On March 17, Bennington College announced that the BFA Dance Lab would not be relocating to Philadelphia for the 2025-26 school year. The program will remain on the Bennington campus, with plans to move to Philadelphia in the fall of 2026.
Following the closure of the Univerisity of the Arts in Philadelphia in June 2024, Bennington absorbed the school’s dance program, and the BFA Dance Lab was born. The plan was always for the BFA students to return to Philadelphia. But as program director Donna Faye Burchfield explained, Bennington’s application to the Pennsylvania Department of Education for a certificate of authority to offer college credit in the state has yet to be approved.
Bennington has yet to establish a Philadelphia location for the Dance Lab. The aim is not to recreate the University of the Arts or to devise a traditional, large-scale campus, but to set up studio and dormitory spaces for the BFA students as well as important school resources such as health services. “It would be an extension of this campus [Bennington],” said Burchfield, “we’re kind of thinking of the city as our campus.”
Currently, there are 37 BFA students. The Dance Lab hopes to maintain this number over the next two years before attempting to expand.
Of the 13 Dance Lab faculty members, the majority commute to Bennington from Philadelphia. The program is currently designed to allow them to teach in three-week stints. “I worry a lot about the faculty and the stress on their families, the stress on their careers, their lives,” said Burchfield.
As the transition to Bennington and back to Philadelphia unfolds, Burchfield highlighted how the Dance Lab is figuring itself out along the way. The program is organizing multiple focus groups composed of BFA students, faculty, guest artists, and alumni in an effort to determine why the Dance Lab is needed and what distinguishes it as a program. “I’m interested in how this can really be a place of experimentation and how we can learn through the process,” Burchfield said.
Burchfield also shared that the program has been working with Bennington faculty to find ways for the BFA students to have access to a wider variety of BA courses. They are hoping to create more space in the Dance Lab fall schedules in order to generate more course choices for the BFA students.
To Burchfield, the merger of Bennington with what is now the Dance Lab symbolized the resilience of dance, and also an opportunity for abundance. She described the BFA program and Bennington as different, but alongside, one another, “rather than being like each other…how do we keep each other’s autonomy but still grow side by side?”
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