Outside the Box

CFA students craft cross-school relationships.

By Rachel Johnson

What is the root of resilience?

This question, underlined on a blackboard, opens Route, one of three entries for CFA’s new Box Project. Students from the Schools of Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts were thrown together in teams of four, provided with a box of miscellaneous items, and allowed six hours to create a short video inspired by the contents of their box. Each project revolved around two keywords: “resilience” and a word unique to each box—in Route’s case, “childhood.”

In the course of the whimsical video, the blackboard fills with a mathematical-like formula drawn in chalk by two theatre students, a visual artist, and a musician, who also composed the background music. All three Box Project groups included at least one student from each CFA school to encourage intra-school interaction and motivate different types of artists to work together toward a common goal. “Artists are not necessarily isolated,” says Jeannette Guillemin, assistant director of visual arts and creator of the Box Project. “You need people who can come together, despite differences, and work collaboratively.”

That’s what made the Box Project so “magical,” says Guillemin. “You had these people who are all really creative and working in the arts, who’ve never met each other, who are, for the first time, having these terrific conversations and working creatively together. It was inspiring. That’s what it’s going to be like as an artist in the twenty-first century.”