Feet to the Fire

Spring Events include World, U.S., & Connecticut Premieres

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We hope that you will take advantage of all that the Center for the Arts has to offer in the coming months:

In keeping with our tradition of welcoming the world to Wesleyan at the CFA, you will have the opportunity to discover one of Australia’s most adventurous contemporary dance companies (Chunky Move); a sizzling jazz guitarist/vocalist from Benin (Lionel Loueke); and an Argentine quartet that celebrates the tango music of Buenos Aires (Fernando Otero).

And in keeping with our interest in the intersection of art and science, the CFA has commissioned two works that will have their first performances at Wesleyan in conjunction with Feet to the Fire: Fueling the Future. SPILL, by Leigh Fondakowski and Reeva Wortel, is a visual art/performance installation that explores the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The work will debut at Beckham Hall in February. Composer Paula Matthusen, new to Wesleyan’s music faculty, will premiere work divided by time at the Van Vleck Observatory. The sound installation is a reflection of how the scientific definition of energy resonates and clashes with cultural and historical concepts.

Other highlights include the world premiere of a new multi-part suite by jazz vibraphonist and music faculty member Jay Hoggard; the U.S. premiere of Quicksand, a provocative new work by inDANCE, the highly acclaimed Toronto-based contemporary dance company directed by Wesleyan Artist in Residence Hari Krishnan; and a 21st-century examination of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Theater Department Chair Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento.

We invite you to stretch your imagination, contemplate new ideas and celebrate all that the CFA’s faculty, students, and visiting artists and companies have to offer.

Best wishes,

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

P.S. If you are looking for arts interaction over the holidays, please attend Middnight on Main, New Year’s Eve on Main Street in Middletown.

Fall events include U.S. & New England Premieres, Navaratri Festival, Lucier Celebration

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Center for the Arts Fall 2011At a time when so many of us are turning to YouTube to see performances by our favorite artists, we can lose sight of what it’s like to experience live performance. This fall, the Center for the Arts offers you a wide range of performances and exhibitions that will connect you with some of the brightest minds in contemporary art-making, transport you to foreign lands, and inspire you to think about the world in new ways—and the performers will never be more than 69 feet away!

We recognize that it has become increasingly difficult to classify a work as strictly music, dance, theater, visual art, or film as more artists are blurring the boundaries among disciplines. So we have merged our visiting artist performances into a single Performing Arts Series. We hope this will lead you to cross the boundaries of your own comfort zone and discover new artists and art forms.

Highlights of the fall season include the American premiere of the ground-breaking Italian movement theater collective Dewey Dell and the return of Philadelphia’s Rennie Harris Puremovement, that has been a trailblazer in taking hip hop forms from the street to the concert stage for nearly twenty years. We’ll also host two New England premieres: the astoundingly brilliant throat-singers and musicians from Inner Mongolia, AnDa Union and, continuing our collaboration with the College of the Environment, we’ll welcome Water is Rising, a breathtaking performance by a group of 35 dancers and musicians from the Pacific Island atolls, the first islands predicted to be submerged due to climate change. In November, the Music Department and CFA join forces to celebrate Alvin Lucier, internationally renowned composer who has just retired after serving on our faculty for four decades. Alvin Lucier: A Celebration features a major symposium, concert series, film screenings and an exhibition curated by Andrea Miller-Keller.

With performances and exhibitions by visiting artists, students and faculty, there is an extraordinary amount of good work to see at Wesleyan this fall, with 60% offered free to the public or at ticket prices that make us one of the most affordable venues in the state. Tickets are on sale now online. Starting at 10am on Tuesday, August 16, you can call or visit the Wesleyan University Box Office at 860-685-3355 to receive a 10% discount on your purchase of four or more Performing Arts Series events (and if you buy six or more “Performing Arts Series” events, you’ll save 15%!) Starting August 16, you will also be able to buy subscription packages for both the 35th annual Navaratri Festival (a 15% savings) as well as the Alvin Lucier Celebration (a 25% savings!)

Please join us. We appreciate that you believe, as we do, in the power of the arts to add meaning to our lives and to remind us of the capacity of the human spirit. Thanks for making Wesleyan’s CFA your center for the arts.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Earth Day 2010: Joining Art and Science

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This Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, an annual day of environmental awareness. Events are happening all across campus, from a student-organized sleep-out on Foss Hill to a Connecticut trail maintenance outing this weekend to the bi-weekly farmer’s market that has become such a staple feature of campus life.

The CFA is also hosting several events. In recent years, we have become increasingly interested in exploring environmental issues. As you may know, with Feet to the Fire we began a campus-wide initiative to investigate climate change using art as a catalyst. Our intent was not only to shed light on a matter of urgent societal concern but also to experiment with how science and art intersect and inform one another.

In celebration of Earth Day and in the spirit of Feet to the Fire, the CFA and Environmental Studies have teamed up to present a panel discussing the role of the arts in illuminating environmental issues. Panelists include Marda Kirn, founder and executive director of EcoArts; Cassie Meador, member of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange; Godfrey Bourne, associate professor of biology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and director of the CEIBA Biological Station in Guyana; and our own Barry Chernoff, professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Program. We’ll also be premiering Paul Horton’s 30-minute documentary film Connections Within a Fragile World, about Chernoff’s and Meador’s co-taught course which took place in Guyana.

Environmental awareness is also featured in this weekend’s presentation of Reggie Wilson’s The Good Dance—dakar/brooklyn. While The Good Dance, which explores the secular and religious traditions of river cultures in Central Africa and the Mississippi Delta, does not take a specific stance on environmental issues, it does feature the striking visual image of over 300 plastic water bottles on stage. Continuing our collaboration with student environmentalist groups on campus, the CFA is collaborating with the TAP THAT! bottled water awareness campaign, a program of the Wesleyan’s Environmental Organizers Network (EON). During the Q&A sessions following the performances, EON will distribute the water from the bottles to the audience and provide information about bottled water in the lobby. After the performance, EON will reuse the bottles in an art installation in the Usdan Campus Center, after which all of the bottles will be recycled.

Wesleyan Earth Day Celebration:
Joining Art and Science to Engage Environmental Issues
Thursday, April 22, 8pm
CFA Hall
Free Admission

Reggie Wilson / Fist & Heel Performance Group:
The Good Dance—dakar/brooklyn
Friday & Saturday, April 23 & 24, 8pm
CFA Theater
Pre-performance talk by Allison Hurd ’11 on Friday, April 23 at 7:15pm, CFA Hall (formerly CFA Cinema)

For more Earth Day events happening this week, see the calendar organized by SAGES, Wesleyan’s Sustainability Advisory Group for Environmental Stewardship.

Reflecting on Feet to the Fire

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Many of you know that Feet to the Fire: Exploring Global Climate Change from Science to Art was a multilayered project that, from 2008 to 2009, took us from Middletown’s Veteran’s Park, to the Green Street Arts Center, to campus classrooms and CFA venues in a shared exploration of climate change using the arts as a catalyst. (The Feet to the Fire brand continues on campus this year, with a focus on water resources.)

We put together this summary video for a convening of higher education leaders hosted by the Association of Arts Presenters in January in New York City. The gathering, a follow-up to the 2004 American Assembly “The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining, and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education,” sought to understand what creative research programs like Feet to the Fire can tell us about the impact of the arts on learning. Directed by Middletown’s own Paul Horton, we wanted to share it with you.

Also, please save the date for Wesleyan’s Earth Day Celebration on Thursday, April 22 at 8pm in the CFA Hall. We invite you to the premiere of the full-length 30-minute documentary film produced and directed by Paul Horton. The documentary is about the course on tropical ecology co-taught by Professor Barry Chernoff, Director of the Environmental Studies Program, along with Cassie Meador and Matt Mahaney of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange that took place in Guyana in spring 2009. During the course, students combined data collection and analysis with movement research, gaining first-hand knowledge of the tropical ecosystems of Guyana and creating site-specific artworks in the field.

Preceding the film, a panel of artists and scientists, moderated by Jeremy Isard ’11, will discuss current thinking about the envisioning of our environmental future.

Co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Program, a component of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Dance and the Environment in Threshold Sites: The Ultimate Meal

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It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to write about Feet to the Fire, our campus-wide exploration of climate change from science to art. The initiative made possible the creation of four new works by members of Wesleyan’s arts faculty. If you haven’t been to the Feet to the Fire website recently, then you probably haven’t seen the podcasts we produced about two of them: Ron Kuivila’s The Weather, at Six and Alvin Lucier’s Glacier.

The video about Hari Krishnan’s work Liquid Shakti is still in production, but this Friday night in the Schoenberg Dance Studio, we’ll have the opportunity to see the fourth and final commissioned work performed live! Threshold Sites, choreographed by Nicole Stanton in collaboration with Wesleyan students and faculty, was originally scheduled to premiere last May, but because of the tragic events at the end of the semester, the performances were postponed.

Associate Professor of Dance, and Chair of the Dance Department, Nicole Stanton created the work over the course of last spring working with students in her Repertory and Performance course. In conjunction with the Feet to the Fire theme, Stanton invited three professors to co-create a curriculum with her that used research methodologies from social science, evolutionary biology, experiential anatomy, and dance to examine some of the relations between body/self, home/community, and environment/ecosystem, through the lens of food. The resulting multi-media performance weaves dance, song, spoken word…and a meal.

Gina Ulysse in Anthropology provided students with an understanding of theories emanating from the field of cultural studies as they relate to somatic, community, and ecological awareness. Michael Singer from Biology familiarized students with how an ecologist uses practices of scientific observation in the field, taking students out into nature to see how he sees. Andrea Olson, a visiting scholar from Middlebury College in Biology and Dance, conducted an intensive workshop that focused on the development of awareness and respect for the human body and for the environment and charted the relationships between the two. Stanton then synthesized the information into movement expressions and choreographed the work.

“This was a different choreographic experience for me,” she said in an interview I had with her yesterday. “Usually I take an emergent form or context that develops in the studio and the research springs from that investigation. Because of the Feet to the Fire commission, I took a topical approach for the first time.” Friday night’s performance includes a multi-generation cast–three of the original cast members (others graduated), two students who are new to the work, two faculty members (Stanton and Katja Kolcio, Associate Professor of Dance) and four guest artists (Kolcio’s parents and in-laws who are all professional performers!). The work features group segments, a solo by Stanton, and music from around the world, including Ukrainian, German, American, and Senegalese folk traditions. The performance is followed by a communal feast to be shared with the audience.

Threshold Sites: The Ultimate Meal
Schonberg Dance Studio, 247 Pine Street
Friday, December 4, 2009 at 8pm
Seating is limited; to reserve your seat, contact Michele Olerud in the Dance Department, molerud@wesleyan.edu, or call 860-685-3488

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

The Awesome Transience of Weather: Stephen Petronio Company

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Stephen Petronio is known for his collaborative interactions with pop culture, high art, contemporary music and fashion. So, it’s no wonder he was able to attract trailblazing photographer Cindy Sherman and genre-crossing composer Nico Muhly, among other artists, into the creative process of building his latest work, I Drink the Air Before Me, which comes to Wesleyan’s CFA Theater this weekend. When I spoke with Stephen yesterday, he was heading out of rehearsal and he reminisced about the last time he was at Wesleyan. It was the Spring of 1998 and he brought NOT GARDEN with music by Bach, Gounod and Sheila Chandra.

His newest work is a “meditation on the speed and power of weather in all its awesome transience.” Wesleyan is in the middle of this year’s Feet to the Fire initiative–an exploration of water in both its power and scarcity. When I heard that Stephen was creating a work that would evoke the movement of water, wind and weather events on stage, it seemed to me that we could offer our audiences a visceral experience of this precious element.

The title of the piece comes from Ariel’s line in Act V of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In his program notes, Petronio explains that he was struck by “Ariel’s desire to hurl himself through a raging storm, with unthinkable speed and utter certainty, in pursuit of his goal” and that the work was inspired by “the whirling, unpredictable, threatening, and thrilling forces of nature that overwhelm us.”

When I asked Stephen what audiences should look for as they watch the work, he said: “Don’t work hard to find literal meanings in the work: look at how the movement is built…I’m an abstract artist that makes ideas in the body, not in the mind.”

Stephen is a hugely charismatic leader in the American contemporary dance scene. He began to dance at Hampshire College in 1974 and went on to become the first male dancer of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (1979-1986). Founding his own company in 1984, the Stephen Petronio Company is celebrating its 25th Season and has performed in 26 countries around the world. He is noted for works of breathtaking speed, heart-wrenching stillness and great sensuality. He is interested in making compelling contemporary dance that resonates with the moment and culture in which it is made. While he often features pop or rock music in his works, for I Drink the Air Before Me, he turned to composer, Nico Muhly. “Nico is his late twenties; a wildly creative classical composer with an electronic music edge,” states Petronio.

Muhly also wrote sections of the score to be performed by a youth chorus recruited at each tour site. I had just heard Michael Gosselin’s Chamber Choir from Middletown High School perform as a part of Wesleyan Music Professor Neely Bruce’s Ives Vocal Marathon, and it seemed a wonderful way to showcase the high caliber of music education we have in Middletown.

I will also note that this work will open the 10th anniversary of the Breaking Ground Dance Series at Wesleyan’s CFA. To our dance-loving patrons who have returned year after year to see new works by established artists like Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown or artists you may never have seen before, such as Brian Brooks and Rubberbandance, we thank you for taking this journey with us and look forward to celebrating this season with you.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Christine Balfa and a Bowl of Gumbo

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I had a wonderful conversation with Christine Balfa yesterday… Christine is the youngest of four daughters of the legendary Dewey Balfa of the Balfa Brothers, largely responsible for giving rise to the popularity of Cajun music in this country. Christine and her group, Balfa Toujours, will open the Crowell Series on Friday night.

When I talked with her, she told me she’s getting used to a new schedule because her two daughters are back in school after being home-schooled for a year, and they are all adjusting. She found she couldn’t keep up with everything since Dirk Powell, her husband and accordianist for Balfa Toujours, has been on the road so much with Joan Baez, and she’s been working not only with Balfa Toujours but also with the all-women Cajun band, Bonsoir Catin (catin means “my dear” in Cajun French, she tells me). She’s excited about coming to Wesleyan this Friday…she’s heard all about it from Kevin Wimmer ’85, bass player for the group. Unfortunately, Kevin had a prior engagement that conflicts with our date, so he’ll be replaced by Yvette Landry, the bass player from Bonsoir Catin. Courtney Granger, great-nephew of the Balfa Brothers, will round out the group.

“I always knew music would be a part of my life,” she said. She’d appeared playing the triangle alongside her Dad as a child, and then, in the summer of 1991, never having written a song before, she wrote nine. “It was my way of dealing with his loss; I could still feel his presence if I was making music.” She found out her older sister, Nalda, twenty years her senior, had also written songs for the first time that summer, and the two of them made a cassette recording and took it to a local music producer who wanted to record them. Eighteen years later, Balfa Toujours is touring the world.

“When you play traditional music, you face a lot of differing opinions,” Christine said. “There are the folklorists who feel you should play the songs exactly as they were first played and others who set out to intentionally change the music and make it contemporary. In both of those cases, people are looking at it through their heads…they think about it too much. But if artists think about things too much, they aren’t open to being creative. There’s a place for all of these opinions, but in Balfa Toujours, we play what we feel. We play what’s in our hearts.”

As an added bonus, this Saturday, September 19 at 4pm, the CFA will screen the documentary film, Dewey Balfa: Tribute Concert, directed by Middletown’s own Ed McKeon. I spoke with Ed last spring at a meal hosted by Barry Chernoff at his home. Barry is the Director of Wesleyan’s Environmental Studies Program and the dinner was in honor of the company of Stan’s Cafe (remember the Rice Show?) Barry and Ed decided to give our British visitors a Cajun meal. Barry cooked the gumbo and Ed, the jambalaya. I mentioned to Ed that we’d be bringing Balfa Toujours this fall, and he told me about the documentary. The film features a tribute concert performed a month before Dewey died. A local radio station broadcasted it live so that Dewey could hear it in his hospital room. Christine told me: “I didn’t know Ed that well, but soon we knew he had the sensitivity and spirit to make this production happen. We were all going through such a tough time.”

See you this weekend, and please write and let us know what you think of the concert!

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Welcome to the new CFA blog

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Welcome to the new CFA blog and to the opening of our 2009-2010 Season. We are hosting this blog to further connect the campus and community with the work on our stages and in our galleries. For those of you who come to the CFA from outside the campus, we feel that there should be some “value-added” in subscribing to/attending events on a college campus. So we’ll invite you to enter into stimulating dialogue about the works we present by reading the thoughts of some of our faculty, students and visiting artists. You’ll see interviews with some of the artists who are coming to campus and reviews of work that has toured here and has gone on to other cities. You’ll catch up with news of artists who have made the CFA their artistic home over the past few years, read about what our faculty and students are doing on and off-campus, hear about continuing connections between our students and visiting artists, etc. Please send us your comments and suggestions as this is a new venture for us!

My office overlooks the CFA courtyard, and as I write, the Emergency Response Studio has just arrived. Yes, an artist’s studio will be parked in our courtyard until November 8. The artist is Paul Villinski, and he has brought this completely sustainable, off-the-grid trailer to Wesleyan as the core installation of curator Nina Felshin’s upcoming exhibition, Emergency Response Studio, which opens this Friday, September 11 from 5 to 7pm. Inspired by what he found in post-Katrina New Orleans, he transformed a FEMA-type trailer into an artist’s studio/living space. It has a bedroom, a bathroom with a shower, an eat-in kitchen and a workspace. Villinski believes that artists should have the opportunity to “embed” themselves in post-disaster settings and be able to make works that respond to the setting so that the artist’s voice is heard. Nina had heard about the premiere of the exhibition at Rice University, and then happened to have dinner with the interior designer of the bedroom space who told her she had to see it. What she found was an installation that is every bit as beautiful as it is functional…an exhibit that has a great deal to say to those of us interested in living sustainably without sacrificing aesthetics. The exhibition also ties into Wesleyan’s Feet to the Fire program about climate change, which continues this year with a focus on the water crisis and the availability of clean freshwater. I do hope you’ll join us for the opening on Friday and have the opportunity to meet Paul and take a peek at this magnificent trailer.

Best wishes for the new academic year,
Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts