The Big Day Draws Near
The Hopkins Center will open its doors on November 8 and mark its inaugural with an eleven-day program of the arts
Precisely at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 8, a brass ensemble on the front balcony of the Hopkins Center will sound a fanfare and the doors of Dartmouth's $7,500,000 home for the creative arts will swing open. It will be a moment long awaited by the College awaited more than thirty years by some who in the late twenties were members of the first planning committee to propose that a center be built.
The opening fanfare on November 8 will be no ordinary fanfare, just as Hopkins Center is no ordinary complex of buildings. This musical flourish has been especially written for the occasion by Darius Milhaud, the celebrated French composer, and it will be heard a number of times during the next ten -days as the Hopkins Center marks its in- augural with a full and varied program embracing all the arts now housed there.
A formal dedication ceremony will be the very first event after the Center opens its doors on November 8. One week later the continuing inaugural program will reach its culmination in a three-day Convocation on the Arts, bringing to Hanover famous representatives from the world of the creative arts. After its opening-day dedication the Center will belong primarily to the undergraduates for the first weekend. This part of the program coincides with Fall Houseparties, and the Center’s plays, concerts, dances, and gallery exhibitions will be a prime attraction for the students and their dates. Between this weekend and the concluding convocation the Center, in more relaxed mood, will be able to hold open house for the community and general public.
The dedication program on opening day will be held in the Spaulding Auditorium at 4 o’clock. Subject to the contingencies of political life, Governor Nelson A. Rocke- feller ’3O of New York and Governor John A. Volpe of Massachusetts, whose construction firm built the Center, will be two of the speakers at the ceremony. Governor Rockefeller was chairman of the original Hopkins Center planning committee, and it is he who will introduce to the audience the beloved Dartmouth man whom the Center honors President-Emeritus Ernest Martin Hopkins ’Ol.
Dudley W. Orr ’29, chairman of the Trustees Planning Committee, will preside at the dedication program, and others taking part will be President Dickey and Wallace K. Harrison, architect for the Center.
While the auditorium ceremony is taking place every part of the Hopkins Center except the main theater will be opened and guides and attendants will be on hand to assist visitors. The separate opening of the Hopkins Center Theater will take place that evening when the Dartmouth Players present Danton’s Death, a drama by the 19th cen- tury German playwright Georg Buechner. This first dra- matic presentation in the Center will also be the first directed at Dartmouth by Prof. James Clancy, who came from Stanford this summer to be Director of Theater for the Hopkins Center.
Danton’s Death will be given eight times in all during the eleven-day inaugural festival. It was chosen as the first offering because although written more than a century ago, it is very modern in technique, thus combining dramatic past and present as the Center itself will strive to do. Professor Clancy describes it as a young man’s play Buechner wrote it just before he died at 22 having a predominantly male cast of more than thirty. The technical demands of the play are so extensive that Dartmouth could never have produced it without the facilities now available in Hopkins Center.
The first concert in Hopkins Center will be given by the Dartmouth College Band in Spaulding Auditorium while The Players are performing at the opposite end of the Center. The first-night play and the concert will launch the weekend events planned primarily for the under- graduates. In addition to the weekend’s open house there will be two more performances of Danton’s Death, two Glee Club concerts, a student dance in the Top of the Hop after the Columbia game, and a bigger dance Saturday night in Alumni Hall.
The art shows planned for the inaugural period will in- clude one on “Impressionism; 1865-1885” in the Jaffe- Friede Gallery and a one-man retrospective exhibition of the works of Hans Hofmann, now 82, in the Show Place Gallery. Hofmann, a teacher with vast influence on modem art, will come to Hanover to take part in the Convocation on the Arts. Three other art shows during the inaugural period will present Contemporary Sculpture in the Sculp- ture Court, Spanish Renaissance Drawings in the Intimate Gallery, and Fine Prints from the Dartmouth College Col- lection in the Barrows Print Room. Other exhibitions will be devoted to crafts, European posters, and the creative engineering of Pier Luigi Nervi of Italy, who designed Dartmouth’s new field house.
Nervi will be one of the five distinguished lecturers par- ticipating in the Convocation on the Arts. In addition to Nervi’s talk on architecture, Hans Hofmann will speak on the visual arts, and Michel St. Denis, known on both sides of the Atlantic as a director, will lecture on the theater. Music and crafts are the other two subjects in the convoca- tion lecture series, and all five speakers will participate in a panel discussion, with Prof. Rudolf Arnheim of Sarah Lawrence College as moderator.
A colorful academic assembly will be staged in the new field house on Sunday morning, November 18, and at that time the Nervi building will be dedicated. Honorary de- grees will be conferred and the main address for the occa- sion will be delivered by William Schuman, the noted American composer, who is president of New York’s Lin- coln Center for the Performing Arts and a member of the Hopkins Center Music Advisory Group.
The musical program during the convocation will be especially noteworthy. Carl Weinrich, director of music for the Princeton University Chapel and one of this country’s foremost Bach interpreters, will give a dedicatory organ recital in the Spaulding Auditorium on Friday afternoon, November 16. A chamber music concert that evening will feature the New York Woodwind Quintet. The Dartmouth Community Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Mario di Bonaventura, newly appointed Di- rector of Music for the Hopkins Center, will be augmented for the convocation and will give concerts in Spaulding Auditorium on Thursday and Saturday evenings. Alex- ander Prilutchi, former concertmaster of the Havana Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, will play a Mozart violin concerto in the first concert, and pianist Anthony di Bonaventura will be guest artist in Brahms’ first concerto in the Saturday concert. The Dartmouth and Mt. Holyoke College Glee Clubs and the Dartmouth Community Sym- phony Orchestra will bring the convocation to a close with a choral-orchestral concert in Hopkins Center on Sunday afternoon.
Among those who will be attending the Convocation on the Arts as guests of the College will be many members of the four Hopkins Center advisory groups made up of prominent persons in the worlds of art, music, the theater, and crafts. These groups are headed by William B. Jaffe, New York art collector and co-donor of one of the Hop- kins Center galleries; Goddard Lieberson, musician and president of Columbia Records; Arthur Hornblow Jr. T5, producer and a leading theatrical figure in Hollywood and New York; and Mrs. Vanderbilt Webb of New York, chairman of the American Craftsmen’s Council.
It is expected that many Dartmouth alumni interested in the arts will also be present at the festival events during the inaugural period and especially at the Convocation on the Arts, November 16-18. With College in session, dormitory accommodations will not be available. In an- ticipation of a large number of out-of-town visitors, the College has reserved many of the nearby hotel and motel rooms. It will be glad to help arrange accommodations for alumni and others interested in coming to the Convocation. Inquiries should be addressed to Nichol M. Sandoe Jr., Hopkins Center Inaugural Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H.
