Center for the Arts

Thomas B. Burrows appointed interim director

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

The director's position opened last month when Robert Chumbley left UB to head the Atlanta Ballet.

The Texas-born Burrows is a professional arts administrator whose extensive experience includes the general management of Ontario's Hamilton Place Theatre, Toronto's O'Keefe Centre and Canada's Shaw Festival Theatre Foundation.

For the past three years, he has lived and worked in Cooperstown as a consultant in theater management to several Canadian theaters, as well as to St. Peter's Lutheran Church, well-known as "The Jazz Church" in New York City, which offers a broad range of performing arts programs, including exceptional jazz programs, opera and theater.

Prior to his work in Canadian theater, Burrows served for five years as managing director of theater operations and assistant to the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre Company, widely regarded as the finest university theater program in the United States. While at the university he lectured in arts administration.

Prior to his tenure at Yale, Burrows was the general manager of New York City's Establishment Theatre Company during its salad days. Founded by Peter Cook, Ivor David and Sybil Burton in the mid-1960s, it was a large and highly-regarded off Broadway producing theater.

Given his experience and interest in professional collaborative arts presentations, Burrows' enthusiasm for the UB center is evident. "I love the inherent vision for the Center for the Arts, a vision that is there to inform program choices. I also like the fact that this is driven by the academic need for interdisciplinary collaboration," he said. "We certainly have an obligation to create revenue, and we will," Burrows said, "but what is exciting to me is the opportunity to fully realize the potential to develop projects that will enrich academic programs in the arts at UB.

"For instance," he says, "at Yale, which has what is probably the strongest theater program in the country, there was a perceived need to introduce the best working professionals as lecturers in a variety of disciplines."

He added that at Yale there was also the impetus to create a fully professional resident acting company as a "laboratory" for students preparing for careers in design, technical work, administration, acting, directing and theater criticism.

"Fine educators aren't satisfied that their students try to be the best among their immediate peers, after all, but want them to aspire to be the best, period," Burrows said. "That can't happen unless students see and meet the finest artists in their fields and then get to work with them, to learn from them."

Burrows expresses great enthusiasm for existing UB arts programs that incorporate that philosophy-not only the center itself, but the new international program in the Department of Theatre and Dance and that department's upcoming four-week residency with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, considered by many to be the finest modern dance company in the country.

Several other arts programs at UB have, for many years, incorporated the participation of exceptional artists into their academic programs-the Music Department's June in Buffalo Festival and Conference and conferences in conducting and performance, the English Department's Poetics Program, interdisciplinary work of the Media Study Department and the University Gallery program, the Art Department's Illustration Program and for decades, the Department of Comparative Literature's visiting professorships. Many of these programs represent significant collaborations with community's best arts institutions and organizations as well.

"We can do this," Burrows said. "UB has the reputation, the facilities and the ability to create innovative programming that will encourage the best artists to come here-and it is a matter of getting the best."

He found the center's staff 'exceptional.' "Their roles have been stretched beyond everyone's original expectations; the quarter-million dollar budget they expected to have is simply not there anymore. Nevertheless they have performed their multiple functions extremely well," he said.

A graduate of Texas' McMurray University, Burrows is affiliated with several theater associations including the International Society of Performing Arts Administrators. He is a former director of Canada's Niagara Region Tourist Council and the Niagara College Theatre Advisory Committee and former chair of the League of Canadian Theatres.