The year was 1984: the MTV Video Music Awards debuted and Prince, Tina Turner and Kenny Loggins topped charts.
Stunningly, the local performing arts scene was even worse when Kathy Silbiger arrived in Durham and became programming director of the Institute of the Arts, a now-defunct University office.
Weeks before her retirement as head of Duke Performances Dec. 31, 2006, Silbiger reflected on the changes she had helped to create at Duke and in the Triangle.
"I moved here because my husband got a job here, a typical trailing wife tale. I looked around-and you've gotta remember, this was 21 years ago-there was nothing, not just at Duke but in the area," chuckled Silbiger, who had been working at the Madison Civic Center in Madison, Wisc. "My job was to create programs, so I just started doing that."
As she leaves her post, she can consider a successful arts series, several programs for students and a burgeoning Triangle arts scene as changes she helped to create.
"I feel good about the fact that I created some academic programs that have continued, and got Duke in Los Angeles and Duke in New York started," she said. "I feel like I have incubated a number of projects that have gone on to become an integral part of arts at Duke, and I feel good to have really raised the profile of Duke as a forward-thinking presenter."
Aaron Greenwald, who became interim director of Duke Performances Jan. 1, said the University has developed a national reputation for quality performances during her tenure.
"What's really interesting to me is that Kathy has taken the international and research missions of this institution very seriously in her presenting, so she presented international artists years before anyone was else was very seriously pursing world music or world dance," he said. "Certainly taking those chances in North Carolina, she was the first. Her vision of the arts is an incredibly democratic one in that she realizes the more good art available the better."
The Institute of the Arts was a large, ambiguously defined office. It encompassed not only programming, but also attracting guest artists and artists-in-residence and promoting events sponsored by arts-related academic departments. Silbiger said she has missed the latter two roles since Duke Performances came about in a reorganization three years ago.
In addition to Duke in New York (now run by the English department), Duke in Los Angeles (a program created with and controlled by the Program in Film/Video/Digital), she helped create an international jazz festival held between 1988 and 1990, which featured names like Wynton Marsalis and Lionel Hampton.
Silbiger-a classically trained trumpeter and primarily a classical listener-also worked to diversify the offerings available at Duke.
"I was feeling as though the scene here was a little bit Western-centered," she said of the 1989 creation of a "Living Traditions" series of world-arts performances. Silbiger added that through her work she was able to develop a deep appreciation for and knowledge about jazz and modern dance, two genres with which she had been mostly unfamiliar.
But she said she has been frustrated that students were not so willing to explore lesser-known forms, and said she has come under fire for not booking popular acts-something she feels ought to be the province of the student-run Duke University Union.
"I wish that Duke students were more adventurous and creative and would see out new experiences; but maybe that's human nature or maybe I haven't done enough to make it cool," she said. "I don't blame people."
She also said bad facilities-especially Page and Baldwin auditoriums-and lack of funding have been challenges.
"It sends a message to audiences, and to students-does Duke really care, if this is the kind of facility we provide?" she said. "That's made this job harder than it should have been."
But with the emphasis on the arts in the University's new strategic plan, passed by the Board of Trustees in September, Silbiger said she hopes her successors will have more leeway, and said the future for the arts at Duke can be very positive.
In a December interview, Provost Peter Lange, whose office subsidizes $5 tickets for students at all Duke Performances events, emphasized Duke's commitment to the arts.
"We're on an upward trajectory for the arts on this campus and that's in curricular terms and co-curricular terms, as well as in terms of opportunities for the community," he said.
Greenwald, who will serve for 18 months, said Silbiger's pioneering work has helped to create a boom of programming throughout the Triangle that threatens to crowd Duke out. He said he hopes to combat that with themed, interdisciplinary miniseries, including one for the 90th anniversary of the birth of legendary jazzman Thelonious Monk. The Monk series, he said, would tie into research about the North Carolina-born pianist being done at the Center for Documentary Studies.
"My hope is that we'd be able to get not only into music classrooms but into dance, history, anthropology and so on," he said.
Other plans include international series-the first focusing on Brazil-and a Spring 2008 set on North Carolina rhythm and blues, from 1950s crooner Clyde McPhatter, a Durham native, to Charlotte-born neo-soulman Anthony Hamilton.
As for Silbiger, she said she'll be taking some time off to live in New York City, travel to Argentina and do volunteer work. And then, she said, it will be time to pick up her horn again. After a quarter century of cultivating other people's art, it's tough to begrudge her the opportunity to work on her own.?
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