“One of the things that ties what we’re doing together is the notion of intercultural investigation and art-making. Intercultural is not quite the same thing as multicultural, which implies the juxtaposition of different cultures, or cross-cultural, which tends to imply one culture studying another. Intercultural performance is the sort of art that comes when artists from different cultures actually engage the differences and points of linkage between them as part of the work they’re doing.

“Our faculty, many of whom have arrived at UCLA in just the last few years, are very excited about the creative work and scholarship that we are able to do here. But it has been increasingly difficult to have to work within the limitations of a building that was designed for another purpose. The Dance Building, still quite elegant-looking from the outside, was originally designed as a women’s gymnasium. The inside is a mess — one floor is eaten up by lockers, and we have problems with plaster peeling, and we can’t plug in the sewing machines and computers at the same time in some parts of the building because the circuitry goes out. Of course, we have struggled on, because that’s what artists and scholars who are passionately committed to their work do, but it’s an amazing thing to be able to actually design a building to suit our specific programs and what we project our future needs will be.”

With input from Kaufman and WAC’s faculty, staff, and

students, the architectural firm of Moore Ruble Yudell of Santa Monica was selected to renovate the Dance Building, which is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. “One of the reasons we felt strongly that this was the right architectural firm was meeting Buzz Yudell and his associates and seeing the kind of sensitivity they had, the kind of openness to some of the cross-cultural issues that this department deals with, wrestles with, investigates,” Waterman said. “But Buzz also had a background in dance. He was a dance student at Yale before he went into architecture, and he’s written articles on the moving body in architectural space, on what it is like when you move through it.

“So he had all the parts of our department, the movement and dance and performance part and the interest in not only Western and European, but also other models of how you might organize a home. His

design is a great example of intercultural work itself. In fact, what he was able to do, which blew all of our minds, was to take the basic kind of Beaux Arts Italianate design of the building, which is all about squares and rectangles, and incorporate Glorya Kaufman’s strong interest in the Art Deco idiom — its curvilinear qualities and swooping design — and our interest in non-Western models of organizing space. In essence, he managed to put a mandala in the middle of a Beaux Arts design and made everybody happy.”

Most of the lockers on the first floor will be removed and the space converted into classrooms, multi-media labs, offices, and tech support rooms. In place of the upstairs gym will be studio space and a 300-seat theater with state-of-the-art acoustics and lighting. Outside, on the northeast corner, a new open-air theater will be constructed.