June 23, 2025

One afternoon last fall, eight years after my last visit to Bennington for my fiftieth reunion, I found myself on a balcony in Greenwall Auditorium, observing a series of rehearsals by students and faculty of a newly blended dance program, called Dance Lab, that weeks earlier had incorporated thirty-six students and a number of faculty members from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts (UArts). 

Down on the main floor, Jesse Zaritt, a Brooklyn-based dance artist, led a run-through of Dance Lab choreographer Sidra Bell’s latest work for the students. Then Cameron Childs, a teacher/administrator with the BFA program, saw another group through a balletic piece by Gary W. Jeter II, a UArts MFA graduate now on the faculty of the same Dance Lab. Both pieces and others were part of a concert shown at Bennington and then again in Philadelphia in December. The rehearsals I saw evidenced a kind of highly technical, expressive dancing notably different from Bennington’s dance program, which is generally more experimental, personal, and improvisational. Around me on that balcony were several students waiting their turn to perform, a couple of others nursing injuries, and Donna Faye Burchfield, developer of the beloved UArts dance program. 

Burchfield, whose students call her “DFaye,” was the longtime dean of the American Dance Festival, which began life at Bennington in 1934. She had been the dean of dance at UArts for 14 years when she received a disconcerting message: her workplace was closing down in a week. An arts educator with more than 40 years’ experience, she swung into action. 

A compact dynamo with a graying braid and a brisk, engaging manner, Burchfield is a native of Georgia who trained at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and received BFA and MFA degrees before joining the administrative staff of the American Dance Festival in 1984. Founded by Martha Hill at Bennington when the College itself was only two years old, ADF has been the spine of modern dance training in the United States for nearly a century and exposes students and teachers from across the country to the latest and best developments in the art form for six weeks every summer. The festival migrated from Bennington to Connecticut College in New London in 1948, and then to Durham, North Carolina, in 1978. Burchfield became dean at ADF in 2000, only the third person to hold the position, succeeding the late Martha Myers; in 2003 she also began directing the MFA program at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, after having been teaching there since 1993, simultaneously with her administrative and teaching duties at ADF.

When an educational institution fails—goes bankrupt, closes down without warning—lives are disrupted. Faculty and staff members lose their jobs. Entering students have to make other plans. Matriculated students must, as well. UArts shut its doors on June 7, 2024, a few days after announcing its financial difficulties. It has since filed for bankruptcy liquidation. The school, which grew over about 150 years through the mergers of various visual arts and musical academies with a dance school and eventually a theater department, attained university status in 1987 and was a training ground for many luminaries in music and art. Its dance program, originally known as the Philadelphia Dance Academy, produced Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey’s muse and later the director of his company, who died last fall at 81. 

Dean Burchfield was understandably frantic; her thirty-one MFA students were holding airline tickets and about to depart for their summer term in Montpellier, France. She had dozens of undergraduates expecting to continue their training at the Philadelphia institution and newly admitted students knocking at the door. Laura Walker, the president of Bennington, and Provost Maurice Hall sprang to her aid, urged, said Provost Hall, by two UArts deans who “have kids here at Bennington.” 

“The UArts dance program’s mission, rooted in the liberal arts, matches Bennington’s values,” said Hall. “It’s a wonderful complement, dare I say marriage, both the BFA and the Low-Residency MFA.” The UArts dance division was the only one of the University’s programs to be “adopted” in quite this way. 

The Bennington dance faculty and the Philly teachers were deeply familiar with one another’s work, which smoothed the way for the new alliance. “Within the first day, I got emails from my faculty asking, ‘Can we help?’” said Walker. “Our enrollment is the highest it’s ever been, but we had space for around thirty-seven students. And we’re delighted that it’s a really diverse group from countries around the world.” 

Dana Reitz, choreographer, dancer, and visual artist, has taught at Bennington for 30 years. “We were asked by Laura [Walker] and Maurice [Hall] if we were OK with them joining us in some way, in our spaces, with a very different agenda and different needs. There was a very intensive technical schedule that they wanted to keep… We respect the journey and the agony and everything they went through.” 

A hastily assembled task force managed, in a week, to raise $1 million to underwrite the MFA program’s mission to Montpellier and other expenses involved in transplanting thirty-six UArts undergraduates, their teachers, and a few staffers from Philly to Bennington. Sebastian Scripps, the son of Louise Scripps who, with her husband Samuel, had been a longtime benefactor of the American Dance Festival, came through with most of the necessary funds; other contributions came from the Ford Foundation and the Transformational Partnerships Fund.

The arrival of the former UArts students and faculty on the Bennington campus is not, Burchfield hastened to say, “program acquisition.” “We’re developing a new experimental, likely mobile, BFA program.” As many as fourteen members of her full-time UArts faculty have taken part-time work, paid by the course, in order to join her in Vermont. They are continuing the developing relationships they have with the students and their creative and technical efforts. 

Bennington’s financial aid office “matched or beat the aid students had at UArts,” said Provost Hall. The dance students, a lively, energetic, and diverse community whose previous training was in some ways closer to the conservatory emphasis of a place like Juilliard than to the free-ranging, experimental model in use at Bennington, appear to be having a wonderful time. Five newcomers enrolled directly into the College’s BA program. 

Nate Tantral-Johnson ’26, a 19-year-old student from Stratford, Connecticut, had been at UArts for one year when the news broke. “I really don’t know what I would have done without Bennington. I was preparing to travel to France as a research assistant with the School of Dance MFA program, and all of a sudden, I had to look into transferring schools or taking a gap year, neither of which seemed like the right option.”

He continued, “The program that DFaye cultivated [is] like nothing else. She’s teaching us to tune our attention, priming us as critical thinkers, encouraging us to engage with art in a special and unique way. I couldn’t just go back home to Connecticut after being in that world. It would be like closing my eyes. I’ve joked about how I would be willing to follow her halfway around the world, but in some part, that’s true. And now I’ve followed her to Vermont. I think what we’ve been able to build here is incredible. The way we think about education and community has been totally recontextualized. It’s such a fragile thing, and that means you have to hold each other tighter. The other students have kept me grounded. There’s so much support.”

Cat Bauermann ’25, a native of Baltimore now in the final term of their BFA degree, chose UArts because of its hip-hop offerings. They “felt completely lost” when the closure was announced and fought hard to keep the UArts program alive in Philly by writing dozens of letters to politicians and others on social media. “If it hadn’t been available to continue DFaye’s program,” they observed, they would probably have left school and headed to a metropolitan area where they could continue performing, in New York or Los Angeles or Amsterdam; “I would continue my education in the ‘real world,’” which would be their classroom instead. They are trying “not to calculate, but to follow my heart.” Bauermann is thrilled that Philadelphia hip-hop leader Kyle Clark is teaching at Bennington now. “I’m in Kyle’s POD (Performance Pedagogies),” a series of intensive weekends that enable students to continue their engagement with hip-hop in Vermont. They are delighted with the similarity between “the moral compass at UArts and at Bennington” and glad to have access to “places like ‘the Cave’ in VAPA, with new resources and new tools” that feed their special interest in making dance films. 

Three of the UArts students enrolled in Reitz’s multidisciplinary Collaboration in Light, Movement, and Clothes, taught with designers Michael Giannitti and Tilly Grimes last fall. Bauermann said of that class, “the BA students study a million different things; working alongside them has made me reorient my perspective. What they see in a dance work, versus what I see, has shed a light on different ways of making things. It’s been incredible to experience how someone sees my work because that person is a sculptor.” 

What does the future hold for Bennington’s newest dance program? Walker said, “We’re figuring it out. We’re learning from having Donna Faye and the BFA in Dance students and faculty on campus. We could move [the program] back to a center in Philadelphia, with a cultural institution [there] as partner. We want to be a little out of the box. What could a mobile dance campus look like, embedded in Philadelphia? It will be experimental in several ways.”