March 2021 – Center for the Arts

Wesleyan’s Rani Arbo talks to Julie Shvetz about the 40th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition

March 8, 2021 by Andrew Chatfield

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

The virtual opening reception for the 40th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition will take place online on Saturday, March 13, 2021 from 5pm to 7pm. This event is sponsored by the Middletown Board of Education, Middletown Public Schools Cultural Council, and Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts.

Every spring for the past 40 years, the Middletown Public Schools K-12 Art Show has transformed Wesleyan’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery into a joyous, wall-to-wall riot of color. From ceramics to collage, the annual exhibition is a multimedia celebration of the creativity of Middletown students, the vision and dedication of their art teachers, and the community that supports both. It is a beloved event: last year, more than 2,000 people attended the exhibition opening on Saturday, March 7, 2020—just days before it closed early in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, the Middletown Public Schools K-12 Art Show turns 40, goes virtual, and is a testament to an unprecedented year of teaching, learning, and art-making.

“The art teachers are unsung heroes,” says Julie Shvetz, K-12 Visual Department Head for Middletown Public Schools. “They are doing amazing things in their classrooms, making it work simultaneously for kids in the room, kids who are hybrid and will be in the room tomorrow, and kids who are fully remote.” Since last spring, teachers have been packing up supply kits full of pencils, markers, watercolors, air-drying clay, and sculpting tools to ensure that kids at home can fully participate and have a supported creative outlet.

“Students need a way to express themselves and how they’re feeling, with everything going on in the world right now,” says Shvetz. During January’s Presidential inauguration week, she challenged her high school students to create an expressive collage on a topic that concerned them, from COVID-19 and the election to Black Lives Matter and their own futures. They drew a range of emotions, and then incorporated those into a collage of images, text, and 3-D elements that summed up how they felt and what they had to say (some of these will be on view in the virtual show). Says Shvetz, “This show is a perfect means for bringing the community together, from Pre-K to kids who are about to graduate. We celebrate all our students, all our schools, and all our teachers—and this virtual year, we are so glad we still have that opportunity.”

The 40th anniversary Middletown Public Schools K-12 Art Show will be hosted on a Middletown Public Schools website and will open with Zoom reception on Saturday, March 13, 2021 from 5pm to 7pm. We hope you join us for this annual Wesleyan Center for the Arts and Middletown Public Schools tradition!

Rani Arbo
Campus and Community Engagement Manager
Center for the Arts

Artwork (clockwise from left): Maria Enrika Laredo, Gazelle Molina, Audrey Antczak.

Wesleyan’s Hari Krishnan talks with choreographer Ananya Chatterjea about her Movement Workshop

March 8, 2021March 6, 2021 by John Elmore

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

Professor and Chair of the Dance Department Hari Krishnan talks with his longtime colleague and friend choreographer Ananya Chatterjea to discuss her upcoming “Feminist Rage and Healing” Movement Workshop on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 8pm.

Ananya Chatterjea অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায় is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016 Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellow, and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. She is a Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in Dance Studies and technique.

Hari Krishnan is Chair and Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University. A 2013 Bessie Award nominee in the Outstanding Performance category, he is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator, and is the artistic director of Toronto-based dance company inDANCE. His monograph Celluloid Classicism (2019) recently won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”

Warrior-feminist-dance artist Ananya Chatterjea will lead a seminal and urgent workshop on feminist rage and healing at Wesleyan on March 10, 2021. Why is this workshop important in terms of the complex world we all inhabit today?
While some of the issues we are facing today are old, we are experiencing them in new formations. There is urgency as the ecosystemic balance—both in terms of the extractive economy of capitalism that is destroying our habitat, and in terms of violently stifling emergent voices for justice from long and historically marginalized communities—tips over. Sometimes I think all we have is ourselves, in the manner of brilliant Black queer feminist writer June Jordan’s words: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Yet, we have to practice being there for ourselves—in embodied terms. So we practice the regulation of our over-activated nerves, and we care for ourselves and each other, even as we push back consistently and repeatedly against the violences directed at us. This is a practice, this articulation of rage at what is being done to us and in our name, and the ability not to be burned by its power.

What would you like the participants to take away from this experience?
An embodied knowledge of articulating rage.

Could you discuss the syncretic ways you integrate performance, scholarship and social justice issues?
The injustices that are in front of us are multi-pronged, Hydra-like, constantly reincarnating themselves. Some of these we are sharply opposed to, and some, because they are systemic, we are implicated in, albeit unwittingly. It takes all of the skills I have learned and continue to chisel, to identify them through the culture of shiny consumerist capitalism and convenience, and to invite others to do the same. And to imagine a world without these violences—it takes every cell of my body to practice moving as if these violences were not poisoning our world. It takes deep study, critical analysis, intellectual and practice-based rigor, creative ferment, undoing of old learnings, imaginative flights, it takes everything informing each other.

We hope you join us for this movement workshop experience on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 8pm. Reservations are limited to 40 people and are free through the Center for the Arts box office.

Fiona Coffey
Associate Director for Programming and Performing Arts
Center for the Arts

Elevator Repair Service at Wesleyan

March 1, 2021March 1, 2021 by Andrew Chatfield

Elevator Repair Service's "Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge" — Actors Greig Sargeant and Ben Williams (pictured) and director and Elevator Repair Service founder John Collins will discuss the development and process of creating the new theater work in progress “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created and performed by Elevator Repair Service, on Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 8pm. *FREE!* RSVP required for access to virtual event. Photo by John Collins.

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week we focus on Elevator Repair Service’s new theater work in progress “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge.” Actors Greig Sargeant and Ben Williams and director and founder John Collins will discuss the development and process of creating the work on Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 8pm.

In January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic closed theaters around the world, I saw an early open rehearsal of a new work by renowned theater company Elevator Repair Service. The company presented an excerpt of a new show they were developing, Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge. Actors Greig Sargeant and Ben Williams performed an extraordinarily moving verbatim excerpt from the original debate between civil rights activist James Baldwin and the father of modern American conservatism William F. Buckley, Jr. In 1965, Baldwin and Buckley had been invited by Cambridge University Union to debate the proposition “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin offered a riveting speech stating that the legacy of slavery and white supremacy had destroyed his sense of reality.

“It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization, and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin, begins there and accelerates – accelerates throughout a whole lifetime.”

Buckley acknowledged discrimination but said that America was a “mobile society” and Black people had every opportunity to improve their condition. This historic debate became a touchstone in both men’s lives and a marker of the Civil Rights Movement. The initial performance by Elevator Repair Service in 2020 created an incredible echo between the language and rhetoric being used in 1965 and much of the contemporary national conversations around race and equality in America. It was a performance filled with emotion, expression, desire, and an impassioned assertion of civil rights that I felt was important for our Wesleyan students and community to experience.

Elevator Repair Service is an acclaimed New York-based theater ensemble founded by director John Collins and a group of actors in 1991. Traditionally, the company has worked with found or literary texts. In 2006, the company changed the landscape of American theater with their eight-hour production of Gatz, which reenacted the novel The Great Gatsby on the stage. Gatz initiated a trilogy of American literature: Gatz, The Sound and the Fury, and The Select (The Sun Also Rises). This lengthy process of devising work from non-theatrical texts became the company’s signature. They are also known for innovative use of technology, imaginative choreography, and dense soundscapes in their productions. Elevator Repair Service creates its performances through extended periods of collaboration; a typical development cycle includes four to six intensive work periods within a two-year window followed by work-in-progress showings before touring.

Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge was originally set to premiere at The Public Theater in the spring of 2020. After the pandemic shut down theaters, Elevator Repair Service was forced to delay its opening. During the past year, the world has undergone major seismic shifts with the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the insurrection at the Capitol, the end of the Trump presidency, and more. Although the company started working on the production in 2019, by the time the show will premiere in late 2021 or early 2022, the lens through which audiences will see this important show has shifted.

The Center for the Arts plans to bring Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge to Wesleyan in February 2022. In the meantime, we are thrilled to host a conversation with Greig Sargeant, Ben Williams, and John Collins to discuss the show’s origins, how COVID-19 disrupted its development process, and how Black Lives Matter has heightened the lens through which audiences will now experience the production. The discussion will be moderated by Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl and Fitzroy “Pablo” Wickham ’21.

We hope you join us on Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 8pm for this dynamic conversation moderated by Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl and Fitzroy “Pablo” Wickham ’21. Reservations are free through the Center for the Arts Box Office.

Fiona Coffey
Associate Director for Programming and Performing Arts
Center for the Arts