Numerous professional visiting artists come to campus each academic year to both display their creative talents and impart their expressive wisdom to the Hope community. They show and tell us, by virtue of their displayed talents and spoken wisdom, that the arts are important to our collective communities because they require response and engagement, making us more mindful and inspired; making us more human.
Four of those visiting artists sat down separately with a Hope faculty member over the past year to answer how the arts contribute to the public good. It is a question whose answer is necessary toward a better understanding of what makes the arts important in our lives and world.
In this first installment of One Question, Matt Farmer, assistant professor of dance and chairperson of the department, sits down with Julia Rhoads, the founder and artistic director of Lucky Plush Productions (LPP), a dance company based in Chicago, Illinois. LPP appeared at Hope through the college’s Artist-in-Residence program. The company previously performed at Hope in the fall of 2014 through the Great Performance Series.