The Artistic Lifestyle Creativity Laboratory and Buckeye Theater
Pretty much as soon as I became an English major, I began to plan lecturing Masculinity in Contemporary American Literature and teaching creative writing on campus. Of course, the only way I figured I could teach Masculinity in Contemporary American Literature was to be the best American writer and author and make a couple million dollar donations to The Ohio State University, which meant I would have a say in how the money was spent, and if I was going to spend the money, I was going to renovate and revitalize Denny Hall, which is arguably one of the worst buildings on campus but definitely an embarrassment to the College of Arts and Sciences.
Denny Hall is ugly on the outside and not functional on the inside, and the Buckeye eyesore is supposed to host the College of Arts and Sciences offices and the Department of English. I honestly planned to renovate the building in order to update the inside and outside, but I rather my donation go into an addition, which houses the writing laboratory and Buckeye Theater. The mission of The Artistic Lifestyle Creativity Lab is to have various settings would be theme decor in order to create the sites, sounds, and smells of an environment to write, record, film, draw, paint, or study.
For example, one of the rooms in the lab rotation could be a beachside bamboo Tikki Bar with beach sand, sunlight, beach towel, ocean views, sounds of waves crashing, gulls cawing, and the smell of coconut, palm trees, and salty seawater. Another room in The Artistic Lifestyle Creativity Laboratory could be a 1930’s flapper bar with a secret codeword to enter into jazz music with flappers dancing on televisions that look like portals into other rooms. How else are the 21st Century Buckeye artists going to explore other worlds? Or how about a 19th Century coffee shop in Paris, France or Budapest, Hungary? How about on top of a mountain with forty mile per hour winds? How about in the forrest or on a battlefield?
The mission of the creativity laboratory is to design and develop art in an another environment, and the creativity laboratory’s room designs can be commissioned through the various arts and sciences combing music and art departments with English and theater, so we can create better Buckeye artists, but we could improve the College of Arts and Sciences by combining art and science, so the realm of possibilities are infinite. I figured the creativity lab settings could rotate, but maybe each scene could resemble the different phases, eras, and culture of The Ohio State University. The various departments could caucus to decide what they’d want to put in The Ohio State University time capsule.
The Buckeye Theater would serve as a globe sized English lecture hall, music hall, and theater venue intended to blend all the arts with the sciences. I see a College of Arts and Sciences where theater, set design, artistic design, inter design, and architecture merge with music, literature, and even engineering and mathematics. If you pulled up a map of campus, the Hansford Quadrangle North of Denney Hall and East of Denney hall is the perfect location to unite the arts and sciences on campus. It’s almost as if the university planned The Artistic Lifestyle’s Creativity Laboratory and Buckeye Theater during the university’s founding. I don’t know. It seems a little too perfect of an ida. What do you think alumni and alumnae?
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