Placing Space

Interdisciplinary exchange is vital to any creative endeavor. This concept took on new meaning in June 2006, when the Clarice Smith Center brought together established visiting choreographers Dana Reitz and Bebe Miller with Visiting Associate Professor Ronit Eisenbach from the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation. Their creative collaboration resulted in an extraordinary three-week course, "Placing Space: Architecture, Action, Dimension," that engaged 13 students from the fields of dance, architecture, American studies, education, photography, and anthropology in an exploration of the inter-relationship of human movement and space. The course is over, but the work lives on in two upcoming events.

November 8, 2006

Lecture by choreographer and performer Dana Reitz at the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation Auditorium

Opening reception following Reitz lecture at the Kibel Gallery in the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation

November 7 – December 8, 2006

Summer Works, an installation designed by the students incorporating video and images from "Placing Space."

"The interdisciplinary experience is transformational, collegial, open-ended and expansive; education in one of its richest forms. The play of multiple teaching methods and teaching media has pushed us into new areas of practice and understanding. We have each been engaged to the maximum of our attention and abilities at all times...

The Center for Creative Research (CCR)

CCR is a four-year pilot project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, initiated through NEFA's National Dance Project and now administered by LINC, Leveraging Investments in Creativity. CCR is an innovative strategy designed to link established artists with colleges and universities committed to scholarly research and the performing arts.

The overall goal of the Center is to re-invigorate the relationship between the mature individual artist and the academy — a relationship that is, at its best, deeply dynamic and reciprocal. By acknowledging artists as senior researchers, and by facilitating meaningful exchanges between artists, scholars and other members of the campus community, CCR expects to strengthen interdisciplinary connections on campus and increase the depth of students' experiential learning. The University of Maryland is one of three pilot sites at which CCR has developed a set of pilot residencies.