Collaborative arts.

Collaboration among the arts is not a new phenomenon, but interdisciplinary arts programming, especially in our schools, has not been widely accepted. Even composer Richard Wagner in 1846 had trouble getting the public to accept his Gesamtkunstwerk [the total music-drama). His collaboration synthesizing "Dance, Tone and Poetry" was boo'ed from the opera house, but artists continued to collaborate. The ballet Parade shocked Paris in 1917 with its extreme avant-garde costumes, sets, music and choreography by Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie and Leonide Massine. In the 1970s, painter Robert Rauschenberg, choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage began collaborating at North Carolina's Black Mountain College. Black Mountain College, in the 1950s, was a center for many new ideas in the arts.

Today, more and more artists are working with writers, choreographers, architects and composers. Barbara Kruger collaborated with horror novelist Stephen King on a limited edition book for the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Artists and Writers" series. Robert Rauschenberg has worked on numerous group projects including his ongoing international enterprise "Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange." He has also collaborated several times with choreographer Trisha Brown on set designs.

Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, architect Frank Gehry and Oldenburg's wife, art historian Cossje van Bruggen, have collaborated on building design. They designed a building to look like a pair of binoculars for an advertising agency. Van Bruggen writes that the reason they work well together is "Gehry's desire to make a 'strong sculptural statement of the shell' ... converging with Oldenburg's idea of enlarging stereotypical objects to an architectural scale.... Both wanted people to relate directly to the exterior regardless of the building function." (1)

The state of the arts

In our schools today, for the most part, we teach the arts--visual arts, music, theater, dance--as separate and unique entities. The 1988 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report, Toward Civilization, focused on arts education in the United States. The report states: "Basic arts education aims to provide all students, not only the gifted and talented, with knowledge of, and skills in, the arts. Basic arts education must give students the essence of our civilization, the civilizations which enrich world civilizations as a whole. It must also give students tools for creating, for communicating and understanding other's communications, and for making informed and critical choices." It further states that "basic arts education must also include art forms that are interdisciplinary ... opera and music, theatre, film and television, and new work that extends the frontiers of current artistic convention."

During the past decade, many states have begun to adopt plans for comprehensive arts programs-programs that encompass all arts for all students. Implementation on the local level has not always followed. At the state level, only thirty states have high school requirements that include the arts and only forty-two states require local school districts to offer arts instruction in elementary, middle or secondary school. Arts graduation requirements are often vague and sometimes listed as alternatives to requirements in other subject areas (i.e., states accept courses in domestic science, industrial arts, humanities, foreign languages or computer sciences). Also, it is estimated that only twelve percent of elementary school instructional time is devoted to the arts (primarily visual arts and music); the average time spent on the arts in grades seven and eight increased to seventeen percent; and, in high school, the concept of general education in the arts for all students is practically nonexistent.

Positive programming

We need to look closely at ways to improve the quality and quantity of arts education programming in our schools. The NEA report recommends that we strengthen our preservice and inservice teacher programs in the collaborative arts if we want arts education to improve in our schools.

Some exciting staff development courses and programs on collaborative arts are beginning to happen around the country. In Chicago, Columbia College offers a Masters program in Interdisciplinary Arts Education. This program, the first of its kind in the Midwest, has become a model for several inter-arts graduate and undergraduate programs in the country. The program examines the five major disciplines of the arts (visual, sound, movement, literary and dramatic arts) and focuses on conceptual similarities and differences between the arts and their roles in society and education.

In Atlanta, the Woodruff Arts Center, which encompasses the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta College of Art, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Alliance Theater, collaborates on several staff development courses for teachers throughout the year. These accredited courses can be taken by Georgia teachers for recertification. Participants attend plays, concerts and museum exhibitions including informative pre- and post-event sessions which relate all of these art forms to the classroom curriculum.

In California, the State University system sponsors Summer Arts--a two to four week residency program which offers skill development in individual arts and the potential for interdisciplinary exploration. In a two-week intensive course, participants share in curriculum planning and creative approaches to the teaching of visual arts, music, drama and dance in K-12 schools. Teachers are able to take the course for undergraduate or graduate credit.

Each of these programs stress that the arts should be viewed as interrelated components with many possibilities for collaboration. As Claes Oldenburg has said, "The whole point is to expand our possibilities. (Collaboration) tends to deepen ideas, expand them, and give them more authority." The following introduction in Arts and Education Handbook: A Guide to Productive Collaborations sums up the case for collaborative arts in our schools: "The arts, like the sciences, comprise a vast repository of human knowledge. Through these forms, humans have expressed and communicated some of their most brilliant insights and achievements. Because the arts constitute a living history of eras and peoples and a record and revelation of the human spirit, they should be basic in the education of every citizen." (2)

(1) Craig Bromberg. "That Collaborative Itch." ArtNews, (Nov. 1988) Vol. 17, No. 9, P. 163.

(2) Jonathan Katz, ed. Arts and Education Handbook: A Grade to Productive Collaborations, 1988. National Assembly of State Agencies, 1010 Vermont Ave., NW, Washington, D.C.

Regina E. Neu is Director of Continuing Education, The Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, Georgia.