Today@Dal

From Wednesday's Chronicle Herald:

Fred and Elizabeth Fountain have donated $10 million to a new school of performing arts to open July 1, 2014, at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Accompanied by their daughter Katharine, a singer-songwriter and McGill University student, the couple gave the arts and social sciences faculty its largest donation ever at a festive reception Tuesday in the sculpture court of the Dalhousie Arts Centre, home to the performing arts school.

The $10 million is for programming. With this investment, Dalhousie University has agreed to upgrade and expand the deteriorating Dalhousie Arts Centre, which opened in 1971.

As chancellor of Dalhousie University and a longtime arts supporter, Fred Fountain said he didn’t want the arts left out of Dalhousie University’s Bold Ambitions fundraising campaign, which ends Thursday.

“A lot of areas of the university have achieved very large support from Bold Ambitions but nothing dramatic for theatre and music,” he said.

“The funding for the arts tends to be last on the list.

“Elizabeth and I want to do something special for Dalhousie. We want to do something that will impact the whole community.”

He said Dalhousie’s music, theatre and costume studies departments, which merged into a school of performing arts this winter, are “starved for material support and renewal.”

He also told the gathering, including Communities, Culture and Heritage Minister Leonard Preyra, that “our governments, provincial and municipal, should support the arts more than they do, and I include in that both performing and visual arts.”

The couple received sustained applause and a standing ovation, as well as gifts of two director’s chairs from theatre department students and a conductor’s baton from music students.

“We’re just over the moon,” said Susan Stackhouse, associate professor in Dalhousie’s acting program. At a recent retreat for all departments, “there was a lot of dreaming big.”

Read the rest of this article at the Chronicle Herald's website.