Word: ofa
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...Office for the Arts (OFA) would have you believe that it serves as the soil, fertilizer and watering hose for creativity at Harvard. Such a pose, which the OFA strikes in its introductory pamphlet and in its newsletters, really overestimates the support provided by the University to the arts here. While the OFA does serve to centralize Harvard's efforts to inspire (and ability to control) artistic endeavor, it also over hypes the impact of the facilities and services it offers to student groups...
...Practice and Performance," OFA's "Guide to the Arts at Harvard and Radcliffe," is a fine showcase for what's happening on campus. But the groups detailed in the brochure actually have very little to do with the OFA. Like the cover photograph of an ancient bas relief from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the organizations included in "Practice and Performance" have only the vaguest correlation to the OFA. They are ordinarily self-sufficient entities which would not have existed except for student initiative and would just as easily pass from the scene without it. Take, for example...
...major discrepancy, though, between the image of the OFA as an overarching bureaucratic entity and the reality of it as a fine public relations organization lies in the provision of performance space. The Kuumba Singers, a group dedicated to the presentation of works in the African-American musical tradition, cannot secure rehearsal space anywhere in the University. According to a senior member of that group, the room in Sever Hall which it made use of last year has been assigned to the extension school and the other spaces which the OFA can make available are either too small or give...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company also has run into scheduling conflicts with the OFA. Co-director Miranda J. Hodgson '97 praises the new Studio 74 rehearsal space and the grant money her organization receives from the OFA "without which we could not stay solvent." But she complains of the difficulty of performing at Radcliffe Dance Center because the Company must clear its stage set (including flats, scrim, strip lights and trees) after every performance to accommodate dance classes given by Radcliffe. Performance, it seems, gets second priority at Radcliffe...
...Sonic Jigsaw," as the name might suggest, is just the type of adventurous project the OFA loves to fund; it received one of the largest grants, $500. Coordinated by the student group EMBRYO (Experimental Music BRing Your Own)," Sonic Jigsaw" is an interactive exhibit in which participants will become "noise artists," as they play with various experimental disguised sounds. People will be able to select sections of sound and modulate those sounds, while they move the noise from chaos to one individual harmony...