Summer Centered: Seth Boyce ’20 Rocks the Fringe
Seth Boyce '20 outside of FringeArts. Photo by Patrick Montero.
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The history and music double major is interning with FringeArts, Philadelphia’s contemporary dance, theater, visual arts, and music programmer and presenter of the city’s annual Fringe Festival, as he considers a career in arts administration.
It takes a cool and steady hand to work on the logistical side of an arts festival. Luckily, Seth Boyce ’20 has one. Funded by the John B. Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Boyce is working as the guide intern at FringeArts, an arts nonprofit in Philadelphia that organizes contemporary and innovative performances. Boyce’s central responsibility has involved working on the guide for the upcoming Fringe Festival, the annual citywide festival that FringeArts orchestrates every September to showcase over 1000 theater, dance, and music performances.
“My main project was editing the festival guide, which provides information on all the shows in the festival,” said Boyce. “We just sent it off to the printers, so now I’m helping to create webpages for all the shows.”
While editing the festival guide, Boyce drew heavily on the attention to detail and narrative that he has honed as a double major in history and music. He is also using the disciplines’ more analytic skills as he works to create the performance webpages.
“Through both my music and history classes, I have learned about aesthetic trends and how art relates to the society that produced it,” he said. “Looking at the works presented in the Fringe Festival has been fascinating for me because my professors trained me to see art in these ways.”
For Boyce, the internship also represents a first step in a career path he has lately been considering.
“I recently became interested in the field of arts administration, and I thought that this position would show me the types of jobs available,” said Boyce. “Art has always been an attractive career path for me, but I feel like I'm better suited to supporting art and artists than creating art myself.”
Ultimately, the internship has helped expand Boyce’s conception of the diversity of a career in the arts while also allowing him to contribute to work he enjoys on a day-to-day basis.
“I would like to continue working in arts administration and/or editing, for a few more years at least,” he said. “This experience has made me appreciate my education, and I feel like I am using a lot of the skills I've learned at Haverford.”
“Summer Centered” is a series exploring our students’ Center-funded summer work.
