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(03/05/14 10:17pm)
The conference room of Robert A. Jones ’59 House now hosts an exhibit by student Levi Westerveld ’15.5. Entitled “New Spaces, Same Identities”, the series of 12 portraits reveals the often-unseen faces of migrant workers in China. Having previously exhibited portrait series of the Quw’ustun native people of Vancouver Island, Canada, and of traditional farmers of the Valley of the Dordogne in France, this recent series continues and expands a process and aesthetic of sensitive humanity and tenderness.
Ross Commons Co-Head and Professor of Religion Maria Hatjigeorgiou has followed Westerveld’s work since his first exhibition at the M Gallery in Fall 2012.
“I sense that Levi is on track to articulate a very personal visual medium: through his deep empathetic listening, the stories of his subjects, and revealing their ontological defiance against the dehumanization of capitalist development, which seeks to destroy the human soul,” Hatjigeorgiou said. “Levi manages to capture something archaic, almost primordial in the gazes of his subjects, and his art becomes the vehicle that conveys it to us, in a way that almost shocks us, because it evokes the mystery of human existence. This aspect of humanity can never be captured by the culture of the endless photographic narcissism of our ‘selfies’; it can only be accomplished by art. In fact, this is the power of true art: by commenting on the human experience, it reminds us of what is true and enduring.”
A sincere respect for people quickly became evident as he reflected on how he approaches each person.
“All the people that we see are people I know well and have interviewed several times before starting the project,” Westerveld said. “On one hand because I was doing research with a professor on migrant workers; on the other hand because it takes time to get to the point where they are willing to have their picture taken and where you feel confident that you’re not rushing through the process. You need to feel honesty and respect for the person. If you’re just ‘using’ them, it doesn’t feel comfortable when you’re drawing them. You certainly need to have a connection with the people and that takes conversation and time. It’s very pleasurable to get to know all the people. Each person has a very particular story. I can look at all the drawings and have a lot of memories and connections that come back.”
Working with charcoal and dry pastel, Westerveld seemingly captures in two dimensions the seasoned reality of his subjects. This exhibit, much like his previous work, focuses on giving a face and a voice to people whose stories and existence often remains unknown. The captivating gaze of the portraits seems to communicate a fourth dimension of time and a fifth dimension of human experience and emotion, beyond the three dimensions of length, width, and height. Many of the portraits shift from a tea-stained negative space to a striking sense of photorealism and character. One might find this shift analogous to the transition and contrast between rural and urban landscapes.
“I was trying to understand how the identity of these people, their perception of their own identity was changing as they move from the rural landscape to the urban landscape, which in China are extremely different spaces,” Westerveld said. “I was going with the idea that the people, as they move between those different spaces, were going to have very different changes and perceptions of their own identity, in the same way that, for me, moving from France to the United States has changed a lot of things about myself.”
Westerveld talked extensively of the relationship between his portraits and his major, Geography. A class on campus led Levi to research Chinese migrant workers before studying abroad in Kunming in Fall 2013. He was able to pursue his research further with a Ph. D. student who focuses on ethnic minorities among Chinese migrant workers.
He pointed out one woman’s portrait, pointing out the form of her safety helmet underneath her hijab. The question of how people’s identities change as they move between different landscapes is central to the exhibition.
“I realized that many migrant workers still perceive themselves as farmers, because there is such a division in Chinese society between the people who come from rural China and urban China,” Westerveld said. “There are spaces in the urban landscape with a real division between people who belong and people who don’t belong. Migrant workers are living in new spaces, but their identity is not changing or adapting to the space. The Chinese city is not adapting to their identify and not accepting them.”
In 2011, the number of migrant workers in China hit 230, and 17 percent of China’s population floats between urban and rural landscapes. These workers are only allowed in urban regions on a temporary, contractual basis. After one contract expires, they have to find another job or return to their rural homes. A global economy’s momentary want for labor seemingly governs migrant workers’ mobility inside their country’s borders, and their legal existence within a city depends entirely on their labor output.
“There is a real focus on their not belonging to the space,” he said. “And so wherever you look, from the cultural, economic or the social perspective, migrant workers are alienated by the city. There are specific spaces where migrant workers work, sleep and eat together. They don’t really interact with the local people.”
Westerveld described how various linguistic constructions further mark migrant workers as outsiders within urban landscapes.
“I really see the art as a bridge between the people who live in [two very] different places,” Westerveld said. “I think people across the world are getting more and more connected: globalization, the Internet, you buy something that’s made somewhere else in the world. But at the same time people are more disconnected and so this is a way, through the art, to create an opportunity to connect with different people. In the same way it’s about giving a voice to people who might not always have a voice in society. Chinese migrant workers are working daily, every day of the week, long hours, and they do not go to school, they don’t speak English and often times don’t speak Mandarin Chinese, so they don’t really have a way to reach out to other people.”
Certainly, the process of developing these series of portraits seemed to develop and uncover Westerveld’s process and his chosen role to himself.
“It is mainly about the migrant workers and the connection I create between them and the audience, but it is about me too,” Westerveld said. “It’s not a straight line between the migrant workers and the audience; it’s more like a curve and I’m the one curving the line and deciding how people are getting represented here. Even though I try my best to grasp my unconscious and not to think too much when I do the art, it’s very much about me as well. I see myself involved in very different ways. The colors I choose, the expressions I try to choose to put on the face, the lines I’m drawing, the lines I’m not drawing, are mostly unconscious choices. I’m not thinking too much when I do the piece — I just go for it.”
Westerveld will discuss “New Spaces, Same Identities” at an opening reception Friday, March 7, at 8:00 p.m. in the Robert. A Jones ’59 conference room. All are welcome to attend.
(04/21/13 7:28pm)
Tomorrow evening, Davis Anderson ’13, Jessica Lee ’13 and Hannah Pierce ’13 will present their senior work in the Senior Thesis Dance Concert. Each artist’s work has a distinct approach and subject matter, all exploring personal connections to various dimensions of the contemporary human.
Pierce will perform two solo pieces in the concert. Visiting Assistant Professor Catherine Cabeen choreographed “I Want …” in collaboration with composer Kane Mathis. Pierce created the second piece, Concerning Automatic Sprouts, in collaboration with Ricky Chen ’13, who created an original musical score. Collaboration with other artists is central to Pierce’s thesis as she explores this communication gap as a tool to push the boundaries of anatomical investigation and artistic possibility.
“As an artist, I’m really interested in these gaps in communication – between me and Catherine, me and the audience, or me and Ricky,” Pierce said. “When you both think you know what’s going on but there is some ambiguous space between those thoughts. Working with Catherine, finding things in her body and seeing how they change or don’t change when they get transferred onto my body is a treat. It’s a gift, in a way, to see her make this dance. It’s very rooted in a physical experience, but it’s also about a socially and politically constructed understanding of the body.”
While resisting those constraints to a certain extent, “I think the really nice thing about the piece is it looks for peace within that resistance,” she continued. “Both pieces are about figuring out your body and where it is in the world. They’re both very personal, but they’re both very different sides of myself. I feel like everyone makes their own life when they make art. It’s about you, cause that’s what you know.”
Pierce also researched Denise Oppenheim, an artist whose large-scale architectural sculptures transform the essence of recognizable forms by manipulating certain structural components of their overall composition (Think of a church structure standing on its steeple).
As a joint major in dance and environmental studies, Lee’s work, Remembered Paths and Fresh Imprints, contemplates the myriad of ways humans relate and interact with their surroundings.
“I want to raise awareness of the multiple stories embedded in space, to help people become aware of the multiple layers embedded in space,” Lee said. “A certain place has a historical layer, a biological layer, a geological layer, a social layer. I hope that uncovering these stories helps us find personal connections to our physical environments – both those that we consider ‘natural’ and those that we, as humans, shape – and increases our appreciation for the world at large.”
Lee’s conceptualization of space and place is informed by deep, personal connections to specific places on and around campus. She used a variety of creative tools through her process, drawing on recent experience with site-specific work and improvisation while exploring each site with her company of four dancers.
“We did 20 minutes of pure dancing, doing whatever you feel is right, going with your impulse,” said Lee, explaining how one site investigation worked.
“I strongly believe that our movement in these spaces reveals something about the place itself, as well as something about ourselves.”
Lee also worked with natural or environmental symbolism through her process.
As an example, “Paths delineate where we’re supposed to go and how we’re supposed to get there,” said Lee, elaborating that paths also represent the possibility of choice, of reaching a juncture, and perhaps looking back on the paths and choices we encounter and follow in life.
Anderson’s work is divided into three sections entitled The Art of “Too Much,” An Invitation to Curiosity and But I’m Here. Each piece is stylistically unique, employing various performance tools to question how much each of us performs off stage in our daily lives.
“Each piece is a seemingly different way of addressing the same subject,” said Anderson.
With a joint major in dance and political science, and a minor in women and gender studies, Anderson critically explores numerous concepts that seemingly compose one’s indentity.
“We’re investigating the identity politics of drag to empower marginalized minorities,” Anderson explained, “unpacking identity politics through drag, contextualizing yourself within identity politics to help empower you, to help you realize that you’re a person. You don’t need to apologize for your being and your presence, and by doing so you’re adding another vital, important voice to the larger context that is the United States, through self-actualization and strengthening the democracy. RuPaul Charles, a famous, lucrative drag queen and source of inspiration said ‘we’re all born naked, and the rest is drag,’ and I firmly believe that.”
“‘You’re not your religions, you’re not your politics,’ and I like to say I’m not not my skin color, I’m not my penis, I’m not where I grew up, I’m not my family. I’m not any of those things, they just happen and meaning gets projected onto them or infused into them. I feel that drag is looking at that and taking it apart, and realizing that I can be whatever I want to be.”
While creating these works, Anderson additionally asked each of his dancers a set of questions geared towards individual perception of identity. “Who are you?” “What parts of you are fixed?” “Which parts of you are mutable?”
The concert runs Friday and Saturday evening, beginning at 8 p.m. both nights in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts Dance Theatre.
(02/13/13 11:27pm)
Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen, also artistic director of Catherine Cabeen and Company (CCC), proves through her work that artistic creation can be an intellectual activity. While many students were enjoying the change of pace offered during winter term, Cabeen was busy creating, producing and performing in her company’s newest evening-length work, “Fire!”
“[‘Fire!’] is meant to be a response to Niki de Saint Phalle’s life and work,” Cabeen said. “As a female artist in the 1960’s all of the reviews of her early work talk about how beautiful she is much more than work that’s on the wall. She had no artistic training or invitation to study the arts as a child. ‘Fire!’ was a sad piece for me to make because I wanted to make a piece about how gendered expectations in arts and education have shifted and instead it ended up being about how many things have stayed the same. I’m hoping to problematize some of those things we take for granted, asking why we continue to judge female professionals on their appearances in a way that often overshadows the work they do.”
Cabeen identified some thematic ideas discerned from Saint Phalle’s work. She wanted “Fire!” to reflect acts of creation through destruction that are evident in Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings, as well the contradictory nature of mosaics as both fragmented and unified artistic works. Finally, with both formal and moral considerations, Cabeen was interested in Saint Phalle’s use and celebration of her own body in her work.
“A lot of the questions I’m wrestling with in my creative work also anchor the Ethics/Aesthetics/Body course that I will be teaching this spring at Middlebury,” she said.
In addition to her early training in the classical and rigorous traditions of ballet and Martha Graham technique, Cabeen spent a significant portion of her professional career dancing as a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in work with a conscious social and political agenda. Cabeen’s aesthetic seems to emerge from a measure of incongruity between the formality of her training and the aggressive political activism of her professional experience. Her work reflects, in a way, an ongoing moral and aesthetic debate.
“A lot of contemporary feminist art actively rejects classical Western ideals of beauty as a way to create friction in relation to the male gaze,” she said. “However, I find the human body to be incredibly beautiful. I find the bodies of the women in my company to be incredibly beautiful, I find color to be beautiful, I find nature to be beautiful. My artistic question now is: how can I create something that is balanced, structured, classically beautiful, that is at the same time self-conscious, and able to comment on the subject-object relationship that it seduces the viewer into. ‘Fire!’ was one attempt at an answer and I learned a lot through making the piece.”
Cabeen will be offering a lecture demonstration sharing the historic research and creative process on Wednesday, Feb. 20 in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts Dance Theatre at 4:30 p.m.
(01/24/13 2:32am)
Tomorrow evening, the Dance Company Middlebury will begin its tour of Simply Light in the Mahaney Center for the Arts before travelling to Smith College, the Monterrey Institute for International Studies, and various public venues in the San Francisco Bay Area. Six students and one alumnus, Paul Matteson ’00, perform in the concert. Cameron McKinney ’14 joins Matteson and professors Catherine Cabeen, Andrea Olsen and Peter Schmitz as a contributing choreographer.
Simply Light takes full advantage of its form as a repertory concert. Each of the seven pieces offers something distinct, creating a compelling experience that raises a plethora of issues and questions. The degree to which the pieces are dissimilar is one of concert’s greatest strengths, almost constantly forcing the viewer to change their mood and the trajectory of their expectations for the remainder of the evening. The breadth of emotional and intellectual stimuli captured in this concert is a treat for seasoned dance fans and promises accessibility to those who are not familiar with contemporary dance.
“I think it is curious that there are so many different ways that one can approach creating contemporary dance,” said Olsen, also the current artistic director of the Dance Company of Middlebury.
“I think one of the challenges for the dancers is to figure out which way each artist is viewing and exploring space.”
Olsen worked with Hannah Pierce ’13 to create a solo piece that is an absolute delight. Pierce’s movement feels carefree yet is highly polished. She commands the large space given her with apparent ease, playfully allowing gravity to seize control of her limbs as she romps about the stage, seemingly aimless and making me yearn for a world of greater simplicity.
McKinney’s piece is a powerhouse of energy and strength, drawing on House movement and music styles to create an intense experience for performers and viewers. The piece cleverly starts questioning how technology affects human interaction. The precision of dancers Jessica Lee ’13 and Meredith White ’15 deserves many congratulations, as do McKinney’s improvisational abilities (he improvises throughout the piece).
The concert is wildly inventive without feeling too foreign. Schmitz’s trio creation involves particularly curious movement choices that seem to resist any recognizable style of movement and constantly manipulates line.
“It’s not organic, it’s something new,” explained Schmitz.
The beauty of the straight line is given its moments in Schmitz’s trio, as are perfect arcs, imperfect circles, childish squiggles, and sharp angles. The piece is extraordinarily detailed (most moments involve all the forms of line I just described) and its originality of is matched both by its choreographer’s wit and its performers’ finesse.
“It’s a challenge to do, it’s a challenge to watch, and I think [Schmitz] wants that. I don’t think he wants something where you can say, ‘oh this is expected,’” said Doug LeCours ’15, joined in this piece by Pierce and Sarae Snyder ‘15.
Cabeen’s piece, opening the second half of the show, is among the concert’s darker pieces. There is a sense of constant, present multiplicity of attitudes in this piece, yet the piece (like the concert as a whole) achieves undeniable cohesion. It is a visual feast as a full student-company performance, and someone manages to make me feel suspense despite a lack of narrative behind the piece (or, more likely thanks to some number of buried narratives each artist brought to the creation of this piece). Accompanied by a high risk of collision and an effective electronic score, this piece screams with emotion.
Simply Light begins at 8 p.m. Jan. 25 and 26 in the Dance Theater of the Kevin P. Mahaney '84 Centre for the Arts.
(11/29/12 6:01am)
The Fall Dance Concert, “Mosaics from the Underground,” will open tomorrow night in the Dance Theater. The concert is a promising creation that aims to spark conversations about one of the College’s most emphasized values: diversity.
A collaboration involving 10 students and two professors, the concert features nearly 30 student performers and offers a strikingly intimate evening of creative work. The choreographers have created an accessible and relevant experience for audience members by integrating their own interests from across a variety of academic disciplines, including environmental studies and literature.
This concert is the product of a highly academic process, yet it speaks to everyone. It becomes an emotional experience once the viewer stops trying to read it cognitively. The creators of the show engage in conversation, not necessarily through “talking,” but through “showing” their thoughts, experiences, opinions and feelings.
By combining ideas from dance and environmental studies, Jessica Lee ’13 created a piece that evokes the excitement of foolish exploration, the difficulties of growing up and the challenges of college life.
“I danced my whole life and home for me became the dance studio and that involved following directions and discipline and following others in high school and doing what you think you have to get to college,” Lee said.
Doug LeCours ’13, a dance and English double major, turned to literature for inspiration. Citing the style of a favorite Virginia Woolf book, To the Lighthouse, his piece reflects a “stream of consciousness” through movement.
“The body moves as a whole, from the center, beginning from one place, and develops from there,” said LeCours while demonstrating a simple arm movement. But in this way, by constantly focusing on intentionality, simple gestures such as the movement of an arm can become graceful and powerfully moving.
These two choreographers take purposefully different approaches to beginning their work, yet both methods produce beautifully intimate kinesthetic experiences. Diversity emerges as a motif from the concert not because each piece is the same, or even similar, but because each of the 11 pieces focuses on what individual creators can relate to best — the self.
“We really thrive on the raw vigorous excitement of spontaneity,” explained Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen, who guided the students through her Dance 460 class this semester. She continued to detail the creative process she shared with her students.
“We started by using language to explore individual ideas that the students were very passionate about,” she said. “Then we examined how different movement qualities and compositional strategies can embody those ideas. The resulting collection of works is diverse. There are many different movement languages at play . . . I see dance as a form of public scholarship that aims to inform as many people as possible about ideas that we feel passionate about.”
Noting that each choreographer comes from a different training background, Cabeen described how today most dancers must be comfortable using many different styles of dance. This necessity echoes another long standing college tradition — that of teaching and communicating across languages. Students share parts of themselves in their creative work using different movement traditions.
Diversity also emerges when considering the performers’ education and artistic backgrounds, as LeCours pointed out.
“I’m working with three people of incredibly different training backgrounds, which is really exciting,” he said.
His fellow dancers all have different levels of experience in performance and have trained differently as dancers and artists. In addition, their height difference also makes for some fascinating visual humor.
Dance, especially as these students use it, is a communicative language for sharing that which is touching, instinctive and fleeting. As LeCours observed, audience members, performers and even creators engage in the learning experience together.
“Secretly, it’s a process for all of us to discover what we’re dancing about,” he said.
“Mosaics from the Underground” opens Friday, Nov. 30, at 8 PM, with a second show at the same time Saturday evening.
(10/03/12 9:41pm)
There is a wonderful building that many of us walk past and through each day. Some see this place as a second home, a daily destination, a place of creation. To prospective students and their families who are bound to walk through it during their first brief visit to the campus, the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts might just seem like a conglomeration of its angular halls and ceilings.
“A Curious Invasion/Middlebury,” an hour-long site-specific dance project performed at this year’s Clifford Symposium, served as an invitation to reimagine and rediscover the building in its 20th year of existence, as performances last weekend drew throngs of curious students and community members.
Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig of PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER guided the creation of the piece with the help of five of their company’s professional dancers and 13 Middlebury College students. The performance itself unearthed remarkable ways of enjoying the building’s space.
At the beginning of each performance, nearly 100 people gathered near the railing of the upper lobby to look down at the dancers, who had gathered at the lowest level of the building. It was, quite purposefully, impossible to see the entire company at once. In an imitation of the building itself, the details of the piece brought it to life: a moment of stillness contrasted with the rapid singing of the live violin, or the image of moving bodies drawing circles on the wooden floor below with only their pounding footsteps as accompaniment.
The journey continued as the company drew the audience downstairs and outside, sometimes in the face of Vermont’s rainy September weather. Outside the dancers reimagined their environment, transforming lamps into dance partners, tables into stages and the grey metallic wall on the back of the art museum — in all its strength and weariness — into a partner in the action, as two dancers dressed in bright colors explored its exterior. The CFA, in its size and angular irregularity, can be monstrous.
A great deal of work went into delivering the experience in such a short period of time. Student dancers committed over 30 hours to rehearsal, preparation and performance in just seven days. Many felt exhausted after the first day of performances, and some laughed about the bruises gathered from sliding on wood and stone. The lessons they took away from the experience, however, were well worth the effort.
Hannah Pierce ’13 emphasized the importance of collaboration, an overarching theme in this year’s Clifford Symposium, in getting this project up in just a week.
“Pearson and Widrig] made this piece around the building, but they didn’t come in with a piece,” said Pierce. “It’s been about blending ideas from the choreographers and the other artists.”
Adeline Cleveland ’13.5 took other lessons from the welcoming yet demanding atmosphere, where ideas from student dancers, professional dancers and directors were all valued.
“Another part of the process has been for me to try something and for it not to work,” she said.
Directors Pearson and Widrig created their first site-specific performance at Coney Island in 1987. Since then they have taken their work around the country and as far away as Switzerland, India and Japan, but their process is similar everywhere.
“We walk around [a space for the first time] without speaking, listening to the space,” said Pearson.
“We see the space, the architecture, the environment as a partner,” Wildred added. “What can we do to make it come alive? The piece is already there, but it has to be unearthed.”
Everything about the piece was created in the building, for the building and in full sensorial reach of anyone who happened to be passing through.
Unlike most other creative work brought to the College, the audience could be anyone who, by chance or by choice, passed through the site.
“Art is a way of bringing a heightened awareness to every moment,” explained Pearson, expressing how the goal is to go into the unknown with the audience, even in a familiar space.
“Their habitual ways in the space, with themselves, are shattered,” she added.
The project was filmed as a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Dance Company of Middlebury. Also, the performance involved three alumni who are now professional dancers, as well as a number of faculty members who joined the group. Overall, the project opened up a new way of experiencing the building for everyone involved, and the professional company felt welcome and pleased with their visit.
“The students, they’re really smart, they’re alert, they know how to focus, and they’ve been willing to ride this wave with us,” said Pearson, before warming up for a filming session.
PEARDONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER posts a significant portion of video material on their website, www.pearsonwidrig.org. Footage from the weekend’s performance has not yet appeared.