Theater – Page 5 – Center for the Arts

2015-16 Season Now On Sale! World, U.S., New England, CT Premieres

September 28, 2020August 18, 2015 by Andrew Chatfield

This year, we are looking forward to introducing you to artists who are asking important questions about our world today, questioning why things are the way they are, and helping us to envision how they might be.

Dorrance Dance make their Connecticut debut on September 25 and 26 as part of the Performing Arts Series.

Michelle Dorrance, described by the Chicago Tribune as “edgy, seductive and smart,” brings Dorrance Dance to the CFA Theater September 25 and 26. You’ll have the chance to see tap dancers push the boundaries of what tap dance looks and feels like: her company will dazzle you as they transform the stage into one sonic instrument.

At a time when our country is struggling to find its way in terms of race relations, we’ve invited writer/performer Daniel Beaty to campus for a residency that includes the October 9 performance of Mr. Joy, his highly acclaimed tour de force solo show about a community’s efforts to heal in order to dream again.

Composer, visual artist, and new media innovator R. Luke DuBois takes over the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from September 16 through December 13 with his exhibition In Real Time, creating maps, scores, and videos that use real-time data flows and media footage to raise questions of artistic agency, privacy, and fair use. In time for the election season, the CFA has commissioned him to create a new work using research generated by the Wesleyan Media Project.

Dancer/choreographer Eiko Otake returns with a series of intimate performances in unlikely places, including a commissioned work in honor of the 100th-anniversary of Wesleyan’s Van Vleck Observatory.

This year’s Navaratri Festival of Indian music and dance features one of the world’s greatest veena players, Sri Rajhesh Vaidya, on October 10, and Bharatanatyam dancer Alarmél Valli on October 11.

All this shares the fall schedule with performances by faculty and students, including the final class performance by students of Adjunct Professor of Music Abraham Adzenyah, who is retiring after teaching Ghanaian drumming at Wesleyan for the past 45 years. You won’t want to miss that concert on December 4.

As always, we hope you will look to the CFA as a place of enlightenment and enjoyment in the months ahead.

Sincerely,

Pamela Tatge
Director
Center for the Arts

Spring Photos: Feet to the Fire – Riverfront Encounter

October 7, 2015August 18, 2015 by jscribner

This event celebrated the river as a source of cultural inspiration and creativity on May 9, 2015 at Harbor Park in Middletown. “Feet to the Fire: Riverfront Encounter” featured live music, visual art installations, plein air painters, a kids’ activity zone, environmental education exhibits, as well as a craft fair and farmer’s market–all designed to bring patrons closer to the rich culture, history, and science of the Connecticut River.

Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.

Spring Photos: Talk by Quiara Alegría Hudes

October 7, 2015August 18, 2015 by jscribner

Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater at Wesleyan University. Her play Water by the Spoonful received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Her other works include the book for the 2008 Tony Award-winning “Best Musical” In the Heights, and the plays Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (2006) and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2013). Her younger cousin grew up in “the barrio,” graduated public school, enlisted at the age of seventeen, sustained a leg injury in Iraq, and became a veteran, all by the ripe age of eighteen. This talk on April 27, 2015 in Memorial Chapel told the true backstage story of what happened after Ms. Hudes turned her cousin’s life into a trilogy of plays. For him, opening night was only the beginning.

Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.

Spring Photos: In/Between – Pieces in Progress

August 19, 2015August 18, 2015 by jscribner

Lebanese American writer, performer, and teaching artist Leila Buck ’99 presented a work-in-progress sharing of a collaborative theatrical work commissioned by the Center for the Arts as part of Muslim Women’s Voices at Wesleyan on April 18, 2015 in the World Music Hall.
Through theatrical scenes, storytelling, and playful improvisations with the audience, this performance-in-process invited the audience to participate in an interactive exploration of how we know what we think we know, see what we don’t, view ourselves and each other, and engage in the spaces in between. Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.

“Summer at the CFA” to include U.S. debut jazz; world premiere classical music

June 23, 2015 by Andrew Chatfield

SUMMER AT THE CFA
June 30 – July 23, 2015
SUMMER AT THE CFA: EVENING PERFORMANCES
1. Las Cafeteras – Wednesday, July 1, 7pm, CFA Courtyard (Rain location: Crowell Concert Hall); FREE!
2. Regina Carter Quartet (U.S. Debut) – Thursday, July 16, 8pm, Crowell Concert Hall
3. Work-In-Progress Showing of /peh-LO-tah/ and Conversation with Marc Bamuthi Joseph – Thursday, July 23, 8pm, CFA Theater, FREE!

SUMMER AT THE CFA: FREE AFTERNOON TALKS AND PERFORMANCES
4. Elizabeth Willis: Live Poetry – Tuesday, June 30, 12:10pm, CFA Hall, FREE!
5. Taking Over Space: Exploring Three-Dimensional Paintings by Marela Zacarias – Tuesday, July 7, 12:10pm, CFA Hall, FREE!
6. This Is It! The Complete Piano Works of Neely Bruce: Part VI (World Premiere) – Sunday, July 12, 3pm, Crowell Concert Hall, FREE!
7. How to Seduce an Audience? A Talk by Tamilla Woodard and Ana Margineanu – Tuesday, July 14, 12:10pm, CFA Hall, FREE!
8. Okwui Okpokwasili: Embodied Performance/Making the Invisible Visible – Tuesday, July 21, 12:10pm, CFA Hall, FREE!

SPECIAL EVENTS
9. Blackbird: A Benefit Concert for the Stephanie Nelson Memorial Scholarship Fund – Saturday, July 25, 8pm, Crowell Concert Hall

Programs, artists, and dates are subject to change.

Click here to buy your tickets online.

“The Bald Soprano” (through Sat. Apr. 25)

April 22, 2015April 22, 2015 by Andrew Chatfield

CFA Arts Administration Intern Chloe Jones ’15 talks to stage manager Julia Tyminski ’17, and Albert Tholen ’15 and Grace Nix ’15, who are performing as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in the Wesleyan University Theater Department production of Eugène Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano,” which runs through Saturday, April 25, 2015 in the CFA Theater.

Wesleyan University's Theater Department presents "The Bald Soprano." Sitting (left to right): Sara Fayngolz '17, Natalie May '18, Peter McCook '16, Grace Nix '15. Standing (left to right): Edward Archibald '17, Albert Tholen '15. Photo by John Carr. — Wesleyan University’s Theater Department presents “The Bald Soprano.” Sitting (left to right): Sara Fayngolz ’17, Natalie May ’18, Peter McCook ’16, Grace Nix ’15.
Standing (left to right): Edward Archibald ’17, Albert Tholen ’15. Photo by John Carr.

In 1950, Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano, one of the seminal plays of Theater of the Absurd. He was inspired by the cliché dialogues between the imaginary Mr. and Mrs. Smith in an English phrasebook for beginners. Albert Tholen ’15 and Grace Nix ’15 play Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the production by the Wesleyan University Theater Department, directed by Professor of Theater Yuri Kordonsky.

“We are a proper British couple with a twist,” says Ms. Nix with a sly smile.

The entire play takes place in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in their home on the outskirts of London. “It’s a drawing room drama,” says Mr. Tholen. “One that goes horribly awry.”

With The Bald Soprano, Mr. Ionesco rejected coherent plot, character development, and the concept of realistic drama. Through dark and daring humor, the play discusses the futility of meaningful communication in contemporary society, and the tragedy of language in a universe driven by chance.

“It’s a very different logic of causality in this world,” says Ms. Nix. “An illogical logic.”

Ms. Nix and Mr. Tholen, along with the other four actors in the cast (Edward Archibald ’17, Sara Fayngolz ’17, Natalie May ’18, and Peter McCook ’16), have been working with Professor Kordonsky since the beginning of the semester. Together with dramaturge Rachel Sobelsohn ’17, assistant director May Treuhaft-Ali ’17, and stage manager Julia Tyminski ’17, they spent the first two weeks of rehearsal analyzing different translations of the play, originally written in French, to draft their own composite script.

“We spent hours talking about single words,” says Ms. Nix. “Until we arrived at a script, which we felt was the best expression of what this play is trying to say.”

“It’s nice to have ownership over the language in that way,” says Mr. Tholen. “It’s become our script.”

Professor Kordonsky gave the actors a great deal of creative responsibility throughout the process. They would divide into subsets and work on specific moments in the script, then come back together as a cast and share. They created scene after scene, gradually bringing both clarity and complexity to Mr. Ionesco’s absurdity.

“I think more than anything else, Mr. Smith is like a coat that I wear,” says Mr. Tholen. “I don’t get on stage and become him. It’s more of an attitude.”

“It’s the total acceptance of a different world,” says Ms. Nix. “Even though it doesn’t make any sense, it feels right.”

The Bald Soprano invites its audience to view the play from the actual stage of the CFA Theater, rather than from the house seats where one faces a proscenium.

“For this play you want an intimate connection with the audience,” says Ms. Nix. “If the audience were farther away, I think we would lose that connection and some of the urgency of the play.”

Sitting on the stage of the CFA Theater, the audience finds itself right there in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Smith — in close proximity to the play’s simple set: a couch, some chairs, a clock.

“The set looks relatively realistic,” says stage manager Julia Tyminski ’17. “But the minute the show starts you realize it’s an absurd production, yet the actors are playing it as if it’s realism, and that’s where the comedy comes in.”

Wesleyan University’s Theater Department presents
The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco
Wednesday, April 22 through Friday, April 24 at 8pm
Saturday, April 25 at 2pm and 8pm
CFA Theater
$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $4 Wesleyan students

Directed by Professor of Theater Yuri Kordonsky. Designed by Professor of Theater, Retired, Jack Carr (set and lights) and Artist in Residence Leslie Weinberg (costumes).

Spring Photos: Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental – 17 Border Crossings

March 6, 2015March 5, 2015 by Laurie Kenney

The Connecticut premiere of Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental: 17 Border Crossings, a solo work written and directed by Thaddeus Phillips based on his actual travel experiences, was performed on February 21, 2015, at the CFA Theater. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the entire album on flickr.

Chloe Jones ’15 talks to Thaddeus Phillips about “17 Border Crossings” (Feb. 21)

February 19, 2015 by Andrew Chatfield

CFA Arts Administration Intern Chloe Jones ’15 talks to writer, director, and performer Thaddeus Phillips of Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental about the Connecticut premiere of his solo theater work “17 Border Crossings,” taking place this Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 8pm in the CFA Theater.

What was the initial inspiration for “17 Border Crossings”?

Most of the shows I’ve made with Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental involved traveling somewhere to make the show. The travel is done as research for the performance. For example, we did a road trip from Denver to L.A., and we dropped down into New Mexico where we tried to find all the old parts or Route 66, and we filmed stuff and took notes and developed this piece called Flamingo/Winnebago based off that trip. We’ve done that in Bosnia, Cuba, the Amazon. But what would happen is I would come back and tell people stories of things that happened that weren’t directly related to the project we were doing, and I realized I wanted to do something with all this “outtake” material that was simply about travel. It didn’t have a storyline or a plot. It was just about traveling, and then I realized all of the stories that I was remembering or finding were about border crossings.

Can you talk a little about the work itself?

Thaddeus Phillips of Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental performs “17 Border Crossings.”

There are seventeen different scenes or sequences. I had done solo work before but very involved, complicated stuff with video or crazy sets, and [for 17 Border Crossings] I wanted to try doing the classic Spalding Gray monologue at a desk with a microphone and a glass of water. Because I’ve used video in other work recently, I’ve been trying to do works that are much more cinematic in their theatricality but with no video—the simplest scenes possible: the movement of a chair or lights or sound. The idea is to create a very modern/contemporary style of theater but without any media that actively engages the audience’s imagination, individualizing the experience more. If you use a bunch of media, everyone’s seeing the same thing, but if you simply suggest something and fill it in with text and sound, then the way you’re seeing it is a little bit different than the way the person next to you is seeing it because it’s not fully there yet.

Other than the overarching theme of border crossing, what elements of traveling does the work address?

There’s a few: one is that modes of transportation are weird, like a plane is a very weird thing if you really think about it, so there’s a little sequence about being in a plane that tries to expose all that—what you’re not supposed to think about. Then there’s always being taken to a little square room by immigration authorities. Technically when you land, before you leave Customs, you’re not anywhere. [It’s] this weird space where you go through the passport control. You’re in an architectural space that’s been defined as nowhere in the world. Then the whole absurdity of borders themselves, like the border between Israel and Jordan was made up by Winston Churchill, and he made jokes about it, saying “I just invented a country!”

What do you see as the significance of performing this work in such a globalized world, where travel is so much more accessible than it once was and so many more people are traveling?

When you start talking about these little stories or human stories, what you have is a huge global theme but [told] through specific details about a very specific person. What the show tries to do is make very human what it is to cross a border, from being on a plane and being completely unconscious of what’s going on underneath you to people trying to get across for a better life.

Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental: 17 Border Crossings
Connecticut Premiere
Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 8pm
CFA Theater
$19 general public; $17 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students

An Outside the Box Theater Series event presented by the Theater Department and the Center for the Arts.

Enter to win a $200 travel Gift Certificate from Sanditz Travel Management (Feb. 18)

February 13, 2015 by Andrew Chatfield

Write a story (500 words max) about when you crossed a geographic border, or a border of any kind. Where did it lead you? What insights did you have?

Then, post your story on the Center for the Arts Facebook event page for 17 Border Crossings, and you will receive a free ticket to the performance. The story with the most “Likes” by midnight on Wednesday, February 18, 2015 will win a $200 travel gift certificate courtesy of Sanditz Travel Management in Middletown!

How to post your story:

1. Go to the Facebook event page here.
2. “Join” the event.
3. Under “POSTS,” where it says “Write something…” cut and paste your story.
4. Hit the “Post” button.

If you don’t have Facebook, but would like to participate, please e-mail your entry by midnight on Wednesday, February 18, 2015 to boxoffice@wesleyan.edu.

Outside the Box Theater Series
Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental: 17 Border Crossings
Connecticut Premiere
Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 8pm
CFA Theater
$19 general public; $17 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students

The Connecticut premiere of 17 Border Crossings, a solo work written and directed by Thaddeus Phillips based on his travel experiences. The audience is taken to the frontiers of countries around the world in a humorous and poignant examination of imaginary lines, arbitrary passports, and curious customs.

An Outside the Box Theater Series event presented by the Theater Department and the Center for the Arts.

Spring Events Include World, New England, and Connecticut Premieres

January 27, 2015December 24, 2014 by Andrew Chatfield

Wesleyan University is a center for creativity and innovation, and one of the best places for our community to come together to participate in that energy is at the Center for the Arts. Our year-long exploration of Muslim Women’s Voices in performance continues on February 27 with a rare opportunity to see a dance company coming to Middletown from the northernmost tip of Sumatra, Indonesia. The dances of Tari Aceh! feature quick, highly-coordinated movements of hands, heads, and torsos, punctuated by lively body percussion. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. And on April 17 and 18, you can get a first look at a theatrical work-in-progress by playwright and actress Leila Buck ’99 that was commissioned for Muslim Women’s Voices.

Rachel Harrison, "AA," 2010, wood, bubble wrap, cardboard, acrylic, tennis shirt, A/V cart, DVD player, speakers, projector, extension cord, five hair rollers, pack of gum, ear plugs, American Apparel video, color/sound (2009), 80 x 70 x 70 inches. Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery. — Rachel Harrison, “AA,” 2010, wood, bubble wrap, cardboard, acrylic, tennis shirt, A/V cart, DVD player, speakers, projector, extension cord, five hair rollers, pack of gum, ear plugs, American Apparel video, color/sound (2009), 80 x 70 x 70 inches. Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery.

In the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from January 29 to March 1, Studio Art faculty members Jeffrey Schiff and Sasha Rudensky curate Picture/Thing, an exhibition featuring the work of ten artists working at the intersection of photography and sculpture.

In April and May, we present “The Connecticut Meets the Nile,” a two-part happening that will highlight two great rivers. On April 10, Crowell Concert Hall hosts The Nile Project, an all-star gathering of musicians who live in the countries that border the Nile River and have come together to create music that draws attention to the environmental issues of a historic river that sustains millions of people. Then on May 9, at Middletown’s Harbor Park, Wesleyan and regional partner organizations present Feet to the Fire: Riverfront Encounter, an afternoon of music performances, visual art, and kid’s activities that will engage our community with our own beautiful river.

And throughout the winter and spring, you can put your finger on the pulse of what’s inspiring our newest artists by visiting the Senior Thesis Exhibitions in Zilkha Gallery, or by attending thesis performances by music, dance, and theater students performed throughout the CFA.

It’s all here for you. We hope you’ll join us.

Pamela Tatge

Director, Center for the Arts