The Palomar College Performing Arts Department: A History
The story of the Palomar College Performing Arts Department begins on the very first day of the college itself. When Palomar opened its doors on September 23, 1946 — with exactly 100 students on the campus of Vista High School — music was among the handful of subjects offered from the start. The performing arts weren’t an afterthought. They were foundational.
That spirit found its defining early voice in Howard Brubeck. Hired as Chairman of the Music Department in 1953, Brubeck — composer, educator, and older brother of jazz legend Dave Brubeck — brought an artistic vision that reached far beyond North San Diego County. In 1959, his Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra premiered at Carnegie Hall, performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet under Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The music chairman of a young California community college was writing for the world’s greatest stages. That ambition became part of the department’s DNA. Brubeck rose to Dean of Humanities in 1966 and remained at Palomar until his retirement in 1978, shaping a generation of musicians and laying the groundwork for everything that followed.
By the mid-1970s, the performing arts were flourishing in multiple directions. Dance and Theatre had arrived on stage, with ambitious musicals, plays, and performances in Ballet, Jazz, and Modern Dance bringing North County audiences work they had few other places to see performed at that level of craft. The work was community-minded and rooted in a belief that a community college stage could do anything a professional theatre could do.
That belief demanded a home. In Fall 1979, the Educational Theatre opened on the San Marcos campus — Palomar’s first dedicated performance venue. In the early 1990s, it was renamed the Howard Brubeck Theatre in honor of the founding Music Dean, cementing the connection between the department’s present and its origins. Around that same era, Music, Theatre Arts, and Dance came together as a unified Performing Arts Department, recognizing what had always been true: that the three disciplines were strongest in conversation with each other.
Production grew bolder across all three disciplines. The Music program expanded into large ensembles — the Palomar Symphony Orchestra, two Jazz Bands, choral groups, and electronic music — alongside the long-running free Concert Hour series, which has brought live performance to students and the public every week since the 1970s. The Theatre Arts program built a reputation for work ranging from classic musicals to challenging contemporary drama, with productions serving not just as student showcases but as focal points for campus and community dialogue on race, identity, justice, and what it means to be human. The Dance program deepened its offerings to embrace World Dance forms — including Afro-Cuban/Brazilian and other World Dance traditions — alongside its signature annual events, reflecting the department’s belief that dance is a universal language spoken in many voices.
In 2013, a newly renovated Performing Arts Complex gave the department facilities equal to its ambitions: an acoustically refined 260-seat Howard Brubeck Theatre, a Studio Theatre, rehearsal spaces, and a Performance Lab. The renovation was a statement — by the college and the community — that the performing arts matter here.
As our world continues to evolve through the technologies shaping our culture, the Palomar Performing Arts Department remains committed to the unique power of live performance to bring people together through shared experiences of our common humanity. In doing so, we foster communities of curiosity and compassion — qualities that continue to enrich and strengthen our world.