The donations, from John and Jody Arnhold, will expand creative work across disciplines, help pay for an annual fall festival and support the jazz program.
The Juilliard School is home to some of the best young musicians, dancers and actors in the world. But they rarely come together to create and perform across disciplines.
Now the renowned conservatory hopes to change that: Juilliard announced on Wednesday that it had received a $15 million gift to help expand creative work across music, dance and drama. An additional $5 million gift will go to the school’s jazz program to support scholarships, performances and teaching.
The gifts are from the investor John Arnhold and his wife, Jody, a dance educator; the $15 million will support the Creative Enterprise program, started in 2018 by Juilliard’s president, Damian Woetzel, to break down barriers between disciplines. That donation will also help pay for an annual fall festival, whose inaugural edition opens on Thursday.
“We want to connect students tangibly with the changing professional world,” Woetzel said in an interview, “and to give them an innovative edge.”
In the Creative Enterprise program, acclaimed artists, or creative associates, as they are known — including the musician Rhiannon Giddens, the actor Bill Irwin and the dancer Lil Buck — come to Juilliard for residencies. The school also produces interdisciplinary projects, like “Bolero Juilliard,” a video filmed during the pandemic that featured a variety of students and alumni performing to Ravel’s score.
This year’s fall festival will feature an array of artists affiliated with the Creative Enterprise program. The composer Nico Muhly and the violist Nadia Sirota are helping shape an outdoor performance of an excerpt from Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha.” The flutist Claire Chase and the choreographer Pam Tanowitz are taking part in a performance exploring American experimentalism.
“This is not a one-way street,” Woetzel said. “These artists get to work with each other. They get to try things that ordinarily they would not get to try.”
John Arnhold said in an interview that he was inspired by Woetzel’s vision for strengthening interdisciplinary work.
“When Damian has something in mind,” Arnhold said, “generally speaking it’s something that I want to get behind.”
He added that he hoped the gifts would “bring further vibrancy to a school that has all of the tools to create the next generation of arts performers, arts educators, arts leaders.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
