From pages 31-33

 

If a unique environment, an atmosphere and culture seem a little vague, more tangible aspects of the College’s uniqueness are represented by at least certain key achievements that can be claimed as pioneering. I will name eight; there are others.

 

First, the College brought all the arts together. There had previously been other instances of this although not in the UK. Black Mountain College in South Carolina and the Bauhaus in Europe spring to mind, as do the arts workshops of early revolutionary USSR, but Dartington belongs in this company. Second, it had a progressive atmosphere and an insistence on “learning by doing” which it inherited from other enterprises based at Dartington, most notably Dartington’s famous progressive school. The college and the school were sometimes confused with one another. They were different institutions, and should not be seen as different expressions of an identical educational philosophy. Yet there is no doubt that from the outset Dartington College was looser, far less authoritarian and formal than other colleges in the UK. A certain casualness in dress and demeanour, a student centred approach to teaching and learning, and even the mere use of first-name terms for all staff and students – all added up to a culture of relaxed and lenient informality with, nevertheless, a degree of real dedication to the arts. These are commonplace now, but were not so in the early years of Dartington College of Arts.

 

Third, Dartington was the first college in the country to employ non-Western musicians in residence. This began with Indian musicians in the 1960s and continued for many years. As the general brand of “world music” gathered momentum from the 1980s onwards some degree of internationalism became less unusual. By this time Dartington had long since purchased a Balinese gamelan orchestra – not unique in the UK but certainly unusual.

 

Fourth, in the 1980s, responding to the rise of Community Arts nationally, Dartington ran a course in community music making – again the first in the country.

        

Fifth, Dartington’s four-year theatre course, beginning in the 1970s, was the first of its kind whereby one year was spent entirely away from college with the brief of making theatre for and with local communities either in Rotherhithe, London, or Stonehouse, Plymouth. The brainchild of Colette King, Head of Theatre, the basic idea was to put theatre at the service of “those communities which the established theatre does not normally serve.” (16) As far as educational institutions were concerned, this democratization of theatre training was, without doubt, ahead of the game.

 

Sixth, a similar impulse lay behind the Art in Social Context course which began in the 1970s when Paul Oliver was Head of Department and developed when Chris Crickmay took over and successfully campaigned for it to become a degree course. Social context was indeed a Dartington College commitment in all arts subjects – writing and music included - from the ‘70s until its demise in 2010.

 

Seventh, dance and theatre projects with the disabled were explored at Dartington. The college could by no means claim to be the first in this line, but it was most certainly a leading influence. It was a centre for contact improvisation as taught to the blind by Steve Paxton, the American dancer who was a pioneer of the technique.

 

Finally, in the 1990s the College fielded two new courses each of which brought together under its own umbrella a range of contemporary practices. They were named Visual Performance and Performance Writing and they ushered onto the cultural stage approaches that subsequently became important influences in the wider world of arts practices. Arts and Ecology was added in the final years.

 

From these achievements and more, plus the symposia, exchanges, publications, conferences and research hosted by the college, flowed international recognition. It really was a seminal player in arts education and the training of artists, and had a reputation for having a progressive edge.

 

From last two pages

 

What is left at Dartington? Very little that a Dartington College devotee would recognize  as of any importance whatsoever. The Summer School of Music continues, as does the Ways With Words literary festival, true. However, the White Hart Dining Room, where I had conversations with the likes of the Sonic Arts Group of New York, Christopher Small, Fred Frith or Gavin Bryars, has been irredeemably spoilt by a long, high curved bar giving the whole place the corporate air of a sterile airport lounge with equally sterile – but trendy - artwork hanging from the old ceiling that it pretty well obscures completely. Along the front of the bar is a timeline  beginning in the Middle Ages and coming almost up to the present. Amongst other events it documents when Dartington Hall School started in the 1920s and when the College of Arts started in 1961. It shows, in 1989, when the College became an independent institution, although it doesn’t say why. What are conspicuous by their absence are the dates the school and the college closed. It is as if neoliberal, marketised, monetised  Dartington is now happy to take the credit for the two serious and genuinely innovative educational enterprises that it was also prepared to let loose into oblivion and thus consign itself to the glib commercial posturings of the heritage industry, conferences, posh wedding bookings and self-important managers. Shamelessly disregarding the jewel in its crown Dartington has become irrelevant to the more radical needs of the 21st century, and now survives by renting its spaces for prices that most arts organizations cannot afford. The estimable Soundart Radio is the only surviving tangible link with the College of Arts, although the Schumacher College (just down the road from the courtyard and gardens) continues to promote interesting courses in broadly green areas of culture, ecology and what it calls transformative learning. In their advertising Schumacher correctly asserts that Dartington is “ one of the finest teaching and learning environment anywhere in the World”. Yes, we knew that…

 

Composer Gavin Bryars, who put his weight behind the Save Dartington College Campaign, wrote to Principal Andrew Brewerton urging him to make sure that the College remain. His prediction for the Estate without the arts college was not wide of the mark.

 

“What would remain, if the college were to be forced out, would be merely a pleasant rural environment for conferences and so on, like so many others around the country, but it would no longer have the resonance that it has at present.”

 

None of this comes as a surprise. I was aware that whatever I had prized about Dartington would depart with the College. There is probably no point in dreaming of a new college or a resuscitated old one. The thread has been broken. The Dartington ethos, however, continues. As Nick Brace said:

 

“We have taken a kind of spirit with us which is outlasting the place. The spirit of the place is what we take forward.”