- Dartington College of Arts
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Coordinates: 50°27′11″N 3°41′31″W / 50.453°N 3.692°W
Dartington College of Arts Active 1961–2008 Admin. staff 30 Undergraduates 500 Postgraduates 60 Doctoral students 50 Location Dartington Hall, Devon, England Campus Rural Website www.dartington.ac.uk 
Lower Close on the Estate.
Dartington College of Arts was a specialist arts institution near Totnes, Devon, South West England, it specialized in post-dramatic theatre, music, choreography, Performance Writing and visual performance, focusing on a performative and multi-disciplinary approach to the arts. In addition to this, lecturing staff were all in some way active arts practitioners. The college held an international reputation for excellence, and aimed to promote a critical self-awareness in contemporary arts practice, and as such was firmly entrenched in post-modernism.
The college was founded in 1961 having evolved as part of the original Dartington Hall experiment in rural regeneration. Academic degrees were validated in partnership with the University of Plymouth.
Dartington College of Arts merged into the University College Falmouth on 6 April 2008, relocating to Falmouth, Cornwall.
Contents
The college's mission
According to the Dartington website, the college's mission is to "...be a radical, innovative Higher Education learning community for contemporary arts practices in performance:
- building upon, sustaining and developing the distinctive Dartington legacy as a high-quality specialist learning community in the creative arts, at the leading edge of innovation in practice-based teaching, research, and professional development in contemporary arts practices in performance.
- providing life-enhancing, or transformational experience in creative practice for all those capable of benefiting from the Dartington experience, and adding value to the social, cultural and economic life of our region.
- nurturing and sustaining distinctive and dependable partnership, through strategic alliances and collaborative initiatives at regional, national and international levels, for the development of our mission within the rapidly-changing context of a global framework for higher education in contemporary arts practice"[citation needed]
One thing that the college is notable for is an interdisciplinary approach to arts practice and to a certain extent students from different courses do not work in isolation from each other. For example the writing students may write scripts which the theatre students then perform etc. As well as this, the college is very keen on international collaboration and in the 3rd year all students go on the Socrates Erasmus scheme to various institutions across the globe with similarly prestigious institutions.
Dartington and Bloomsbury
Leonard Elmhirst, the founder of the Dartington estate, was a member of the Bloomsbury group from the 1920s. The college and Hall became a popular arts location for such figures as Julian Bell, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Dartington has also received special attention from Ravi Shankar, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Siegfried Sassoon and the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo.
Campus
The college is rural and is divided into four campuses, Higher Close, Lower Close, Aller Park and Foxhole. Higher Close is home to the student bar, the Rat and Emu (commonly shortened to 'the Rat'). Many students find the community life enriches their art, and strong identities develop from the individual halls of residences. Accommodation at Higher Close constitutes Henning, Perry and Albermarle and the old Dartington Hall School at Foxhole is subdivided into the Black, Red, Blue, Orange, Yellow, Green and White Houses.
Academics
All BA students embarked on a Contextual Enquiry Project in their third year of study. This was an investigative project and required the student to examine his or her work in a broader social context. The practice was an example of the College's roots in Dartington School and the alternative education movement which developed from the ideas of Rudolf Steiner from the early twentieth century onwards.
Merger with University College Falmouth
Dartington College of Arts has now merged with University College Falmouth[1] and relocated to Cornwall in 2010. This decision was controversial and generated much local protest,[2] including marches and a petition.[citation needed] The official story was that financial problems caused Dartington College of Arts to seek a merger with University College Falmouth, seen as the only way of securing a long time future for the College. This view was highly contentious at the time, and not generally accepted. The merger with University College Falmouth was seen by some[who?] as bringing increased resources, support and opportunity for arts students and greater opportunities for vocational study and post-graduate support. Others saw it as the death of a noble experiment.[3] University College Falmouth aims to use the merger as a springboard to achieve University status[4] by 2012 and create a University of the Arts in South West England.
Dartington College of Arts was one of the last remaining specialist arts colleges in the UK, with the remainder — apart from a very small holdouts — all now swallowed up by larger institutions. In 2010 the UK government announced the removal of all funding for undergraduates[5] in all but a very few, science-based subjects, inevitably causing fees to rise significantly, and perhaps further compromising the quality and status of arts education.
References
- ^ University College Falmouth, UK.
- ^ Steven Morris (28 December 2006). "Battle to save celebrated cradle of cutting edge art". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/dec/28/arts.highereducation. Retrieved 5 February 2011.
- ^ Anthea Lipsett (10 March 2008). "Last-ditch attempt to halt Dartington merger". Education Guardian (The Guardian). http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/mar/10/highereducation.cutsandclosures. Retrieved 5 February 2011.
- ^ An international centre for the arts in the South West, Newsletter, University College Falmouth, UK.
- ^ Top UK universities warn of damage from budget cuts, BBC News, UK, 12 January 2010.
External links
Categories:- Educational institutions established in 1961
- Art schools in England
- Education in Devon
- University College Falmouth
- 1961 establishments in England
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