"Former Prodigies: How the Liminality of
Conservatories Impacts Perceptions of Art"
2024

University of St Andrews
St Andrews, Scotland

Abstract:

Imagine entering a conservatory excited to improve your artistic skills but graduating and never wanting to perform again. Conservatories are influential places, attended by malleable adolescents, with the power to distort students' feelings about their art and themselves. How do perceptions of art change during and after attending a conservatory?

Through digital ethnography in the form of interviews and a survey, I collected data from former conservatory students about their time at conservatories in the United States on what they learned, what they gained from attending, and what they are doing now. I combined the audio of interviews and screenshots of survey responses with imagery of clay people I crafted in a multimodal video to visualize the data. This research highlights the ways that conservatories are much more than just schools for fine art. Conservatories are liminal spaces filled with games, play, reproduction, embodiment, and liminal people.

In this work, the stories of conservatory students are contextualized within dominant anthropological theoretical frameworks surrounding the school experience and the liminal space to understand how the conservatory environment warps perceptions of art, the body, and the self.