Imagine what would happen if Shonda Rimes ’91—creator, head-writer, and executive producer of ABC powerhouse “Grey’s Anatomy”—threw down her fountain pen one day and came back to Dartmouth for a weekend. Would she give a lecture on screenwriting? Maybe she’d perform surgery on a banana in the middle of Foco. Or perhaps, even better, she’d hang out with premed students in Dana Biomedical Library and call it research.

All that sounds fantastic, but for the sake of this article, I’m going to assume two things: (1) that she would want to bring “Grey’s” back to Dartmouth in a more literal fashion, and (2) that she would be in touch with contemporary trends in performance art. Putting the two together, let’s imagine what would happen if she staged a campus-wide spatial-art performance of an episode of “Grey’s.”

It’s Friday afternoon. You’re getting dinner in the Hop, and for some reason decide to take Shakespeare Alley to the Café. Wait, who is that sitting along the hall in front of the Hood Museum Gift Shop? Why, it’s the “Grey’s” interns! It’s their snack break, so they’re spitting out witty aphorisms about life in the hospital while eating junk food from the vending machines. Freaked out by how adeptly they can turn even the silliest situations into melodrama, you lose your appetite and leave through the back door towards the Hood. By that weird metal swing, you see the show’s resident lesbians delivering rousing speeches about how truly happy and surprised they are to be in a committed, politically-correct, Thursday-at-9 PM-friendly relationship. A Snow Patrol cover band performs pensive indie music a few feet away. Shaken, you hurry past them and escape to your room to pregame with your besties. Unfortunately, you can’t sit on your bed, because there’s Meredith and Christina, cuddling and talking about dark, twisty relationship problems. You tell them to get out, but Meredith just stares blankly at you and murmurs, “Pick me, choose me, love me.” Anyway, you get the idea, right? I use “Grey’s Anatomy” as an example because it’s relevant to Dartmouth (and it’s experiencing a creative upsurge this season), but, more importantly, I’m trying to show that spatial art can be truly engaging if honed in the right ways.

Here’s where I interject with a definition of “spatial art.” Loosely basing our definition on the scene that I just described, spatial art would seem to be a large-scale performance which tells its story using various physical plants over the breadth of an entire landscape. However, spatial art can engage with more than just physical space: it can also utilize time, sound, the five senses, and the imagination to create an ongoing narrative.

A student at New York City’s Cooper Union recently created as his thesis project an expansive dramaturgic plan for a spatial art rendition of Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.” The plan calls for an unadvertised, day-long staging of the play using hastily-built set pieces lodged all over Staten Island. Actors will travel between the various sets reciting chronological dialogue from the play until they coalesce in the final scene/location. The plan assumes that Staten Island residents going about their daily lives will stop to watch out of curiosity, and then become so intrigued that they will follow the course of the play until its completion. What’s really remarkable about the student’s thesis, though, is that it calls for the set pieces to remain in place after the day-long performance. Thus, the play both emerges from the environment (the actors’ staged interactions blend in with Staten Island residents’ daily lives) and returns to it (it “gifts” Staten Island with its props and stages.) In the end, the thesis engages not only physical space, but also time and the imagination. The end result is a sort of “fourth dimension” of art: a creative spatial-temporal continuum, if you will.

What does this sort of art accomplish, though? Sure, it engages its audience more than other mediums (following the actors around Staten Island would no doubt be stimulating), and it’s blessed with an air of esoteric hipness. However, spatial art’s major boasting point is that it partakes in an ongoing conversation with its host environment. In the example above, the mere ambiance of Staten Island adds tone and relevance to the play’s proceedings. Since Staten Island is a relatively quiet suburban haven connected to the more bustling parts of New York City via waterways, bridges, and other navigational pathways, its inclusion in the play comments on the interconnectedness and interdependency for Shakespeare’s characters’ various foibles and follies.

We can find another distinctive example of spatial art just a stone’s throw from Staten Island. In Brooklyn, Niegel Smith ’02—presently an Assistant Director of “Fela!”, the Tony-winning Broadway musical—leads regular “walks” as an associate of the performance-art company Elastic City. The business’s goal—to “make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit”—manifests itself in various artist-led walks throughout the borough. For example, the “Monument Walk,” created by Smith, guides its audience along a vibrant and comprehensive tour of Brooklyn’s most recognizable landmarks. The walk aims to give these monuments “greater sonic fields and wider physical footprints” by encouraging each member of the audience to throw his or her voice across the city and engage in a one-sided pas de deux with each landmark along the way. The idea is that the audiences’ voices and movements will be bent by the landmarks into “soundscapes” and “visual dialogues,” respectively, which can be seen as works of art themselves.

Some seniors might remember Smith from fall term of 2007, when he temporarily returned to Dartmouth to direct “365 Days/Plays” and “Topdog/Underdog,” both by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan Lori-Parks. “365 Days/Plays,” which I assistant directed, essentially took over the Hop in the way that “Grey’s Anatomy” fictionally took over campus at the beginning of this article. At its most basic, “365” comprised several short plays staged throughout the entire building which repeated continually over the course of an hour. Actors could be found in front of the Moore Theater, in front of the Hinman Boxes, in the courtyard next to Moore, at the Top of the Hop, etc. Additionally, all of the plays incorporated various manipulations of space, sound, and time. For example, the actors of one play started to recite their lines faster and faster as the hour progressed. One play even saw its actors switching positions, personas, and accents after each recitation of their script. The result was a constantly revolving circle of human interactions, the significance of which relied upon the spatial-temporal relations of the characters to each other.

The most impressive characteristic of “365 Days/Plays” was that it mirrored the daily exchanges of Dartmouth culture perfectly. The plays lasted only a few minutes, if that, and then launched forward again along a never-ending cycle of movement and dialogue. Thus, they effortlessly paralleled Dartmouth students’ lightning-fast, superficial, day-to-day interactions with each other. In fact, the plays fit right in with students’ schedules: students would stop briefly out of curiosity, and before they knew it the play was over and they could continue on their merry way. The performance art aspect of the play was also not new to campus; after all, sophomores bombard Foco with songs about drinking and debauchery on a regular basis during their pledge terms. Even the Blood Buddy—strolling around campus, waving and dancing in every public space imaginable—could be considered performance art. And don’t even get me started on the Sun God.

All Dartmouth references aside, what makes spatial art so interesting to me is its ability to not only capture the essence of the culture from which it sprouts, as “365” did, but also emulate the characteristically fleeting interactions and relationships of the postmodern world as a whole. Pieces like “365” are perfect examples of this, with their rapid-fire delivery and their focus on passing sensation rather than literal meaning. Moreover, all three of the projects discussed above share a larger, more honorable trait: they make art more accessible. The target audience is everyone—the Dartmouth Music major on his way to the Hop practice rooms, the Staten Island business-man on his way to the ferry, the homeless man lounging outside a Brooklyn Denny’s. For once, progressive art isn’t exclusive. Better yet, no one has to pay to witness pieces like these—and in a struggling economy, that argument might just beat all the others.

So I guess what I’m saying is: Shonda Rimes, get your ass back to Dartmouth and turn campus into a giant episode of “Grey’s!” I can’t speak for everyone else, but I definitely wouldn’t mind walking into AD one night to find Meredith and Derek showing up all the bros with their mad pong skills. And then they’d make out in a corner, obvi. And everyone would cheer. Bring it on, Shonda.

Photo by Adam Foster