Unlike anything offered at Holy Cross, CreateLab is an innovative team-taught course that moves away from the traditional classroom experience, inviting students to explore their creativity and imagination and to take risks in a range of activities that engage with the theme of the course through multiple disciplines and unexpected perspectives.
CreateLab, part of the College’s Arts Transcending Borders (ATB) initiative, brings together a diverse team of faculty, the College’s visiting artists-in-residence, and students from varying majors and class years to participate in a semester of experiential, experimental learning rooted in the arts. Through lectures, performances, and collaborative projects that challenge them to move outside of their comfort zones, students are encouraged to think creatively and deeply, to articulate and tackle their fears, to tolerate ambiguity, and to honor process as well as product. They also develop the skills to build and stand by their arguments, to sustain long-range project development, and to collaborate and commit to teamwork. In line with these aims, faculty and visiting artists facilitate, instigate, provoke, and support the students as they explore their limits and move beyond them.
By addressing questions relating to originality and the origins of creative work, the Spring 2020 offering of CreateLab sought to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the creative process, of the ways in which it is variously used and misused, and of the larger moral, ethical, and spiritual concerns that accompany creative work.
Spring 2022 Faculty
Mark Freeman, Psychology
Daniel Frost, Spanish
Lynn Kremer, Theatre and Dance
Leslie Schomp, Visual Arts
Video Credit: Tom Rettig