Made Whole Again : The quake created a sort of artistic diaspora at CalArts. But now students are reunited on a refurbished campus.

It was not just the cracked mortar or the fallen ceilings. It was not just the thousands of books scattered across the library.

As fall classes begin for the 25th year at CalArts, students, faculty and staff insist that the damage wrought by January’s earthquake was more than just physical.

The Valencia institute promotes a notion that all artists--be they dancers or painters, musicians or filmmakers--should work in close quarters, exposed to and influenced by each other. But with $30 million in damage to the school’s labyrinthine main building, classes were relocated to more than a dozen temporary sites last semester.

Now, reunited on a refurbished campus, the people of CalArts speak of how the temblor robbed them of their artistic community.

“It is the times you are walking down the hall, and somebody is playing music, or you walk past a performance,” says Cristyne Lawson, dean of the dance school. “The kids really felt cut off, and so did the faculty.”

Says Shelley Trott, a dance student: “It is so easy to see a concert or to see animation here. You take that for granted. Then, to be deprived of that, you realize what you had.”

And now, comfortably returned to their offices, administrators speak freely about the concerns they faced in the morning hours of Jan. 17. Some feared the school might never reopen.

“It had to cross your mind,” says Steven D. Lavine, CalArts’ president. “Fortunately, we didn’t sit down and ask ourselves if we could do it, we just did it. The day after the earthquake, we started driving the streets of the Santa Clarita Valley, looking for suitable space.”

In this way, CalArts arranged for classes to be held at such unlikely locations as a vacant Lockheed plant in Valencia, a theater at Six Flags Magic Mountain and Temple Beth Shalom in Newhall.

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“We operated like a big university on a big campus, everyone in separate buildings,” Lavine says. “We discovered we didn’t like it.”

Explains Hartmut Bitomsky, dean of the film and video school: “At Lockheed, teachers had no place to sit down. They showed up for classes, and then they were gone. That’s not how it is done at CalArts.”

Along with scant interaction, faculty and students suffered inconvenience. Dancers, for instance, commuted 90 minutes each way to classes at a professional studio in Pasadena. The art school scrambled for supplies and studios.

“It was pretty difficult,” student Ingrid Calame says. “The frustrating thing was the time we spent arguing for basic needs.”

Seniors in the film school, required to complete films for their final projects, were left without sufficient sound equipment. Some of them, having gone through graduation last May, are back to finish their work.

They return to a 60-acre campus that is, in some ways, better than ever.

Using $22 million in federal aid and $4.4 million in private grants, CalArts administrators employed crews to work 24 hours a day during the last eight months. Construction and engineering representatives remained on campus, in case emergencies arose.

Staff members showed similar diligence. Library workers, several of whom have worked at CalArts for more than two decades, devoted their summer to repairs.

“Building this library has been our life, our careers,” says Fred Gardner, dean of the library. “To walk in and see it a total shambles was pretty devastating.”

Because the facility had to be gutted, Gardner and his staff upgraded the film vault and viewing stations, the computer lab and an area for art slides. At the other end of campus, the dance school took advantage of the rebuilding process as well, adding new flooring and scrims. The music school added a recording studio. The school’s darkroom was enlarged.

Without the earthquake, such improvements might never have come to pass.

“By normal academic processes, you would spend a year deciding how to rearrange your library,” Lavine says. “Fred Gardner sat down with his staff and in one week redesigned his space to make it more efficient.”

Students and faculty have complained about some of the repairs, especially the new flooring in the main gallery, a large hall at the entrance to the school. The original wood floor was replaced by a less-pleasant cork tile. And some people weren’t happy when they returned last week to find that repairs would continue into the semester. The library was still refurbishing its periodicals room. Workers were hanging sound baffles in the main gallery. A popular campus hangout had yet to open.

“That place is our lifeline,” says one staff member.

“It’s where the coffeepot is,” explains an instructor.

But the enrollment of 1,020 is nearly as large as last year, and, for the most part, a sense of relief prevails.

It shows in the smile of Brian Midkiff, a film student who took a leave of absence last semester and has returned to finish his studies. It shows in the enthusiasm of Lavine, who uses words like heroic to describe his school’s resurrection. And it can be heard in the tired but resolute words of Lawson.

“This is not the place for everybody,” the dance school dean says. “But it is the place for a particular kind of student. And if it weren’t for this place, they’d have nowhere to go.”

So, on a recent weekday afternoon, an exotic yet familiar drumbeat rumbles from a music room deep within the school, carrying along hallways, seeping into a bright dance studio. Trott, going over choreography with fellow students, smiles.

“We’re already talking about going to music school concerts,” she says. “I’ve heard people say it’s nice to see familiar faces again.”

Says Bitomsky: “When the students came back, they felt all of a sudden, ‘We missed this place.’ ”