Recent noise complaints about drama students practicing scenes have left some in the department wondering if Arnold Hall is really their home despite having just moved in this fall.
“We’ve never had a home,” said Victoria Pike, president of The New School’s Drama undergraduate student union.
Library faculty with offices on the 9th floor of Arnold Hall made complaints about noise on the floor in early October.
The noise which caused the complaints came from the drama students either before, during, or after their classes, when they would speak loudly or practice scenes in classrooms or hallways.
“We’re not a monotone, raise-your-hand kind of class,” said Pike, “we’ve got four classrooms, so most of the time we will go into class and the teacher will say ‘alright I want you to go work on a scene with a partner and then come back’”.
Because there are no practice spaces for drama students, most of their work is done in the hallways of the 9th floor.
As opposed to the long-standing graduate program Drama at The New School, located at 151 Bank Street, the undergraduate Drama program is just three years old and has yet to claim their own address.
As far as Arnold Hall’s new blueprint is concerned, all floors are dedicated to Mannes and Jazz students. There is no depiction of a drama level, regardless of many classes being held on the 9th floor. Pike, now in her junior year, is part of the drama program’s body of about 145 students.
This Fall, Mannes moved from 150 West 85th Street and houses its student body within Arnold Hall’s walls. In the fall the drama department began to base classes at Arnold Hall on top of their previous location at 151 Bank Street. The 9th floor is the only New School campus facility available to the drama students, who have access to only four classrooms.
“This is a studio floor where you’re going to hear people being loud and yelling and music and all of that kind of stuff,” drama instructor Kathryn Rossetter explained. “People who need quiet space in an office and our students should not butt up against each other. It’s just not logical.”
Though The New School for Drama’s student body has expanded in the last couple of years, the accommodations have not. Within the last three years, the program has grown to roughly 145 students.
Pike addressed the noise grievances as a space issue. “If you’ve been to the 9th floor you know the stairwell. It’s open-aired and goes right down into the 8th floor,” she said. “You can’t confine our space because of the stairwell, and that’s a huge reason for the noise going everywhere. It’s flooding.”
Sonya Duffy, the acquisitions librarian for The New School, works in one of the offices on the 9th floor of Arnold Hall.
“We close the door more than we use to,” Duffy explained after stating that there has been more noise this year.
“This is the only place we can go,” Melissa Maney, a third year Drama student, explained. “If they’re complaining about noise, which is what we have to do, it’s kind of like where do we go?”
Almost every office on the 9th floor is occupied by library faculty. Not one accommodates a drama administrator or instructor. The drama faculty still have offices at 151 Bank Street, a mile away from campus.
“I don’t even know what school those faculty work for,” Pike said. “But our faculty is at 151 Bank street, so if we need something we need to walk all the way over there.”
Before Arnold Hall, the only available space for undergraduate classes was at 151 Bank street, a location the drama graduate program, established in 2005, has always considered home.
Though, as Pike clarifies, it never felt that way for the undergrads. “When they accepted us they didn’t say ‘Welcome! This is now your space too!’ They just said, ‘Yeah you might have some classes here’.”
The feeling of not having a home for the program is something that the drama undergraduates have been dealing with since the program started three years ago.
“They kind of just put us in abandoned spaces, temporarily transform them – which costs money,” Pike says.