Inside the $46-million USC Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center

Glorya Kaufmans private collection of chandeliers are showcased at the entrance of the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. | Photo: Justina Gaddy

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One week before the October 5 ribbon-cutting ceremony for USC's major new dance center, rows of bagged shrubs still sit in the yard and boxes of kettlebells are stacked by the reception desk. But dance classes have already been underway for a month in the lofty first-floor studios and dean Robert Cutietta is seated relaxedly behind a neat working desk in his top floor office of the broad Collegiate Gothic entity.

When asked to name some of the unexpected challenges he faced pushing through both this brand new arts school - the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, which opened in 2015 - and its concurrent building project - the $46-million Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center, just opened for fall 2016 - Cutietta pulls out one of his business cards.

This, he says, displaying the nifty, new card: one side indicates he's the dean of the Kaufman Dance School and - on the flip side - the card displays his older, continuing position as the dean of USC's Thornton School of Music. This card required presidential approval, he explains. Protocol said you can't have something different on the back than on the front. But I wasn't going to carry two business cards.

Cutietta surely faced more pressing events as this two-story 54,000-square-foot building rose on a prominent corner of campus (at Jefferson Avenue and Watt Way), but this little detail he shares is emblematic of the relative ease of things when you're working at a private university with a project-oriented president, C.L. Max Nikias, and a record-setting gift from longtime L.A. dance philanthropist Glorya Kaufman.

Exterior view of the USC Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. | Photo: Carolyn DiLoreto

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Though designed for just 80 undergraduates - about the same size as Thornton's jazz program - it is the first new school created at USC in 41 years and No one even knew how to do it, Cutietta says. When the school was formally announced in 2012, we had no servers, no email. USC is very decentralized, so every school is on its own, and we had nothing! He pauses. And here we are four years later: we have students, we have hired the entire faculty, we have a staff, we have a building.

Hiring the Thornton School dean as steward of the dance program may seem part of the structural path towards The New Movement, the Kaufman School's widespread branding message that includes interdisciplinary and collaborative intentions with USC's schools of cinematic arts, dramatic arts, and music. But when Cutietta announced the first two major faculty hires - tenured UC Irvine professor Jodie Gates as vice dean; and preeminent, pioneering choreographer William Forsythe as artistic advisor for the Choreographic Institute - it instantly defined a dance conservatory of such international caliber that inter-departmental activities became a bit of a footnote.

William Forsythe. | Photo: Rose Eichenbaum

Forsythe's return to America - after the New York-born artist's 40-plus years in Germany - bears a certain loose comparison to the moment in 1933 when Lincoln Kirstein snagged George Balanchine from Europe to work in New York City. Though Forsythe scoffs at the idea, his choreographic intellect and consistency makes him the closest heir apparent to maestro Balanchine, and his life-changing effect on dancers certainly merits a comparison. Indeed, in her early dance years, Gates shared a trajectory with Forsythe: dancing with him at the Joffrey Ballet, then Frankfurt Ballet. When she was developing initial school curriculum - 40 courses, drawn in the air, she says, before any faculty hires - she was elated when Forsythe agreed to run a Choreographic Institute for the program, with a contract that brings him to USC for three weeks each fall and spring. (He also has a new ongoing relationship with Boston Ballet, and still works on assorted projects in Europe every year.)

Working together to posit what dancers need for training and choreographic growth, Gates and Forsythe added hip-hop to the mainstay of Kaufman dance techniques. Not an adjunct class, hip-hop is taught on equal footing with ballet and contemporary classes (at a time when neither leading NYC conservatory - NYU Tisch or Juilliard - offers any hip-hop in the dance major program). The real New Movement here is how faculty - ballet teacher Patrick McManus, contemporary dancer Patrick Corbin, and UCLA-trained d. Sabela Grimes, an Afro-diasporic dancer/composer - pay attention to how the school's three main techniques - informing training, phrase-making and choreographic structures - rub off each other as time progresses.

Interior view of the USC Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. | Photo: Carolyn DiLoreto

In her office across the hall from Cutietta, Gates' setup is less complete, for the vice dean remains continuously on the fly, leaving in 18 hours on a recruitment tour. Plenty of great dancers apply, she explains, but they must also be able to get into USC first and pay the $51K tuition. (Though some partial scholarships are available, Cutietta describes the Kaufman School as not overly generous with them. My fundraising efforts are geared almost exclusively to scholarships because I know that's what it's going to take to be competitive, he explains.)

Yet Gates cites the Kaufman school's ability to also offer courses that address the current complex climate for dancers - a waning of the traditional one-ch

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/usc-glorya-kaufman-dance-center-ro...
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