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(05/10/17 11:40pm)
As the semester comes to a close, you may be looking for ways to center yourself before digging into finals.
“I think that quieting oneself to listen is a lovely way to close out the last day of classes, especially for those who miss being sung to at night,” said Gloria Breck ’18, a physics major at the College.
Coincidentally, the closing event of the 2016–17 Middlebury College Performing Arts Series provides the perfect opportunity for students to slow down their fast pace of life and fully relax in the rhythm of music. On Friday, May 12 at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts’s Olin C. Robinson Concert Hall, soprano Dawn Upshaw, a five-time Grammy Award winner, will give a traditional song recital with her regular duo partner, pianist Gil Kalish, featuring works by Schubert, Janáček, Ravel, Clarke, Bartók and Bolcom. There will be a post-concert reception for the audience.
The morning following the concert, at 10 a.m. in Robison Hall, five lucky Middlebury College students will participate in a master class with Upshaw. Baritone Kahari Blue ’19, mezzo-sopranos Victoria Isquith ’19 and Mandy Kimm ’17 and sopranos Eleanor Mayerfeld ’19 and Miranda Seixas ’20 will each receive individual coaching from this world-class artist. Observers are welcome.
As the Pioneer Press described, “Upshaw’s instrument has the kind of power, clarity and pure beauty that can transfix a listener.”
Combining her rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming power of music, Upshaw is a world-class vocal artist with concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. With an extraordinary ability to reach the heart of music and text, Upshaw was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007 and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008.
Kalish, the concert’s pianist, is also greatly renowned for his talents. According to The New York Times, Kalish “painted Messiaen’s bursts of solo piano writing in bright hues and with sharply defined edges.”
“Leading a musical life of unusual variety and breadth, Kalish has a profound influence on the musical community as an educator and as a pianist,” Kalish’s biography praises. “His myriad performances and recordings has established him as a major figure in American music making.”
Gloria Breck ’18 is a music lover and a piano student of Diana Fanning who has presented solo piano recitals in Robison Hall before. She is looking forward to going to the Upshaw/Kalish concert.
“I grew up hearing both names separately but frequently over the local classical music station (104.9, KDFC), so to have them materialize at Midd is a dream,” she said.
Student tickets are $6 and can be purchased at go/boxoffice.
(05/04/17 1:32am)
“The Women of Troy,” a new adaptation of Euripides’s play from more than two thousand years ago, is a lyrical poem of grief and savage irony that is as relevant today as it was then.
“Contemporary playwright Don Taylor’s evocative translation is a relentless song of suffering, capturing the women of Troy waiting to be shipped abroad from their war-torn city,” the Middlebury Theatre Program webpage advertises. “Officials come and go. A grandmother, once queen, watches as the last surviving members of her family are taken from her one by one. The city burns around them.”
Vanessa Mildenberg, a visiting assistant professor of theatre from London, directs the production, which features a company of 21 students. The play will transport its audience to a place and time that encompasses both the ancient and the now, the here and there — it challenges and inspires us in both lyrical and realistic terms.
“On my many travels, what strikes a chord with me, wherever I am, is that there always seems to be an ‘over there’” Mildenberg said. “War and conflict is over there, refugees are over there. Women are subjected to organized rape over there, by those people. People are killed in churches over there, by them, those people … us and them.”
One of the chorus members, sociology/anthropology and theatre joint major Mary Baillie ’18, found it challenging to remain active and fully immersed in the show at the beginning of the semester. However, after digging into modern war’s influences on women, she finds meaning in her individuality and is able to connect the past to the present.
“We are a group, yet each of us carries a very particular backstory,” Baillie said. “Our meticulous research into our roles as individuals — a group of very different women who have undergone different atrocities — has helped exponentially in understanding the way I react to what is happening, and also my own place within the dynamics of the group and the play.”
Finding this ancient piece of work highly resonant today, Baillie hopes that the sadness rooted in the play will help arouse moments of empathy powerful enough for us to view things differently, especially in a world where death and loss have become so prevalent in media that we are often ignorant of them.
Wentao Zhai ’17, a classics major, is taking Professor of Classics Pavlos Sfyroeras’s class in which students read the original “The Women of Troy” in Greek. After reading the script, he has visualized what a faithful production would look like. Nonetheless, Zhai is looking forward to being challenged and seeing new things in old forms by watching this fresh production.
“In terms of expectations, I am curious about how the production will particularly connect the play with a modern audience to promote an emotionally engaging experience,” Zhai said. “Though the plot, the characters and the relations between them would have been very familiar for the ancient Athenian audience, they are not so transparent for a modern audience. I look forward to watching how the production will introduce these elements and render the language.”
“The Women of Troy” will be performed on Thursday, May 4, and Friday, May 5, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, May 6, at 2:00 and 7:30 p.m., in the Seeler Studio Theatre at the Center for the Arts. There will be a post-show talk back immediately following the production on Thursday night. Tickets are $6 for Middlebury College students.
(04/21/17 4:59pm)
Stop hibernating, and pick up the rhythm of spring! The Middlebury African Music and Dance Ensemble, directed by Assistant Professor of Music Damascus Kafumbe, might just be the event to bring you out of your winter lethargy. On Wednsday, April 26 at 8 p.m., students from the African Music and Dance Performance class will perform in a display that captures communal-based and interactive processes that serve as the backbone of many African societies. Beyond drumming-based practices, this concert will showcase the diversity and richness of African music with a spotlight on the dynamic nature of these traditions. The performance will take place in the Mahaney Center for the Arts’s Robinson Hall.
Kafumbe is a native of Uganda. He joined the College in 2011, and in addition to directing the Middlebury African Music and Dance Ensemble, he teaches ethnomusicology/world music courses and maintains the College’s Ugandan musical instrument collection. His African Music and Dance Performance class is both a performance course and an ensemble that focuses on East African music and dances. The traditions studied are primarily Ugandan, and throughout the course students learn to play and perform with various instruments, such as bow-harps, thumb-pianos, xylophones and more. “
The music and dances to which I introduce students are non-notational, so they have to learn them through observation, imitation, interaction and collaboration, among other pedagogical procedures that provide somewhat unconventional learning experiences,” Kafumbe said. “These experiences impact the students’ lives beyond the course. Students are able to transfer the skills — oral, aural, visual, creative, artistic, communication, collaborative and coordination — they learn and hone in the course to other areas of their lives.”
Though some students may expect this class to be easy, it is actually highly challenging, as it is designed to give students a rich, hands-on experience in an ensemble setting. Through immersion in East African dance and musical traditions, the course develops through mini lectures, in-class and out-ofclass rehearsals, guest lectures, a final concert and reflective writing.
Entering into the class with different backgrounds and levels of musical/dancing experiences, students face various challenges and difficulties working alone and in an ensemble.
“Students’ varied musical and performance backgrounds inevitably cause tension,” Kafumbe said. “Sometimes, less advanced students might feel overstretched while more advanced students might feel less challenged by the course material. But this forces the students to figure out how they can work together toward their common goal: to perform as an ensemble.”
Featuring guest performers, including faculty, students who are outside of the course and Kafumbe’s family members, the program will include an original composition inspired by the current political environment. Performers will tell many stories that contextualize and interpret the music and dances that they perform.
(04/21/17 3:56am)
Brooke Williams has been a freelance journalist for over thirty years, advocating for the wilderness and exploring places where the untamed outer wilderness and “internal” wilderness meet. On April 11, with reference to his new book, “Open Midnight: Where Wilderness and Ancestors Meet,” Williams offered his insights on discovering our role in evolution in a talk at the College.
“A memoir of wilderness, metaphysical transformation, ancestral immigration and Charles Darwin, ‘Open Midnight’ beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime,” writes the Trinity University Press.
While researching the story of William Williams, his oldest known ancestor from England, Williams discovered that his ancestor lived at the same time as Charles Darwin, who also resided in Shrewsbury, England. This discovery triggered Williams to imagine the encounter between his ancestor and Darwin.
“My book has some imagination in it, but it is all non-fiction,” Williams said. “Like I say in the book, I am not sure that all of this stuff happened but I am not sure that they did not. Later I learned, Carl Jung said most everything you can imagine has roots in your unconscious. So that means what you imagine is true too, in a certain way, isn’t it?”
While William Williams is part of his personal family history, his imagined encounter with Darwin and Darwin’s theory of natural selection extended the search for his personal history back to the earliest moments when life first began. Williams went to England to learn more about his ancestor’s life and had an epiphany once he got there.
“I have gone thousands of miles to visit the place where my ancestors were born only to realize that just because my genealogy showed my earliest ancestor showing up there in the late 1700s, they did not just fall out of the sky,” Williams said. “My ancestors had ancestors who had ancestors who had ancestors going back to those first cells coming alive in that steamy swamp.”
“For the first time, I saw my family tree as a small branch connected to the entire massive tree of life … We are all related if we are willing to look back far enough,” he continued.
Fiona McCarey ’19, a film major, found that the talk resonated with what she has been doing in her environmental literature course this semester.
“We have been working a lot on connecting nature to larger ideas, more philosophical observations rather than the physical here and now,” McCarey said. “And I think Williams’ talk really spoke to that aspect when he was describing both physical spaces of red rocks in Utah and in Shrewsbury, but thinking in larger concepts of who was actually here, why were they here and where they were travelling to.”
The relationship between imagination and fiction that Williams talked about also helped McCarey with her recent confusion about these two seemingly contrasting concepts and inspired her to create a story that derives from her experience.
“I recently went to Silver Lake where I found weird burnt papers. I started to think that I could totally come up with this really cool story but that is not necessarily non-fiction and I do not know if I could write it for my environmental class,” McCarey said. “But now I think I will try to tackle that for my next paper.”
Speaking of her experience at the talk, McCarey relates Williams’ search for his ancestor’s stories to her own ancestors from Ireland which her father has discovered by doing researches at ancestry.com. As McCarey is planning to go study abroad in Ireland, she hopes to take Williams’s initiative and find out more about her ancestors while there.
“You forget where you necessarily come from because most of my family lives in America so I do not think about the before when you get here. So my take away is to think my family in a larger context of the world and how we are all interconnected,” McCarey said.
Leo McElroy ’18, a junior who studies physics and computer science, learned about the talk from the Calendar of Events and was intrigued by Williams’s experiences.
“I think that broadening one sense of ancestry to include a large portion of the natural world, or specifically the living world, was striking to me,” McElroy said. “I only did some basic genealogy stuff like drawing a family tree for four or five generations back when I was younger. I have not had the sense of guided by ancestors two hundred years back the way the speaker described.”
By weaving two parallel stories about the inner and outer wildernesses, Williams compares the place he loves to the place he actually comes from. Sharing his journey of discovering about his ancestors, Williams invited the audience to consider our entire being from both inside and outside, challenging our concepts of reality, spirituality and the wild.