When God performed his greatest miracle, an act of God’s holy love through Christ’s death on the cross, burial, and resurrection, everything was made new – even the visual and performing arts! At Calvin, we believe the development and preparation of an art is a gift that is meant to be shared, but that doesn’t always mean a grand stage is required. Christian students who are trained in the visual and performing arts cultivate gifts that bring blessings to their community through live performances and displays, but they also bring life-enriching beauty to our living rooms and even to individuals in the privacy of their own experience. Arts opportunities for our students are varied and abundant:
• Instrumental and choral music
• Dramatic and choreographic arts
• Visual arts — graphic design, drawing,
painting, ceramics, etc
• Rhetorical and oratory arts — i.e.
Calvin High School’s Speech & Debate Club, Grade 5-8 Fine Arts Festival or the Capstone Senior Thesis project and while Calvin students have occasion to perform such as in concerts, festival settings and debate tournaments, as well as have their visual art work displayed weekly on campus throughout the year, we also hope to provide the satisfaction of personal character formation and growth through the process as much as the performance or display.
The arts provide robust opportunities for students to develop discipline, confidence
and life-long, beautiful and practical skills. At Calvin, we seek to actively develop a
young image bearer’s natural, God-given ability to wonder and imagine and muse. The performing and fine arts should not be seen as merely enrichment, add-ons to an academic “whole-child” program rooted in the liberal arts tradition, but rather, the arts are the very elements which orient and provide context for pure development of our rational capacities and attainment of knowledge. This is because
the arts help us understand God and his world better by recognizing that the fullness of our humanity is found in more than just knowledge, information, intellect, or power, but also in the subtleties of beauty, precision, nuance, and winsome expression, all of which require time, discipline, attention, and engagement with others. This, of course, is quite a contrast to our microwave, amusement-addicted culture marked by countless, passive hours spent on television and social media and even video games. What a gift we have from God in the visual and performing arts!
