Claire Trevor School of the Arts

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Claire Trevor School of the Arts
UCIfinearts.jpg
Claire Trevor Theater and related structure
Claire Trevor School of the Arts
General information
Architectural style Brutalist
Town or city Irvine, California
CountryUnited States of America
Construction started1969
Completed1970
Client University of California, Irvine
Technical details
Structural systemReinforced concrete
Design and construction
Architect(s) William Pereira
Structural engineerBrandow & Johnston
Website
Official website

The Claire Trevor School of the Arts (CTSA, Claire Trevor) is an academic unit at the University of California, Irvine, focused on the performing and visual arts. The four departments housed in the school are for art, dance, drama, and music. CTSA has undergraduate programs, masters programs, and a doctoral program in drama conducted jointly with UC San Diego.

Contents

Architecture and history

The school was named in honor of Academy Award-winning Hollywood actress Claire Trevor (1910–2000), [1] a longtime resident of nearby Newport Beach and the stepmother of UCI benefactor Donald Bren. The school represents the largest contribution to the campus by architect William Pereira, who oversaw its construction in 1970. It features a distinctive "modular" design in which individual buildings are connected by an overhead network of pillar-supported canopies. Early architectural sketches showed a design incorporating a lattice of broadly curved columns around the buildings, this was ultimately simplified into the flared solid forms of the buildings themselves. In 2005, the school's landscape was redesigned by Maya Lin in a retro-futuristic style, featuring an outdoor theater, fountains, decorative LED lighting and landscaping with native grasses and wildflowers. In fall 2011, the new "green" Contemporary Arts Center opened in the heart of the school, a $42.35-million building equipped with studios and spaces for displaying, staging, and producing art. [2] It serves as the new anchor for the art school complex.

Departments and faculty

Art department

Founded under the name Studio Art, the department renamed itself in 2012. It teaches a wide range of contemporary media, including drawing, electronic art and design, new genres, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video and digital filmmaking. The department has around 20 full-time faculty members and accepts about 10 graduate students each year into its three-year M.F.A. program.

Dance department

The UCI Dance department teaches ballet, modern dance, improvisation, and jazz performance and choreography, as well as courses in the history of dance, dance medicine and science, and the integration of dance with interactive technologies such as motion capture and telematics. [3]

Drama department

Robert Cohen organized an undergraduate repertory company that took Oedipus Rex on the road to UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz in the department's early years. Other early productions included The Assassination of Jean Paul Marat by the Marquis de Sade , "Little Mary Sunshine", Night of the Iguana and Midsummer Night's Dream . [4] William Inge, author of such plays as Bus Stop, Picnic, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs taught playwriting in the drama department in the 1970s. Jerzy Grotowski, acting theorist and founder of the Polish Laboratory Theater, joined the drama faculty in 1983, [5] and conducted his Objective Drama project in the fields and barn south of the main campus. UCI graduate drama student James Slowiak was his chief assistant during the project years. [5]

Music department

The Music department offers both a B.A. and a B.Mus at the undergraduate level, as well as a two-year M.F.A. degree program. Emphases at the Master's level include choral conducting, collaborative piano, guitar/lute performance, instrumental and piano performance, and vocal arts. There is also a Ph.D. degree in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) and Musicology. [6]

Deans

The current dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts is Tiffany Ana López. López is a professor of dramaturgy and, as dean, she holds the Claire Trevor Professor endowed chair in CTSA.

Notable alumni

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References

  1. "Archives". Los Angeles Times . 24 November 2002.
  2. "UCI arts center overcomes hurdles". articles.dailypilot.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016.
  3. "Welcome to Department of Dance | Claire Trevor School of the Arts | Department of Dance | Claire Trevor School of the Arts". dance.arts.uci.edu.
  4. "UC Irvine Feature: Cohen festival to honor founding arts faculty member". Archived from the original on 2012-08-05. Retrieved 2012-02-27.
  5. 1 2 Koehler, Robert, "O.C. Theater," Los AngelesTimes, 07/23/1991.
  6. "Welcome to Department of Music | Claire Trevor School of the Arts | Department of Music | Claire Trevor School of the Arts". music.arts.uci.edu.

33°38′59″N117°50′42″W / 33.6497°N 117.845°W / 33.6497; -117.845