Dance school loses dean of 10 years

After spending half of the summers of her life at the American Dance Festival School, Donna Faye Burchfield, 52, is seizing a new opportunity to influence the dance world.

At the end of the 2010 season, Burchfield will leave the school where she has been dean for the past 10 years to become the director of School of Dance at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

“On its very simplest terms, dance lives here,” she said. “And if it lives here I can come live alongside it and help it grow more.”

The festival announced last week that Burchfield had made the decision to leave back in May, feeling the need to move closer to her immediate family in New England and to be in a place teeming with opportunity for the arts.

“As I felt this struggle around me, I felt this urgency within me to find these new ways to sort of strengthen dance,” she said.

Burchfield will also be leaving Hollins University in Roanoke, Va., where she established a dance department and an Master of Fine Arts program.

With 300 dance students — more than 100 incoming first-years — The University of the Arts School of Dance is markedly larger than the program at Hollins.

“It’s a lot different in that it’s a school of dance and not just a department.”

The University of the Arts removed its MFA program in 1985 to focus on its bachelor’s degrees.

But Burchfield isn’t going to jump right in to bringing an MFA program to the university.

“I would say that my first order of business is to get to know the place and to get to know about the enormity of possibilities of dance in Philadelphia and the people who live there and make that heart beat,” she said. “I have to weave that into what I imagine, too. It can’t just be my dream; it has to be all of our dreams.”

After the festival, Burchfield will return to Hollins until mid-August and will start work in Philadelphia in September.

Burchfield said she will not lose her ties to North Carolina.

In addition to keeping her family’s farm in Creedmoor, she said she expects to send students from the University of the Arts to the dance festival.

“There’s something that happens here at ADF every summer where students come to feel that amazing sense of all these dancing bodies coming together,” she said.

But her move is part of a larger vision to open doors for dancers.

“I’m on a mission — and I really mean that. If it can’t happen there, it has to happen somewhere,” she said. “The possibilities for people involved in dance have to expand.”

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