Updates and reflections from Wesleyan's Center for the Arts in Middletown, Connecticut
Allysen Hooks, dancer at Gallim Dance, taught a Master Class on Gallim Dance’s movement language and Gallim Dance repertory on Saturday, March 5, 2016 in the Bessie Schönberg Dance Studio as part of DanceMasters Weekend. Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Choreographer Allison Orr, the Menakka and Essel Bailey ’66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment, conducted a special program with the children at the Green Street Teaching and Learning Center’s AfterSchool program on Monday March 7, 2016. Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,
It is astonishing to me that Friday April 1 is my last day at Wesleyan University, after nearly seventeen years. I wanted to send you a note to thank you for being patrons of the Center for the Arts. There is simply no way we can ever welcome artists to Wesleyan without the presence of an engaged and committed audience. You have no idea how wonderful it was for me to look out at you from the Crowell Concert Hall or CFA Theater stage, or to see you at an opening in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. I knew that you were there to join me in celebrating what the arts can tell us about other cultures and other worlds; how they can help us to make sense of the world in which we live; and how they can make us feel both the exhilaration and the sadness of what it means to be alive. I want to thank you, in particular, for the times you bought a ticket to a performance by an artist whom you didn’t know but, because we at the CFA felt it was an important artist or group, you took the risk.
In these last days at my desk overlooking the CFA Courtyard, I am reflecting on so many great moments when we shared such joy and excitement not only for visiting and faculty artists, but also when we marveled together at the virtuosity and creative power of Wesleyan students and all that they have to offer us.
I will miss my Wesleyan and Middletown families greatly, but as an alum and parent of a member of the class of 2016, I know that I will return often and continue to experience the arts as only Wesleyan can present them. I also want to take the opportunity to introduce Laura Paul, Interim Director of the Center for the Arts, who will lead the CFA in its next chapter. Together we have been planning a 2016–17 season of performances and exhibitions that I know you will enjoy.
If, by any chance, you are free this Friday, April 1, I will be in Crowell Concert Hall at 8pm to introduce the great Wu Man and the Shanghai Quartet. I would love the chance to say goodbye and thank you in person; if not, I hope you will come to visit me this summer at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts (if you missed the announcement in January, I’m going there to be their new Executive Director)!
Thank you again for your generous support of the Center for the Arts.
Fondly,
Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts
Choreographer, writer, director, and conceptualist Ralph Lemon gave a presentation about his new and old work about an imagined South in the Ring Family Performing Arts Hall on Thursday, February 25, 2016.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Advanced student choreographers had their dress rehearsal for the Winter Dance Concert on Thursday, December 10, 2015 in the CFA Theater.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
“Introduction to Dance” (DANC 111) and beginning dance students performed works of various styles, including Bharata Natyam (South Indian classical dance) on Sunday, December 6, 2015 in the Crowell Concert Hall.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Master drummer and Adjunct Professor of Music Abraham Adzenyah celebrated his final performance with his students after 45 years at Wesleyan on Friday, December 4, 2015 in the Crowell Concert Hall.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
A dress rehearsal for Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Attendance was held on Thursday, November 12, 2015 in the Patricelli ’92 Theater.
Thank You For Coming, a series of works by choreographer/director Faye Driscoll, focus on how you experience yourself in relation to other bodies and the spaces you inhabit. During the Connecticut premiere of the dance theater work Attendance, dancers passed through ever-morphing states of physical entanglement. Intimately staged in the round, Ms. Driscoll crafts a heightened reality of observation, invitation, and interdependence. The audience and performers shared a dynamic, joyful ritual of action and transformation. Ms. Driscoll was Wesleyan’s 2014-15 Creative Campus Fellow in Dance.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Dancer/choreographer Eiko Otake, Visiting Artist in Dance and East Asian Studies, presented a series of intimate performances as part of her solo project “A Body in Places.” She preformed in the Van Vleck Observatory on Friday, November 6, 2015.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Internationally acclaimed Indian dancer and choreographer Alarmél Valli turned the traditional Bharatanatyam style into subtle, deeply internalized, personal dance poetry in her Connecticut debut in the Crowell Concert Hall on Sunday, October 11, 2015.
Click here to view the full album on Flickr. Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
