By the time the students in Bruce Payne's New York-based "Leadership and the Arts" program return from their semester in the city, they will have seen 15 operas, attended some 16 to 20 Broadway and off-Broadway plays, taken in several dance performances, visited a variety of museums, and participated exclusively in the first class that the Metropolitan Opera Guild has ever offered to college students.
This is high culture, and they're living it.
Payne, a lecturer at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, hopes that in addition to introducing his 16 students to some of the best that the New York arts scene has to offer, his program will give them an understanding of art that goes beyond the aesthetic. The program, which is designed primarily for students studying public policy and leadership issues, is intended to introduce participants to questions of leadership, funding and philanthropy that are vital to the artistic community, but perhaps not so visible to those outside of it.
Public policy studies, Payne said, tends to focus on day-to-day concerns without sometimes taking into account the broader questions that stem from these concerns. With his program, which is being offered for the first time this semester, he said he hopes to combine the philosophical and aesthetic issues surrounding art and artistic production with the practical ones that play such a crucial role in the artistic community.
The impetus for the program sprang from three areas of particular interest to Payne: one, his interest in issues of democracy and aesthetics and the intersection between them; two, his "extraordinarily deep interest in opera," which will be a major focal point of the program; and three, his desire to introduce other people to the arts and help them appreciate what can at times be insular art forms if one has not been exposed to their nuances.
"I put those things together to create what I thought would be an outstanding educational opportunity for students and a chance for me to teach about [these] issues in a different way," Payne said.
He emphasized that the program is about more than aesthetic appreciation, although that is of course a crucial aspect. "It's a leadership program," he said. Artists "are people who manage to get excellence with inadequate resources.É I've wondered what the field of leadership would be like" if it dealt more with the issue of arts leadership.
Because there has always been a finite amount of funding for the arts, members of that community have been forced to think of innovative ways to deal with limited resources. Payne, who directed the public policy institute's leadership program when it was developed in 1985, said that it is in this kind of creativity that many of the lessons of leadership can be found.
During the semester, students will take three classes and have the choice either to take a fourth at New York University or participate in an internship or independent study. Two of the classes will be taught by Payne: "Leadership and Quality in the Arts" and "Policy, Philanthropy and the Arts."
The other class is truly unique. "Grand Opera: Music and Drama, Performance and Politics," will be taught by Robert Bucker, director of education at the Metropolitan Opera Guild. It will mark the first time that the guild has ever offered a class to college students, and it is being offered exclusively to participants in Payne's program.
"This will combine music, dance, visual arts, the elements of architecture and set design," Bucker said. "Opera is a very collaborative art form." Bucker has served as assistant dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and said that he is looking forward to working with students who have not necessarily studied much music and art.
"These are students who are very much on the professional track," he said. "The purpose is for them to gain an appreciation of the art form. If they develop a passion for it, all the better."
Trinity junior Daniel Robinson, an art history major who hopes one day to head up an art gallery in New York or Europe, called the class "a dream come true."
"This is exactly the work I want to do," he said. "I'm hoping to gain some insight into what it takes to be successful."
In addition to seeing operas, Payne said that students will follow a few of them from rehearsal to opening night, which will enable them to get a more intimate picture of the work that goes during the production process. He called this a "total immersion strategy" that he hoped would gain the students interest in an art form that if often seen by many as inaccessible and difficult to understand.
Payne said he hoped that the students in the program would gain a greater understanding of the links between art and leadership, and armed with this insight, perhaps end up one day on the boards of cultural institutions.
"This is a unique chance for 16 Duke students to study leadership, policy, philanthropy and creativity, to learn from people who make art and from others who organize and support it, in the cultural center of the country," he said.
The operas that the students will see and study include Verdi's "Aida," Mozart's "Don Giovanni," Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," Bizet's "Carmen" and Puccini's "Madame Butterfly." Plays will include Terrence McNally's "Master Class," Steve Martin's "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" and August Strindberg's "The Father."
The program is being administered on a trial basis and will be evaluated to determine if it will be offered again.
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