Recently a dance performance was presented at the MITP by students doing the first postgraduate course in dance studies at the University. What were your reactions?
The possibility of studying dance at both the undergraduate and graduate level at our University is undoubtedly a leap forward in tertiary education in the arts for Malta.
The University had begun to provide degree courses in theatre and music studies ever since the University was re-established with the change of government in 1987.
When it began the music studies programme was restricted to musicology but gradually it became possible to provide tuition up to master’s and even doctoral level in both performance, although on only a few instruments, and voice, and composition.
The Theatre Studies division has likewise over the years amplified the practical part of its programme and now also has a specialist in Maltese theatre and more generally post-colonial culture on its staff. Initiating dance studies last October now makes it feasible to start envisaging the provision of a holistic approach to performance studies.
It is interesting to note that two-thirds of those taking up the master’s course came from abroad, no doubt mainly because of the prestige of its co-ordinator, Prof. Joanne Butterworth, formerly of the Research Centre for Dance, University of Leeds, UK, and of Fontys, University of Applied Sciences, Tilburg, the Netherlands.
She is brilliantly assisted by Mavin Khoo, born in Malaysia, an expert both in Bharata Natyam (Indian dance) and Western classical ballet and contemporary dance, and other visiting lecturers.
One of the characteristics of the course is its intended emphasis on contemporary technology.
The performance at the MITP came after only an academic semester of coursework consisting of intensive weeks of residential study in Malta, with the intervening periods bridged over by distance-learning methods.
However, it was clear from this first assessment exercise that the theoretical and historical dimensions of a university education makes a significant difference in the quality of communication by artists using the body as language.
I was particularly happy to note that the offerings of two Maltese participants, Sandra Mifsud and Francesca Abela Tranter, who were admitted to the course on the basis not of a first degree but of their experience and technical preparation, were in no way inferior to those of the American, British and other European participants.
Mifsud choreographed what could have been a socio-political manifesto, while Abela Tranter showed how philosophy could be danced: she presented a modern exegesis of the central part of Aristotle’s ethics, his analysis of the varieties of friendship.
How relevant are such studies in the performing arts to the economic aspects of personal and social life?
I have always thought it paradoxical that we have so many good dance schools, but hardly any dance companies. Most of the dance performances we have in Malta are showcases for the schools, and generally in opera performances it is even more difficult to get a proper corps de ballet than a stageworthy chorus.
To have professional dancers other than teachers is surely a requirement if we are at all serious in our cultural pretensions.
However, the curriculum of the dance course has been deliberately constructed to give room for the education of dance therapists, community workers and similar vocations. It also complements theatre and music studies for the formation of performers who aim at as complete a mastery of body language as possible.
Theatre studies is including as from this year study units in arts management, applicable also to music and dance.
In music, efforts are being made to develop a distinctive character especially at postgraduate level, for instance by making full use of very distinguished musicians who have fortunately taken up residence in Malta, as well as of local musicians such as Philip Ciantar, who has established an international reputation with his ethnographic studies of north African music, and Reuben Zahra whose experiments with the integration of traditional folk instruments and Western orchestral complexes have won him invitations to teach in ethnomusicological courses in Venice and elsewhere.
Courses are also being developed to help improve the quality of all kinds of what one might call popular music, from the Maltese traditional bands to jazz and the multiple uses of electronic technology.
The preparation for Valletta’s appointment as European Capital of Culture for 2018, which the experience of various cities shows to have been more or less successful according to the foresight shown in the building of infrastructure before the year, and in the sustainability of activities afterwards, provides a stimulating context within which to fashion educational systems for the growing generation of performing artists.
Why do you as a priest and philosopher take such an interest in the performing arts?
There has always been a close and intimate relationship between liturgy and all the performing arts, dance and theatre as well as music, since liturgy is essentially a matter of worshipping God with the body.
The renaissance of all the performing arts in contemporary times is correlated with the rediscovery of the significance of ritual both in so-called primitive and in the most sophisticated societies by anthropologists and their like.
If there has been a striking, almost universal trend in contemporary philosophy of religion, it has been a shift in importance given from theology as a ‘science’ to the approach to God by way of the experience of beauty.
Pope Paul VI was a pioneer in effecting this move, which was continued by the actor, poet and dramatist Pope John Paul II, and has culminated in the teaching of the pianist Pope Benedict XVI.
I hope that dialogue between the Faculty of Theology and the Mediterranean Institute will develop beyond their common interest in Judeo-Christian-Muslim relations to that of the affinities between liturgical reform and contemporary theatrical language, including public processions and street theatre.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.