Roberts Theatre seats nearly 400 people. On a typical night, fewer than 150 of those seats are filled. Students and faculty in the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts have a name for what produces that gap. They call it the Bucksbaum bubble.
The question of why Grinnell students do not attend arts programming has been raised before, alongside a broader pattern of declining attendance at campus events that reaches beyond Bucksbaum. On April 3, Aguibou Bougobali Sanou, assistant professor of theatre, dance, and performance studies, organized a roundtable lunch to discuss the problem with students he had identified as connectors across campus. He calls them “stars among stars,” by which he does not mean people who seek visibility but people who have the social gift of drawing a community together.
“I cannot believe that Grinnell College, with roughly 1,700 students, has a problem filling 400 seats,” Sanou said. “We need to think about how we strategize our communication.”
The students who gathered in Room 269 that afternoon described a problem with several overlapping causes. Bella Takata `28, a theater major who has worked on four main stage productions and co-leads Tuesday Afternoon Dead, said the department’s physical separation from the rest of campus contributes to its low visibility.
“You see sports teams eating together, and they’re very visible, so you know what they’re doing,” Takata said. “We have to be in our own space. We’re kind of separate.” She said she did not know what the department was up to when she was a first year and suspects that remains true for most students outside it.
Levi McMillan `27, also a theater major, described a solo performance project from a seminar class two semesters ago where five people attended. He attributed part of the problem to what he viewed as the confusing layout of Bucksbaum. “There are certain places that Grinnell people recognize and some they don’t,” McMillan said.
Several students pointed to the box office as a concrete barrier. Getting a ticket requires a physical visit to Bucksbaum during limited weekday hours, which Takata described as a real obstacle for students whose schedules are already full. “Even I have trouble getting to the box office, and I live here basically,” she said.
McMillan said he does not always know when the box office is open, even as someone who spends most of his time in the building.
The space reservation system presents a separate difficulty. Booking a room in Bucksbaum requires checking availability in the College’s 25Live calendar system, then submitting the actual request through a different form on the department’s website, a process that multiple students described as difficult to locate and navigate. Lily Shoemaker `28, who co-leads the dance organization DanceXChange, said many students have stopped attempting to reserve spaces at all and instead show up and wait, noting that doors are frequently left unlocked regardless of whether a booking has been confirmed. Takata said she has never successfully booked a room through the system, and that when she tried to mount an independent musical and could not navigate the department’s requirements around performance rights, the production moved off-site.
“If the doors were open, it could have been here,” she said. Her peer Joslyn Lilly `27 said she has friends who are in their third year and have never stepped foot in Bucksbaum for a performance of any kind.
Shoemaker, who has been working with Sanou to build connections between campus dance organizations, raised a separate issue facing dancers specifically. Because dance is not recognized as an athletic activity at Grinnell, dancers are not granted access to athletic resources including physical therapy through the Charles Benson Bear `39 Recreation and Athletic Center.
“Dance is an extremely strenuous thing,” Shoemaker said. “I bet half the people in the ensemble right now have issues with their bodies, and we’re not given access to physical therapy because we’re not considered athletes.” She described trying to secure practice space at the dance studio in the Bear as a recurring difficulty.
“Getting access to those spaces without something backing up your legitimacy is nearly impossible,” Shoemaker said.
Violet McCloskey `28, a music major and research assistant in Bucksbaum, said she discovered the Young, Gifted and Black gospel concert only by chance while scrolling through the campus calendar to book something else. “I think if there’s anyone who has the time and capacity to market, it’s going to be students,” McCloskey said. “They’re going to know how to reach out.” McCloskey described an approach she has developed with the Grinnell Children’s Choir called an informance, which functions as a short performance that pauses at intervals to explain what the ensemble is working on and why, designed specifically for audiences who have no prior context for the material and would otherwise be left to make sense of it on their own.
Sanou identified a structural dimension to the problem that he said contributes to the pattern across departments. When an office or program brings a performer to campus, he said, the dance and theater faculty often find out only when a poster appears, which he described as a missed opportunity for collaboration and shared audience-building.
“Collaboration starts with communication,” Sanou said. “If we only discover something on a poster when our schedules are already full, it becomes difficult to support, and that’s a loss for all of us.”
McMillan suggested that extending main stage runs across multiple weekends would make performances more accessible to students whose schedules conflict with a single-weekend run, a challenge that reflects a wider conversation about how Grinnell sustains its cultural programming over time.
The outcome of the roundtable was a celebration of International Dance Day, observed annually on April 29, which had not previously been observed at Grinnell. This year, Sanou plans to choreograph a short piece that participants can learn in advance and perform together at Kingston Plaza at noon on Wednesday, April 29. The event is open to all students. Colleagues at University of California, Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University have already asked to participate.
“It’s networking and socializing through dance,” Sanou said. “Community-building in its simplest form.”