Notre
Dame community often focus on sports. The performing arts center
will expand the range of possibilities for celebrating a sense
of community, making it abundantly clear that this community can
come together and see itself just as robustly through the artistic
work that is produced here.
The third way that this facility will enable us to accomplish
our goal of making the performing arts central to the Notre Dame
community is the most intangible but the most profound. Urbanist
Kevin Lynch has argued that the success of any urban environment
depends on its imageability -- does the place offers
strong public images that form a set of common mental pictures
carried by large numbers of its inhabitants? Given the number
of monumental structures on this campus -- the golden dome, the
Basilica, "Touchdown Jesus," the Grotto -- Notre Dame has perhaps
the most imageable campus in the country. But until the
performing arts center arrived, there were no strong mental pictures
of the performing arts within that reservoir of images that constitute
the Notre Dame experience.
As long as these arts were without a site that could join that
pool of mental pictures that define the University as a vital
atmosphere for learning, and an equally vital landscape of shared
memory, they were condemned to being left out of the picture,
both literally and metaphorically.
For the performing arts to become central to the mission of
this university, we needed a world-class facility where students
could be given the best possible instruction. But our ultimate
goal is to give them a sense of how important the arts can be
in a lifelong education process.
By marking a place for the teaching and appreciation
of film, television, theatre and music on campus, the performing
arts center will acquire the sort of monumentality described by
the architect Charles Moore: "Monumentality is not a product of
compositional techniques, or flamboyance of form, or even conspicuous
consumption of space, time or money. It is, rather, a function
of a society's taking possession of, or agreeing upon, extraordinarily
important places on the earth's surface, and of the society's
celebrating their pre-eminence."
Our academic mission will be successfully realized only when
this building achieves that monumentality by providing not just
the stages for artistic performance but the possibility of staging
a new form of public life for Notre Dame.
Jim Collins is an associate professor of film, television
and theatre at Notre Dame.
(October 2004)
