{Photograph} courtesy of Kennesaw State College
Dr. Ivan Pulinkala arrived as a dance professor at Kennesaw State College in 2005 with a giant job: Construct the college a dance division. “We had theater, music, and the visible arts, [but] the lacking element was dance,” says Pulinkala. He began with a dance minor, which drew 140 college students by the second 12 months. Subsequent, he satisfied the Board of Regents so as to add a dance main, after which, in 2012, a whole division. It’s since develop into the biggest collegiate dance program in Georgia and extremely regarded all through the dance world.
Now, after years of concerted effort by Pulinkala and his colleagues, and because of a beneficiant bequest by the late Robert (Bob) S. Geer, former vice chairman of the railway firm Norfolk Southern, KSU’s arts departments will get a grand new residence: an arts hall at Chastain Pointe, adjoining to the unique Kennesaw campus. The Geer household present of $10 million will present the college’s School of the Arts—comprising dance, theater, music, and visible arts—with seed funding to construct a sweeping new set of buildings and creative area over a number of years. “It will give us room to develop and develop,” says Pulinkala.
{Photograph} courtesy of Kennesaw State College
Pulinkala, now the college’s provost and govt vice chairman of educational affairs, believes the dance division’s success presents a preview of how additional funding within the arts may domesticate distinctive excellence for the college. “A terrific college will be outlined by many issues; a kind of is athletics, and one other is the humanities,” says Pulinkala.
The plans to develop Chastain Pointe date again to 2009, when the fast-growing dance division started hungering for more room. KSU had just lately bought the property, which was aptly known as “warehouse row” on the time. “So I went to the president and provost and stated, ‘Give me a kind of warehouses,’” Pulinkala recollects. “‘I promise you, we simply want huge, empty areas.’”
Over the previous decade, the dance division, together with the College of Artwork and Design’s portray and drawing and printmaking applications, have relocated to a renovated portion of the Chastain Pointe complicated. However Geer’s present makes it doable to convey into actuality the total imaginative and prescient: an arts hall with about 200,000 sq. ft of area, sufficient to deal with all 4 colleges of the School of the Arts, together with outside efficiency venues, inexperienced area, and fashionable studios and lecture rooms.
Although that full facility remains to be underway, KSU’s funding in its dance division is already paying dividends. The brand new Chastain Pointe residence contains studios with sprung flooring and Marley dance surfaces, and costume and set retailers. The 435-seat KSU Dance Theater, positioned close by on the Marietta campus, was designed particularly for dance efficiency.
Marsha Barsky, present chair of the dance division, says the upgraded services have had an instantaneous impact on college students: “You’ll be able to actually see the growth of their our bodies,” she says. “Having this a lot area transforms the best way they transfer.”
It has additionally reworked this system. House to the aggressive Eleo Pomare–Glenn Connor Summer time Choreographic Residency, the division has achieved nationwide and regional recognition, having been chosen a number of instances to carry out on the Kennedy Middle in Washington, DC, certainly one of few faculty dance applications to obtain the dignity. The corporate often performs at occasions held by the American School Dance Affiliation and hosts an annual high-school dance competition for aspiring younger dancers.
Bringing collectively your complete School of the Arts—renamed the Robert S. Geer Household School of the Arts in honor of Geer’s contribution—is greater than only a sensible imaginative and prescient. Autumn Eckman, assistant professor of dance, believes the bodily proximity between arts disciplines will facilitate inventive connections amongst college students.
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is already occurring,” she says. Gathering the 4 colleges collectively “will bodily open the door to new potentialities for college kids.”
This text seems in our February 2025 situation.
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