In our New School Histories class today we tried to tell the heart-stopping story of the University in Exile in a new way. This turned out not to be necessary, as it turned out; it was the first most of the class had heard of it! But it was fun to tell it in a new way, and in the headspace of the centennial of the New School.
To the usual story we added granular detail of how the University in Exile was conceived, funded and staffed - choosing which endangered scholars to try to rescue must have been unbelievable painful, and then getting them over hard in many other ways. We pointed out that Alvin Johnson was well positioned to direct this project through the work he'd done as associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences - the University in Exile happened at The New School because the school was already the hub of an international community of scholars.
But not just scholars - the nearly two hundred refugees scholars granted safe passage by the New School included many artists, a part of the story which warrants remembering, especially given the kind of school we've become. So we talked about the Dramatic Workshop, established by Johnson with refugee director Erwin Piscator, building out an already thriving theater program to meld American and European theater practice, Epic Theater and Broadway. Berlin, New York and Moscow!
It's an exciting story of its own, and paints a quite different picture of what the New School was and represented in the 1940s. We'd become a center for the arts in the 20s and 30s, learning to appreciate the modern arts as themselves forms of social research, and this took it to a new level. The grafting of the work of Piscator and his partner Maria Ley onto that of Theresa Heilburn and John Gassner, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg was just the kind of "Renaissance" which Johnson had seen the University in Exile ushering in, bringing European thinking to American materials. The New School at that time was humming with these Renaissance energies, new sciences and arts in a new kind of synergy.
The Dramatic Workshop has fallen out of our story, although it is the source of most of the celebrity alums we used to claim. The New School parted ways with it in 1949, and the school's commitment to theater subsided. It never disappeared, of course. Indeed, Mary Ley Piscator tried to bring the spirit of the Dramatic Workshop back twice, in the 1960s and at the end of the 1980s, when Dramatic Workshop alumna Judith Malina offered a "Dramatic Workshop II." Theater came back in a more substantial way a few years later, with a partnership with the Actors Studio, which lasted for a while (its new home Pace University now claims the whole legacy), but just looking at the constantly changing names suggests that theater's place has never been stable.
It's fitting in its way that Maria Ley Piscator's students in 1965 offered "An Evening with Kafka"! It may be fruitless to consider what the place of theater (or anything else, for that matter) will be at The New school in a hundred years. But it's worth considering the power that awareness of such legacies - both the days of glory and how short lived they were (barely a decade for Dramatic Workshop or Actors Studio) - might have in shaping it. Meanwhile, the shining example of the University in Exile suggests ways The New School might again become a path-breaking haven for scholars aborad. (Bob Kerrey, the New School president who ended the relationship with the Actors Studio, also unsuccessfully proposed a new university in exile for scholars from the Middle East.)
Today, the New School offers BFAs and BAs in theater (at the College of Performing Arts and the College of Liberal Arts, respectively), while the MFA seems to be on hiatus. The legacy of the University in Exile has recently been reactivated in the New University in Exile Consortium, spanning fifteen universities but homed at The New School. And we have a new president coming in Spring. What next?
To the usual story we added granular detail of how the University in Exile was conceived, funded and staffed - choosing which endangered scholars to try to rescue must have been unbelievable painful, and then getting them over hard in many other ways. We pointed out that Alvin Johnson was well positioned to direct this project through the work he'd done as associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences - the University in Exile happened at The New School because the school was already the hub of an international community of scholars.
But not just scholars - the nearly two hundred refugees scholars granted safe passage by the New School included many artists, a part of the story which warrants remembering, especially given the kind of school we've become. So we talked about the Dramatic Workshop, established by Johnson with refugee director Erwin Piscator, building out an already thriving theater program to meld American and European theater practice, Epic Theater and Broadway. Berlin, New York and Moscow!
The Dramatic Workshop has fallen out of our story, although it is the source of most of the celebrity alums we used to claim. The New School parted ways with it in 1949, and the school's commitment to theater subsided. It never disappeared, of course. Indeed, Mary Ley Piscator tried to bring the spirit of the Dramatic Workshop back twice, in the 1960s and at the end of the 1980s, when Dramatic Workshop alumna Judith Malina offered a "Dramatic Workshop II." Theater came back in a more substantial way a few years later, with a partnership with the Actors Studio, which lasted for a while (its new home Pace University now claims the whole legacy), but just looking at the constantly changing names suggests that theater's place has never been stable.
It's fitting in its way that Maria Ley Piscator's students in 1965 offered "An Evening with Kafka"! It may be fruitless to consider what the place of theater (or anything else, for that matter) will be at The New school in a hundred years. But it's worth considering the power that awareness of such legacies - both the days of glory and how short lived they were (barely a decade for Dramatic Workshop or Actors Studio) - might have in shaping it. Meanwhile, the shining example of the University in Exile suggests ways The New School might again become a path-breaking haven for scholars aborad. (Bob Kerrey, the New School president who ended the relationship with the Actors Studio, also unsuccessfully proposed a new university in exile for scholars from the Middle East.)
Today, the New School offers BFAs and BAs in theater (at the College of Performing Arts and the College of Liberal Arts, respectively), while the MFA seems to be on hiatus. The legacy of the University in Exile has recently been reactivated in the New University in Exile Consortium, spanning fifteen universities but homed at The New School. And we have a new president coming in Spring. What next?
