In the spring of 1999, Cal Performances presented director Peter Sellars' updated version of the Chinese opera "Peony Pavilion" -- an avant-garde twist on a 16th-century classic that Bay Area critics hailed as the must-see music-theater event of the season. For campus scholars, however, events related to the show that took place off stage were as worthy of praise as the production itself. These events included a two-day symposium to discuss the opera -- its history, adaptation, production, and cultural ramifications -- that drew notable professors and critics from around the country. Taken together, the "Peony Pavilion" events typified the broad reach and outstanding quality of the arts at UC Berkeley. It also signaled a remarkable effort by faculty associated with Berkeley's new Consortium for the Arts, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Chinese Studies to form a partnership and to use the stage production as a springboard for diving into an array of intellectual explorations. The Consortium for the Arts' involvement with "Peony Pavilion" marked its inauguration as a broad-based campus effort to complement and coordinate the work of individual arts departments. The consortium's mission is twofold: to facilitate and sponsor interdisciplinary collaborations in the arts on campus, and to organize and teach programs that enable students and faculty to take the fullest possible advantage of university-sponsored performances and exhibitions. Departments are organizing workshops in conjunction with performances and exhibits in order to draw more students and faculty to arts events on campus. Faculty are finding more common ground between those who create art and those who critique it. And more faculty are starting to consider ways to use art practices as a pedagogical tool in the humanities. The consortium was initiated by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Carol Christ, who foresaw the opportunity for greater interaction between individual arts departments, and between artists and their colleagues in the humanities. "With the synergies an arts consortium will encourage, Berkeley will stimulate the kinds of collaborative projects that will distinguish it as one of the country's leading places for significant art," she noted. Its director, Professor Charles Altieri, says the consortium will continue to expand and enrich opportunities for students. Undergraduates, he says, can take advantage of numerous seminars offered in conjunction with residencies by artists and performers, and they are encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary art practice or research. And graduate students, he says, now have phenomenal opportunities to do advanced research that combines criticism with art-making. "M.F.A.'s in drama, dance, art, or film can work closely with both scholars and makers, so that we expect eventually to realize director Peter Sellars's dream of universities producing art that could only be made because of resources available at great research universities," says Altieri. "Conversely, Ph.D.'s in all the humanities departments working on aspects of contemporary culture have extraordinary access to artists participating in the shaping of possible futures for that culture." These exciting developments would not be happening, however, without the talents of individual faculty members. This chapter highlights four professors who represent the diverse and exceptional work of Berkeley's arts faculty. Each is an artist -- an actor, musician, painter, and filmmaker. And each is a scholar, too, whose art is deeply informed by their studies in fields such as literature, history, politics, and women's studies. Their work blurs the distinction between the arts and humanities in ways that benefit both.
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