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(11/13/15 3:46am)
Flashing lights, black-and-white video projections of launching aircraft and sounds of revving engines flooded Wright Memorial Theatre this weekend as part of the visceral backdrop for the fall faculty show, Flare Path (Nov. 5-7). Set in a hotel near an RAF Bomber Command airbase during World War II, the play was written by popular English dramatist Terence Rattigan in 1941. Its name refers to the lamps stationed alongside runways that allow aircraft to take off and land in the darkest of hours. The story behind Flare Path, however, is far more than the theatrical perils of air combat, or even the gravity of life in wartime Britain, though these are salient themes – rather, it is a tale of duty, heartache and morals that provides a most telling glimpse into human nature and all of its inner turmoil.
We are all familiar with the quintessential wartime story of men fighting valiantly on foreign fronts whilst their wives and sweethearts eagerly await their return. It is this emotional matter that forms the foundation of Flare Path – though Rattigan, who drew inspiration for the play from his own experiences as a tail gunner during World War II (and miraculously saved the incomplete manuscript amidst a crisis in air combat), added a twist to the tale by dropping a love triangle into the mix.
Actress Patricia Graham, portrayed by Sofia Donavan ’18 in her first Middlebury College theatre performance, is spending the weekend with her husband Teddy, played by Jabari Matthew ’17, at the Falcon Hotel on the Lincolnshire coast, when she is surprised by a visit from her past lover, Hollywood film star Peter Kyle, played by Sebastian LaPointe ’18. To throw a wrench in things, Teddy is suddenly assigned to a night raid over Germany that very evening, leaving Patricia to grapple with lingering feelings for her old flame and a sense of obligation toward a husband whom she barely knows. The couple met and married during one of Teddy’s week-long leaves; Patricia and Peter were madly in love before then and would have married had Peter not been unavailable. With Peter calling for her affection in the wake of his waning career and Teddy counting on her for emotional support, Patricia finds herself trapped in a moral dilemma. Who needs her most?
The presence of two other couples in the hotel contribute further to an already emotionally trying tale. Maudie Miller, portrayed by Quincy Simmons ’18, has managed to take a short time off work to see her husband, tail gunner Sergeant Dave “Dusty” Miller, played by Alex Herdman ’17. Meanwhile, Do- ris, played by Ashley Fink ’18, is visiting her partner Count Skriczevinsky, portrayed by August Rosenthal ’17, a Polish pilot who decided to serve with the RAF after his wife and son were killed by the Nazis. Written at the end of 1941, a point in history when England stood as the lone player against the German National Socialist war machine, Flare Path has a rich premise fraught with tension and uncertainty, prompting an emotional whirl- wind for all parties involved.
Director Richard Romagnoli, a professor of theatre, was careful to address the inner conflicts that the women in the play had to contend with.
“These fliers leave their wives like husbands going off for a day at work. Many never came back,” he said. “The women were powerless to impose their will. Those who were veterans stoically accept it. Patricia, who had just moved to the base to live with her husband, says to him as he’s about to walk out the door on a mission, ‘Teddy, I don’t know what to say,’ to which he replies, ‘Come back.’ It must have been a surreal experience – will he return in six hours or not? I’ve read that around 55,000 RAF bomber crews were killed over Europe between 1939 and 1945.”
Anxiety levels amongst the characters reach their peak when one of the planes is destroyed by the German air force, and Count Skriczevinsky does not return from the mission alongside Teddy and Dusty. The meticulously executed crash scene – the resounding boom, the flickering fluorescent lights and the looks of harrowing shock and dread on the characters’ faces – stood out as one of the most gripping moments of the night.
In creating a backdrop for the play, Romagnoli explained that he tried to “give the war a presence that would, at times, dominate the space through the use of video, sound and lights.”
“I thought that was important to convey the extent to which the war subsumed the hotel and its residents,” he said.
As characters filter in and out of the front lobby of the hotel throughout the nerve-wracking night, certain sections of the dialogue shed light on the terrifying magnitude of their situation.
“I suppose if I’d been in England longer than a mere three months, I would be as blasé about raids,” Peter comments at one point, as the sounds of bombers fill the air. “Listen. Those ours?”
“Theirs,” Maudie says after a long pause. She has lived through so many bombings that she can tell the difference between Ger- man and British air raids.
Resilience amidst massive hardships stands out as a prominent theme in Flare Path.
“If there was anything that I would hope the audience members took away from the performance, it would be that they became more aware of the ability humans have to cope with day-to-day life stressors,” Matthew, who played Teddy, stated. “What the audience members choose to do with that awareness is really up to them.”
Despite the seriousness of the plot premise, the cast strived to strike a balance between heaviness and humor. And so, even as the entire storyline seemed to verge on tragedy, audience members found them-selves chuckling periodically throughout the night.
“A dramatic scene or moment is followed by a comic scene,” Romagnoli explained. “It was important for these antithetical moments to hit their targets. Comedy undermines the gravity, while the drama reminds us of the stakes. Ultimately, their world is an absurdity, one created to make their conditions tolerable.”
The opening scene is crucial in setting this particular tone for the play, as Peter humorously attempts to negotiate a room for the night with the snarky hotel manager, Mrs. Oakley, as played by Lana Meyer ’17. In other moments, the young waiter, Percy, portrayed by Maxwell Lieblich ’18, brings a much-needed burst of energy to the group through his feverish serving of drinks and light-hearted comments. Later in the evening, Doris’s alcohol consumption drives her to a state of drunken silliness (as depicted charmingly by Ashley Fink ’17), which provides a welcome reprieve from the tension emanating from the rest of the room.
Besides a few moments of particular emotional intensity, Flare Path is a play full of understatements. As Professor of English and the Liberal Arts John Bertolini stated in the Program Note, this is perhaps best exemplified by Maudie’s matter-of-fact comment, “There’s a war on, and things have got to be a bit different, and we’ve just got to get used to it – that’s all.”
To characterize a life turned upside-down by nightly air raids as “a bit different” is a testament to the mindset of the British public – and it is this tendency to understate that stood at the heart of last weekend’s performance.
“There existed several places in this play in which not just myself but perhaps the entire rest of the cast had to channel large and at times complicated human emotions, while not acting these emotions in a large way,” Matthew explained. “It wasn’t really a matter of suppression as it was a matter of understatement.”
Unfortunately, some of the nuanced expression behind these performances may have been lost on the audience due to the characters’ thickly-accented speech, rapid-fire delivery of dialogue and usage of time era-specific jargon. The faculty production of Flare Path deeply engaged the audience in many other regards, however – from its breathtaking aesthetics and sound design to its striking depiction of wartime terrors to the flurries of light and calm in between. Though it is not always an easy play to watch, in humanizing a small piece of history, it is so worth the telling.
(11/11/15 9:31pm)
After taking down fifth-seeded Tufts last Friday (25-21, 25-20, 19-25, 25-16) to advance to the semifinal round of the NESCAC championship, the Middlebury volleyball team saw their season come to a close with a difficult loss to Bowdoin on Saturday (21-25, 24-26, 13-25). The Polar Bears would go on to defeat Williams in the championship round on Sunday, earning a berth in the NCAA tournament; the Panthers, finishing their season at 18-7 and 7-3 in the conference, were left to wonder at what could have been, despite having thoroughly exceeded the on-paper expectations for a team with no seniors that finished 12-12 last year.
“We’ve had some lopsided matches recently (good wins, and tough losses), and I think we’re learning what it feels like to really play well together, and we just need to do that consistently this weekend,” Head Coach Sarah Raunecker said. “I like where we are now heading into NESCAC’s. If we play well, we can compete with anyone there so we feel like we’re in control of our destiny.”
After defeating Tufts in their last regular season game, Middlebury drew the Jumbos in the first round of the NESCAC tournament. The Jumbos showed up ready to play, hoping to exact their revenge, but the Panthers refused to budge. The score ran all the way to 22-22 before some strong play from middle hitter Gabi Rosenfeld ’17 and outside hitter Becca Raffel ’18 allowed Middlebury to wrap up the first set. The Panthers capitalized upon that momentum in the second, racing out to going ahead 13-4 and then coasting to a 24-16 lead. Tufts stuck around for a bit, stringing together four straight points, but ultimately fell on a service error that gave the Panthers a 2-0 lead.
With their backs against the wall, the Jumbos fired off a quick eight points to start off the third and would lead the rest of the way. Middlebury made a push to get within five at 19-14, but Tufts regained control with three straight and went on to notch their first set victory, 25-19.
In the fourth set, the match concluded with some hard-nosed play. The two teams fought to a 13-13 tie before the Panthers began to distance themselves from the Jumbos, building a 17-14 lead and then running away with a 25-16 victory and the match. Notable players for Middlebury include Raffel, who led both sides with 15 kills, Rosenfeld, who had 1 solo block and 4 block assists, libero Emily Kolodka ’18 who dug up 25 balls and setter Hannah Blackburn ’17 who dished out 36 assists.
“We weren’t even thinking about the fact that it was Tufts,” outside hitter Alice Roberts ’17 said. “This tournament, we went in saying that we can only focus on what we’re going to do — and we want to win the whole thing. Tufts came back and definitely fought, but we were playing too well.’”
On Saturday, the Panthers found themselves in the opposite situation, trying to get back at a Bowdoin team that had handed them their first conference loss back in September. However, some of the consistency problems that plagued Middlebury at times earlier in the season reared their heads once more, and little errors prevented the Panthers from stringing together runs when they needed them. In the first set, the Panthers stuck with the Polar Bears until Bowdoin, leading 15-14, rattled off seven straight points to go up 22-14. The Panthers fought back to make it 24-21 before the Polar Bears finished off the set.
Always resilient, Middlebury pushed Bowdoin to a 19-19 tie in the second set. The Polar Bears scored four straight points, but the Panthers responded with a 5-1 run of their own to tie things up at 24-24. The Polar Bears took control, scoring two quick points to take a 2-0 lead in the match.
In the third set, nothing seemed to go Middlebury’s way. Bowdoin jumped out to an early lead and never took their foot off the pedal, closing things out with a 25-13 third set victory.
“Our serve-receive went very well in the first two sets,” Roberts said. “Once Bowdoin started to control the match a little bit, we got a little disjointed.We kept bringing ourselves back — we were composed the entire time — but Bowdoin just played a great game. They had almost no errors, whereas we had some unforced errors here and there.”
Looking forward, good things seem to be on the horizon for the Panthers. They return every member from a squad that featured a number of players on NESCAC leaderboards. Raffel finished third in the conference in kills per set with 3.80. Middle blocker Melanie English ’17 was second in blocks with an average of 1.04 each set, and Blackburn was third in assists with 9.68 per set.
Roberts shared that the team is even more excited to see where the added experience, along with a handful of incoming freshmen, might be able to take them next time around.
“Honestly, people were looking at our team as though we weren’t going be great this year, but I was very much expecting us to play well because our team was first-year and sophomore heavy last year, playing-wise,” Roberts said. “Now I’m extremely excited for next year because we went this far, with this team that’s not changing—if anything, we’ll just be adding some more players,” she said.
(11/05/15 4:17am)
It is easy to discount “American Culture” as a loose, insufficient, reductionist term for the patchwork heritage of the U.S. As we all know, America is called a “melting pot” for a reason – this country is primarily composed of people who have cultural roots elsewhere, often across several continents. The resulting attempt to define a singular culture of the USA necessarily fails. American cities are microcosms of the greater state of US culture; in the space of one city block, the demographics of citizens can vary so wildly that it feels as if a visitor has stepped between two countries.
When I left home for my semester abroad at Oxford, I was expecting to feel culture shock just by virtue of the society here in England working a little differently, with different norms and customs. But they still speak English, and since America really doesn’t have an entrenched culture, I thought it would be fairly easy to get accustomed to it.
But it surprised me when I started feeling a clash of cultures on a more fundamental level than just difference in behavior. I began to feel an underlying difference between the two countries, and not just in how the ketchup tastes (slightly different) or the buses drive (aggressively with little regard for pedestrians). George Bernard Shaw’s oft-quoted statement, “The United States and Great Britain are two nations separated by a common language,” may be cliché, and it most likely sounds pretty kitschy and tourist-y for me to say so, but he’s right. I’ve felt a vague sense of detachment from the British in a way that has made me identify more with the country I’m from. And it’s made me realize that “American Culture” might be more than a general affinity for McDonald’s and automatic vehicles.
I’m not going to embark on an attempt to define U.S. culture to any significant extent, because I certainly still think that it is nebulous and constantly shifting. Nevertheless, I have observed and felt several things that have made me wonder if we give short shrift to American culture itself, and whether it’s richer than we generally give it credit for.
To start with a small-scale example of how even basic things differ: I have found very few sink faucets in the UK that have a unified hot/cold tap. Almost all have two different taps with two different spigots for hot and cold water, requiring you to take a few extra seconds to fill the basin and get warm water to wash your hands with. These sinks exist even in places that were very clearly recently built or renovated, so it can’t simply be explained away by a relative lack of updating appliances. If I can be wildly speculative here for a few moments, this phenomenon seems to me to indicate something about the two cultures. The British haven’t changed these sinks most likely because they work well enough, but those few extra seconds necessary to fill the basin have been widely eliminated in the US.
The landscape of both Oxford and England have also caused me to reassess American culture. English countryside is heavily farmed, and with a population density of more than twelves times that of the U.S., it is unlikely that you can travel more than a few miles without seeing some sort of town or city. And Oxford itself, as a medieval city, is extremely dense; thousands of people congregate on the city centre (where I happen to live at the moment), buildings stand in close proximity to one another, and the roads are narrow. A few large parks are welcome parts of Oxford’s scenery, but these are fenced-in, heavily cultivated and locked at night.
All this contrasts greatly with the United States, where cities and towns sprawl and empty space is aplenty. Driving through the western part of the US reminds you just how massive the country is, and still how much of it is wild and untamed. Swaths of prairie land bordered by massive ranges of mountains make up the American Frontier, and having visited a country now where even the woodlands of Scotland are dwarfed by the countryside of Montana, I’ve got the sense that some of that difference has made its way into our cultures. Nineteenth century America is often defined by the pioneers of the West, who made their lives on somewhat inhospitable land and managed to settle brutal terrain. The roughness and independence of these early pioneers is still apparent in the towns scattered throughout Wyoming, Montana, Nevada and even still parts of California, but I think that frontierism is still present across America. There’s an appreciation for space which manifests itself in spread-out cities and untamed urban parks (think Central Park in New York and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco). There’s also a transience apparent the American psyche — Oxford is steeped in historical tradition going back well before the US was ever founded, whereas many American cities and towns have simply appeared or drastically expanded to fit the constant and continual shift of American citizens across the country.
I’ve only been in the UK for a few weeks, and I freely admit that I do not have nearly enough evidence to back up my claim beyond just an inkling, but the truth of that assertion is almost secondary to the fact that I have been thrown off a step by it. There’s something here, even in the design of the faucets, that makes this place feel different and causes me to think about myself as a result of an American culture. There are plenty of problems with American society and I do not intend this column at all to channel American exceptionalism — but there are certain facets of British life that have started to cause me to think about how Americans are unified. Perhaps it’s not just the notorious proliferation of junk food, or a penchant for over-the-top patriotism, or even the lack of a definitive common culture, that make us American. Maybe there’s something in the still-unconquered frontiers that make us different and give us a sense of cultural unity.
(11/05/15 1:05am)
Men’s Soccer
Both of the Panthers’ losses this season came in 1-0 road losses against Amherst and Tufts. Amherst ended the regular season undefeated and as the top-ranked squad nationally, while Tufts began the campaign as the pre-season number one. Yet, after the both squads were improbably bounced from the conference tournament on the first weekend, Middlebury (13-2-1, 7-2-1 NESCAC) appears to have jumped onto the fast track to its first conference title since the 2010 edition of the team squeaked by Bowdoin on penalty kicks.
The Panthers are set to take on Wesleyan this Saturday Nov. 7 at 11 a.m. at the soccer field. Wesleyan was the team responsible for knocking off the top-ranked Lord Jeffs. In their first match up this season, Greg Conrad ’17 headed in a beautifully centered ball by Philip Skayne ’17 in the 80th minute to seal a 2-1 victory for the Panthers.
Saturday’s match figures to be high scoring as well, as Middlebury’s 2.49 goals-per-game average is the highest in the conference, while Wesleyan’s 1.9 goals-per-game is the third-highest. Defensively, however, the Panthers hold the edge over Wesleyan by a wide margin, as Middlebury’s goals-against-average is under half a goal-per-game, while Wesleyan’s 1.5 goals-against-average ranks in the bottom half of the conference.
Rounding out his 31st season at the helm of the men’s soccer squad, head coach David Saward’s team knows all it needs to do this weekend is execute and he will be heading to his 11th trip to the NCAA tournament.
“I think their record completely belies their ability,” Saward says of Wesleyan. “I think they’re really a very good team. Beating Amherst on Saturday does not surprise me…I think they’ve got a number of very good players. It’s not going to be easy. They’re going to come full of confidence now even though they’ve had a tough run. I know a number of their players, and I really think they’re very, very good. Well-coached. I think it will be a very even game. It’s going to be who can find the special moment to win the game.”
If the Panthers execute against Wesleyan on Saturday, they would take the field again Sunday Nov. 8, playing either Connecticut College or Bowdoin for the NESCAC title.
Women’s Soccer
The women’s soccer team (7-4-5, 4-3-3 NESCAC) heads to Bowdoin this weekend on the heels of its 3-2 upset over Amherst on Halloween.
Turning attention to the task that awaits them in Williamstown, Captain Katherine Hobbs ’17 said that although the Amherst game was more nerve-wracking than the team would have hoped, it provided a spark for the team.
Hobbs emphasized that “by coming back from behind and battling through the final minute, we proved to ourselves that we can get the job done when it counts most.”
The Panthers face a tall task this Saturday Nov. 7 when they head to Williamstown to take on the Ephs, who were undefeated until last week then the Panthers knocked of Williams at home 2-0. Last week’s result against Williams proved that though the Panthers are the sixth seed in the NESCAC tournament, they are certainly a legitimate contender.
“Saturday’s game is going to be another huge battle and is going to come down to little moments like those that won us the game this past weekend at Amherst. We definitely rattled Williams this past week,” Hobbs said.
The Panthers shut-out Williams in last week’s match, which was only the second time this season that Williams failed to find the back of the net for only the fourth time over the last three seasons, and it was Kate Reinmuth’s ’17 fourth clean sheet of the season.
“Williams is certainly a worthy opponent,” said Reinmuth, who saved all three shots on goal registered by the Ephs. “We know that it’s going to be a battle every time we face them, no matter the week or the field – or the year for that matter. We beat them last week, but that’s no guarantee of anything, so we’re working to fine tune our game in anticipation of Saturday.”
The Panthers’ defense needs to limit Williams’ dangerous duo of junior forwards, Audrey Thomas and Kriste Kirshe – the top two goal scorers in the NESCAC – as they did in their first meeting when Thomas and Kirshe were held without a shot-on-goal.
Hobbs reflected how the team is embracing the rematch with the top-ranked Ephs, who she says “will be coming into this rematch with a vengeance, but that makes the game that much more fun. We have already taken away their perfect season and now we are excited to end their NESCAC run as well.
Field Hockey:
If the Panthers (15-1, 9-1 NESCAC) are going to repeat as NESCAC tournament champions, the odds are that they will likely have to go through Bowdoin, as the last four NESCAC tournament finals pitted Panthers against Polar Bears. The Panthers have only been the higher seed in two out of the six meetings between Middlebury and Bowdoin in the finals.
Field hockey almost certainly does not need to win its game Saturday Nov. 7 in Brunswick, Maine against Tufts to guarantee it a spot in the NCAA tournament; however, the team would relish a chance to avenge its only loss of the season, off of a penalty stroke in the last minute, to Bowdoin in Brunswick on Sept. 26.
If the Panthers are going to repeat as NESCAC tournament champions, the odds are that they will likely have to go through Bowdoin, as the last four NESCAC tournament finals pitted Panthers against Polar Bears.
After easily handling Hamilton last Saturday afternoon Middlebury leads the nation by wide a wide margin in assists-per-game with 3.63, more than half an assist better than the next-best team. The Panthers also lead the nation in average margin of victory at almost 4 goals-per-game and rank fourth in goals scored per game at 4.56.
Moreover, it could easily be argued the Panthers have the best scoring duo in the country in Pam Schulman ’17 and Annie Leonard ’18 with 33 combined goals on the year thus far. The Panthers’ goalkeeper, Emily Miller ’17 is also having a tremendous year for the Panthers, as she ranks 8th in the nation in goals-against-average, having allowed only 11 goals in 977 minutes.
Nevertheless, Leonard says that the team is not looking beyond the next game.
“We are just focused on taking everything day by day and not looking too far ahead,” she said. “The team is working hard to get better, and we are just focusing on doing our jobs. We can only control what we do as a team, so we’re working our hardest to prepare ourselves. We are certainly excited for the road ahead.”
Volleyball:
The volleyball squad (17-6, 7-3 NESCAC) has enjoyed a successful regular season especially for such a young team: the Panthers have no seniors on this year’s roster.
The talented young team is headlined by Becca Raffel ’18 who currently leads the NESCAC in kills with 334, and has more than avoided a “sophomore slump” after being named co-Rookie of the Year in 2014. Raffel is joined by veteran presence Melanie English ’17, who is also the conference blocks leader, as well as fellow outside hitter Emily Kolodka ’18 and Hannah Blackburn ’17 as the team’s key contributors.
Middlebury enters the NESCAC tournament as the fourth seed for the second straight year. No one on the current roster has advanced passed the quarterfinal round of the NESCAC tournament, but their match with Tufts this Friday evening Nov. 6 in Brunswick, Maine provides an opportunity for this team to have a breakthrough.
“Tufts is a very strong team,” Raffel said in preparing for the Jumbos early this week. “We had a competitive match with them last week and [so] we know their tendencies and their game. It’s nice to be able to go into the game having proved to ourselves that we are capable of beating them, but at the same time it’s never easy to beat a good team twice, especially at NESCACs.”
The Panthers’ mental toughness certainly cannot be questioned, especially with the way that it handled the highs and lows of this season. At the times when the Panthers faltered they got right back up again – the most notable example being how they followed losing two-straight hard-fought matches to NYU and Bowdoin in mid-September with a ten match winning streak.
“No one on our team has won a NESCAC championship,” Kolodka. “We are hungry for the opportunity to play Saturday and Sunday, and that’s driving us to bring our best volleyball on Friday.”
(11/05/15 12:51am)
Middlebury volleyball wrapped up its regular season with a split this past weekend against two NESCAC foes, losing to Connecticut College on Friday evening, Oct. 30 (25-27, 20-25, 26-28) but bouncing back Saturday, Oct. 31 with a big win against Tufts (22-25, 25-23, 25-20, 25-19). Finishing at 7-3 in the conference, the Panthers secured the fourth seed in the NESCAC tournament in Brunswick, Maine, where they will square off against the Jumbos once more on Friday in the quarterfinals.
This past weekend’s games, combined with those from the prior weekend at the New England Challenge at MIT, brought the team’s regular-season record to 17-6. In Boston, they had come up short against MIT (20-25, 19-25, 22-25) and Wellesley (22-25, 25-17, 19-25, 23-25) but defeated Babson in straight sets (25-19, 25-18, 25-22).
In the week leading up to the New England Challenge, Head Coach Sarah Raunecker was excited to see her team tested.
“This weekend we’re going to play three very good teams in our region, but all non-conference, which will be great,” Raunecker said. “MIT is the top ranked team in NE, Babson is in the top 15, as we are, and Wellesley is always a good team, so the competition should be great all weekend. It’ll be fun to see what we can do against these teams.”
Even though the Panthers didn’t manage to win a single set against MIT, they put together a number of strong runs throughout the match and showed that they felt comfortable against premier competition (MIT was ranked no. 23 in the nation at the time). The game against Wellesley was more or less the same; Middlebury started strong out of the gates, taking the first set, but unfortunately struggled to stay in a consistent groove over the final three.
Against Babson, however, the Panthers controlled the match from start to finish, coming away with a decisive victory in straight sets over a team currently ranked #5 in New England.
In the eyes of middle blocker Gabi Rosenfeld ’17, with just a little extra push, the two games that the team lost might have come out quite differently.
“We had a lot of really great moments this weekend,” Rosenfeld said. “Our serve receive was extremely consistent, which allowed us to run our offense well. We showed that we can beat any team if we’re playing our best and staying positive, but if we don’t play with intensity, we lose to teams that we really should beat. The matches against MIT and Wellesley kind of just slipped away from us because we weren’t playing our own game.We let the other teams set the pace and could never take back the momentum.”
Notably, outside hitter Becca Raffel ’18 earned a spot on the all-tournament team for her play over the weekend, pouring in 35 kills over three matches to the tune of a .272 hitting percentage.
The NESCAC matchup against Conn College last Friday, Oct. 30 turned out to be an especially frustrating one for the Panthers, who stretched both the first and third sets past 25 points but never seemed to be able to take the reins against the Camels en route to a three-set loss. On a more positive note, team captain and setter Hannah Blackburn ’17 surpassed the 2,000 assist mark for her career. She notched 29 to bring her total to 2,003, good for fourth place all-time at Middlebury.
Outside hitter Charlotte Devine ’17 thought the team’s play felt choppy and a tad sluggish against the Camels, but praised the squad’s ability to make adjustments before Saturday’s match against Tufts.
“On Friday in our game against Conn., we were lacking the energy and flow that have allowed us to come together and play cohesively so much this year,” Devine said. “On Saturday, we really found that enthusiasm, and our defense and offense worked beautifully together to play a clean match against Tufts. So while we had our ups and downs on the weekend as a whole, I’m really proud of our ability to pinpoint what needed fixing on Friday and to come ready to play our game on Saturday.”
In fact, Saturday’s game had major implications for the Panthers’ playoff seeding. Had they lost, they would’ve shared the fifth spot in the NESCAC with Conn College (6-4). However, the Camels would’ve had the tiebreak, meaning the Panthers would be facing an uphill battle as the sixth seed.
Instead, Middlebury fought through a tough loss to Tufts in the first set to take the next three and come away with the win. The Panthers hit .227 to the Jumbos .166, with a number of players getting in on the action: outside hitter Isabel Sessions ’19 led with 15 kills and Raffel poured in 13, while middle blockers Eliana Schaefer ’18 and Melanie English ’17 combined for 18 kills and 6 blocks.
Still, Devine stressed that, regardless of whether the team had won or lost Saturday’s game, the team would need to focus on its own play rather than their opponent in the NESCAC tournament.
“We can take any team in the conference when we play our game: this season has proven that,” Devine said. “We’ve had some of the best teamwork on the court that I’ve seen in the three years that I’ve been playing here, and I know every single person on our team is committed and willing to place the team above everything else.”
The Panthers will face Tufts at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6. If they win, they will face the winner of the Bowdoin-Bates matchup on Saturday with hopes of making it to Sunday’s championship game.
(11/04/15 7:31pm)
On Monday 26th of October a Chinese Author came to speak at the Robert A. Jones conference room on being a writer in contemporary China, "When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction." His name was Ning Ken, and like his novels, he is more than what meets the eye. It was his pen name, of course, but I only realized what it could mean politically when I wrote it out in Chinese. The direct translation would be “would rather,” and when I asked him to make a sentence with it, he offered this: “I would rather write in this way than to achieve fame and rake in a lot of money.”
The dose of personal resistance that Ning lets out through his pen name is palpable enough. Yet his attitude towards dress and appearance is altogether quite different. Ning is a medium-height man in his mid-fifties, who dressed in smart casuals, a pair of jeans, black shoes and a brown leather jacket on both of the two days I saw him. His looks were that of an honest, harmless man. From my conversations with him I know him as a very friendly “uncle,” someone who is passionate about the ways that he has been able to synthesize various aspects of the contemporary Chinese society through his writings.
One has to wonder, why do being a good writer and enjoying popularity have to be in constant tension with each other in the Chinese context? Ning is the author of no fewer than five novels, and his most well-known ones touch on very controversial and taboo subjects. His critically-acclaimed novel about a university professor who escapes to Tibet after the June Fourth Tianamen Massacre ’89, Sky Tibet, reached the final rounds in the nomination process for a prestigious award only to stay there because of a government order.
Though this may be enough to frustrate many writers with a fiery passion and an unequivocal sense of justice, qualities that certainly describe Ning, he has a very clear sense of the privileges and responsibilities of a writer in contemporary China. When I asked him at his lecture whether there is an ideal readership in his mind, his answer was rather astonishing: he said that he does not write for anyone, that it does not concern him whether his books sell or not. Instead, he just wishes to exploit as fully as he can the possibilities that present-day China has handed to him.
The literary movement that he is spearheading is called “the ultra-unreal,” a term whose meaning is still slowly taking shape in the Chinese literary world. The label came out of a conversation he was having with a friend, when they were discussing the most recent scandal that involved a top level government official. This time, a deputy chief justice from the Hebei province died in a car crash, his supposed “legal” marriage to four wives being exposed when all four of them wanted to claim his body. For him this is a classic example of what is ultra-unreal about the Chinese society: things happen that “surpass the unreal or the imaginary.”
Over lunch, he told me that each epoch should leave its own unique mark in the literary history of the world. He said though the underlying human desires may not change very much from epoch to epoch, the circumstances with which each has to work to fulfil those desires differ. Subjects such as romance, marriage, and the domestic life have been explored almost to perfection by the 19th century English novels. Or take the Latin American brand of magical realism for example: a mix of severe social critique, history, and pop culture, which even until this day still lends itself to a relevant way of making sense of dictatorial rule and patterns of inequality.
For Ning, the ultra-unreal is an unprecedented exploration into the ways that an illogical system operates on a consistent brand of logic that keeps on producing illogic results. He argues that there is not a civilisation comparable to the contemporary Chinese one, wherein the logic of power is so absolute and its reach so far and so complete. Evidence for this claim can be found in the absolutely ghastly speed at which everything is moving in the country: from GDP growth to cell phone usage and car ownership rates to the build-out of highways and railways systems.
Ning’s novels are concerned with those very few who can wield power without any checks and balances. He chooses never to write directly about the System. In one of three parallel plots in his newest novel, Three Trios, he talks about an official who has lost favor with the Party and falls in love with a woman. He describes this character’s journey as “the gradual reawakening of his humanity,” the part of him which had been suppressed as a government official because everything then was transactional.
As a writer he is also aware of how adaptable this particular brand of Chinese logic is: he mentioned the newly established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and characterized it as the spreading of the Chinese approach to economic development beyond China. It is a particular logic of economic development that relies too heavily on government-led public infrastructure investment projects, a natural product of a highly centralized power system. Just like in his own works, Ning showed a deep understanding of the resilience and pervasiveness of power. Yet, with the kind of wonder and disbelief that Ning beholds the current Chinese establishment, can he not be anticipating the radical changes that this unmistakably unsustainable approach to development is subjected to? At a time when the Chinese GDP growth is at its all-time low and the unemployment rate its all-time high within the past two decades, Ning’s visit gave the college community an invaluable insight into why these might be, and where the country is going from here.
(10/22/15 12:02am)
This season is certainly shaping up to be one of the stronger ones in Middlebury Volleyball’s recent history. After seeing their winning streak halted at ten games with a loss against Williams two weekends ago, the Panthers promptly started another streak by sweeping NESCAC opponents Colby and Bates this weekend Oct. 16-17, pushing their overall record to 15-3 on the season.
To anyone who’s been following the Panthers this year, the difference between on-paper expectations and actual performance has been nothing short of impressive.
Emily Kolodka ’18, who has served as the team’s libero for most of the season, recalled some of the group’s uncertainty from back in August.
“Coming into this season...initially, everyone was a little on edge. What [will] our freshmen be like? What is it going to be like having no established, older leaders on the team?” Kolodka wondered.
However, “everyone [has] done a really great job stepping into leadership roles,” Kolodka said. “On the court it doesn’t really matter how old you are or if you’re playing with much experience, if you can be calm under pressure… and can step up when you need to — whether you coming off the bench and...haven’t played a game the whole season, or you’ve started every game ...and [just aren’t] having a good game — that’s what counts,” Kolodka said. “I think everyone on our team has done an amazing job of that this season, and I think that’s what’s made us so successful, regardless of the fact that we don’t have any seniors and regardless of those question marks people raised.”
The squad, which has yet to lose a conference game on the road, used all five sets to take care of the Mules Friday evening (22-25, 25-23, 25-16, 17-25, 15-11) before rolling over the Bobcats in four during Saturday’s day game (25-19, 15-25, 25-14, 25-16). These two wins gave Middlebury a 6-2 record in the NESCAC, locking the Panthers in a four-way tie for second place with Amherst, Tufts and Williams.
Despite the unsettling loss to Williams the week prior, the team stuck to its principles in this week’s preparations, Kolodka insisted.
“We definitely didn’t have a different attitude. If anything, it was important for us...to keep moving forward. Especially when you come out from a loss like that, that’s so close—it makes you realize how important every single NESCAC game is [and] how important every single point is,” said Kolodka. “So we really paid attention to detail in practice, trying to do our best …[on] every rep.”
Despite their 3-4 conference record coming into the game, Colby came out more than ready to play on Friday, leading for most of the first set and finishing things off after a Panther comeback tied the game at 22-22. Middlebury responded in a hard-fought second, which ran to 23-23 before the Panthers managed to put the Mules away with a kill from middle blocker Gabi Rosenfeld ’17. It seemed that the third set would be just as close until, knotted at 14-14, Middlebury rattled off ten straight points on the service of outside hitter Isabel Sessions ’19.
Colby took the momentum back from the Panthers in the fourth set as they raced out to an early 12-6 lead. The Mules held Middlebury at arm’s length the rest of the way, forcing a fifth and final set.
Showing the closing strength that’s helped them throughout the season, Middlebury jumped out in front, 6-1. The Panthers fought the Mules’ valiant comeback attempts to finish things off (15-11) on a kill by captain and setter, Hannah Blackburn ’17. Team leaders were outside hitter Becca Raffel ’18 with 13 kills, middle blocker Melanie English ’17 with 4 blocks, and Kolodka with 24 digs.
While the game was closer than the Panthers would’ve liked, especially against a team that’s out of reach of a top spot in the NESCAC, Kolodka wasn’t one to complain.
“Wins are wins, no matter what—so at the end of the day, we’re all really happy that we did what we needed to.” Koldoka said. “I don’t think we were necessarily as clean as this weekend, …but we still pulled it out.”
The team played with more authority on Saturday against Bates, posting decisive wins in the first, third, and fourth sets by margins of 6, 11, and 9 points, respectively. They stumbled briefly in the second, hitting at an unusually low .065 clip as a team.
They didn’t look back though, hitting at .293 the rest of the way and holding the Bobcats to a percentage of .033 over the last two sets. Like in Friday’s game, Raffel led the team in kills (16), English led in blocks (4), and Kolodka led in digs (18).
The Panthers will take a break from NESCAC play this weekend as they travel to Boston for the New England Challenge. They will take on MIT on Friday, Oct. 23 and Babson and Wellesley on Saturday, Oct. 24.
(10/21/15 11:16pm)
English novelist David Mitchell has been known to tailor to everyone’s taste, be it traditionalist, postmodernist, realist or fantasist. A superb writer and storyteller, he understands how to please his readers. As he stated in an interview in The New Yorker, “One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of mind is to ask why anyone would want to read this, and try to find a positive answer for that. Someone’s going to give you eight or ten hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience.”
Mitchell’s sixth novel is certainly that. The Bone Clocks is written in a similar form to Mitchell’s most famous novel, Cloud Atlas, with six interrelated narratives that stretch from 1984 to 2043. In and of itself, each is a short novel with depth and precision in its characterization that manages to construct a full picture when it comes together with its counterparts.
The plot is complex, intriguing and filled with hundreds of threads woven together to create one large tapestry. The novel opens in 1984 with Holly Skyes, a teenage runaway, and ends sixty years later in the far west of Ireland, where Holly is raising her granddaughter as the world faces environmental and economic collapse. In between, Holly encounters an undergraduate Cambridge sociopath in a Swiss ski resort (1991), has a child with a man more invested in his job as an Iraq War photographer than in his family (2003) and becomes the widowed author of The Radio People (2015). Amidst all this, Holly’s life is disrupted by a slow-moving war between a cult of predatory soul-eaters and a brand of vigilantes led by Doctor Marinus. She finds herself as an unwitting pawn in a war she does not belong in – but she may prove to be its decisive weapon.
Mitchell writes with a furious intensity, a slapped-awake vitality and a delight in language that no new medium can rival. He sees the everyday world with startling freshness, leading to grounded and sarcastic Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D.H Lawrence had been reborn in this new digital age. It is no coincidence, then, that it was the makers of The Matrix who transformed his previous epic Cloud Atlas into an extraordinary film released in 2012.
There are many reasons why a novel like The Bone Clocks should not be successful. In a section from the point of view of Crispin Hershey, Mitchell even writes, “A book can’t be half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.” Yet somehow, in a true testament to Mitchell’s writing abilities, it works. The realism of Holly’s life allows us to glimpse fragments of the world beyond, like a curtain revealing the shadowy figures from an alternative realm.
Overall, this book is a little mad, and like most of Mitchell’s works, it does not fit neatly into a single category. I am sure that many people will ask if this is “serious” literature, but that is not the point. Mitchell’s sentences never give off the sour taste of intellectualism that is found in many genius fiction pieces. Rather, he has always been a writer who understands that the reader wants to be entertained. The Bone Clocks shines brilliantly in this regard.
(10/21/15 8:43pm)
Every culture, no matter what country or government, develops traits that distinguish the socially privileged from the impoverished. Usually, they’re ridiculous societal quirks. Cars in Manhattan are a fantastic example. You neither need nor benefit from one, which means you’re driving to show something. Implicitly, you’re screaming to the world that you 1) have time to wait on infested streets honking your horn incessantly and 2) have enough money to invest in a useless chunk of steel that has no utility where you live. Another good example are fur coats in Moscow, where noses mysteriously upturn at anyone who isn’t wearing a dead animal around their neck.
In Las Vegas, I encountered this in stark clarity. The status symbol of the Nevadan bourgeoisie isn’t an expensive car, nor is it a luxurious fur coat. It’s membership in the Literary Society, an aggrandized book club. They meet in whatever ritzy venue they desire and discuss their chosen prose, inviting the author to share a gourmet “brunch.” They also invite (for philanthropic reasons, I assume) local English teachers and their students. I was one of those students last January. I remember wealth, lots of it, worn on the necks of lawyers and casinocrats. Many appeared bloated with botox and hairspray. None of them really struck me as especially intriguing, except one – the invited author. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with extroverted confidence, an easy grin and a book called “Deep Dark Down: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that set Them Free.” His name was Hector Tobar.
It’s safe to imagine that the 33 Chilean miners don’t possess the status symbols of their society. I doubt they had excessive cars or extravagant fur coats in their ten-week vacation in Hades, either. Their narrative is one the world has forgotten. In 2010, a few months after an earth-shattering quake, the San Jose copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert collapsed on them. Their supervisor – who probably does have an excessive car and extravagant fur coat or two – happened to be absent. They were trapped in the abyss for sixty-nine days. Everything was darkness, literally and metaphorically. The only light was the fire of fear that seared their brains with every grumble of the cavern.
In the words of Jose Ojeda: “we were a pack of sheep, and the mountain was about to eat us.” And that trauma understandably bled into the sunlight and the “good” years that have passed since. One, for example, washed up drunk and suicidal enough to confine him to a Santiago psychiatric ward.
For a group as celebritized as the miners, you would think they would have been offered the best psychological assistance available on Earth.
They sure were buried in mountains of other stuff. They were offered planned trips – although most ended up not happening – to Britain, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Israel, Spain and Greece and a new motorcycle from Kawasaki Chile. As noted in El Segundo, each miner was promised approximately 19 million pesos ($38,000) in “vacations, clothing, and donations.” Not only did they not receive major psychological help, they also were skimped that compensation.
A CNN article published in August pointed out that “today, many of the miners have trouble making ends meet, some living off of government pension, which pays about $500 a month. That’s roughly half of what they made working at the San Jose mine.”
Others have returned to mining. Hector Tobar’s transcription of one victim’s story, Luis Urzua, is heart-wrenching: “to have one mine fall on top of you, and then to find yourself obliged to work underground in a second mine, with the same boss who once left you behind” is the “life of a miner.” A few years ago, we were the ones who lauded them with gifts and celebrity that most of them publicly stated they didn’t want.
We treated them like the Kardashians. Then we threw them out, back into normalcy, back into the mines.
But there’s still hope. If you go into town, to the Marquis Theater, the first poster you’ll see advertises “The 33” for November 13th.
It’s a movie adaptation of the Chilean miners’ story, starring Antonio Banderas. At the Literary Society meeting, Tobar specifically pointed out that ticket sales transitively fund the miners. The movie is a charity. And that’s great. . . until you think about it more deeply. While the miners themselves cycle through traumatic depression and impoverished wages, we in the First World can garble popcorn and watch portrayals of their suffering on gigantic silver screens. It’s exploitative, but it’s their last hope.
It’s their last possible way of reaping compensation for the tragedy that they experienced.
For this reason, I urge readers to book a ticket for November 13th.
Don’t come away from this article thinking the exploitation entitles you to skip it. You have the privilege to skip the portrayal of the miners’ suffering, but they don’t. They’re living it; they’re experiencing it right now.
Let’s make “The 33” sell out.
(10/14/15 10:04pm)
On Sunday, Oct. 11, the College inaugurated Laurie L. Patton as its 17th president in a historic ceremony on McCullough Lawn to an audience of over 1,000. Patton is the first woman to hold the office of president in the College’s 215-year history and previously served at Duke University as the Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Robert F. Durden Professor of Religion. She arrived at Middlebury on July 1, 2015, after the Board’s announcement of her selection as president on November 18, 2014.
The ceremony commenced with a formal academic procession of faculty, administrators, the Trustees and delegates from 63 colleges, universities and learned societies. Patton’s undergraduate alma mater, Harvard University, and her graduate alma mater, the University of Chicago, were both represented in the delegation.
Marna C. Whittington, Chair of the Board of Trustees, conducted the investiture by presenting Gamaliel Painter’s original cane to Patton. President Emeritus John M. McCardell, Jr., returned to Middlebury to present the traditional pewter medallion worn by Middlebury presidents at all formal occasions. Patton received a standing ovation from the crowd before she delivered a 35-minute address. She spoke of the vital role that the Green and Adirondack Mountains play in shaping the community. She also gave five thoughts about a vision for the future, with a focus on making “arguments for the sake of heaven,” a philosophical principle in Judaism.
“I hope we are all thinking about that, because I believe that Middlebury’s collective genius of warmth, optimism, rigor and compassion can make us some of the best arguers in higher education — arguers who can think together with deeper respect, stronger resilience and greater wisdom,” said Patton.
Patton noted Middlebury’s heritage of open mindedness, high aspirations and innovative leadership in higher education as qualities that make it unique among its peer schools. “We have a love and care for languages and writing and sciences and society and arts and athletics all at the same time.”
Patton received a second standing ovation at the conclusion of her address.
The ceremony was preceded on Saturday by a series of academic panels in celebration of learning called to order by the new president. The first panel, moderated by Tara Affolter, Assistant Professor of Education Studies, was titled “Race, Gender, and Inequality.” The second, moderated by Eilat Glickman, Assistant Professor of Physics, was titled “Scientific Exploration and the Boundaries of Life.” The final panel, moderated by Timothy Billings, Professor of English and American Literatures, was titled “The Ethical Dimensions of Reading Classical Literature.” This panel featured Wendy Doniger, a Sanskrit scholar and President Patton’s thesis advisor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. After a public concert on McCullough Lawn featuring Dispatch (headed by Brad Corrigan ’96), the tradition of inauguration weekend continued with a fireworks show behind the Peterson Athletics Complex.
“It was very important to us and to President Patton that the inauguration weekend bring together Middlebury’s many and overlapping communities,” said Caitlin Myers, Associate Professor of Economics and a member of the inaugural committee. “We worked hard to plan events that students, faculty, staff, townspeople and friends of the College would be excited to attend.”
On Oct. 10, 2004, Middlebury inaugurated Ronald D. Liebowitz as its 16th president and simultaneously dedicated the new Davis Family Library. In his address, Liebowitz spoke of the beauty and remoteness of the Champlain Valley as an “ideal environment for contemplation and creativity.” He spoke of innovation in the College, which created the nation’s first undergraduate Environmental Studies program in 1965, created the Language Schools in 1915 and began the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences after Joseph Battell bequeathed 30,000 acres of his farm on Bread Loaf Mountain in Ripton to the College in 1915. “Middlebury is a college of experiments,” he said. “We must preserve these parts of the Middlebury culture that encourage creativity and innovation.” He and his wife, Jessica, started the Ron and Jessica Liebowitz Fund for Innovation to give financial support to innovative projects proposed by members of the Middlebury community.
Presidents Emeriti Armstrong, Robison and McCardell were in attendance at Liebowitz’s inaugural ceremony. At Patton’s inauguration on Sunday, McCardell attended, and the wives of Robison, who is in ill health, and Armstrong, who passed away, attended Sunday’s ceremony in place of their husbands. Liebowitz was not present at Sunday’s exercises.
Donna Donahue, a member of the Town of Middlebury Select Board, gave words of welcome and thanks. She acknowledged the many contributions the College has made to the town. She cited the completed Cross Street bridge, the current construction of a carbon-neutral town office building, planned construction of a gymnasium and recreation facility, a planned public park where the current town offices stand and development of commercial space behind Ilsley Library as examples of this constructive relationship.
Former Vermont governor Jim Douglas ’72, the Executive in Residence at Middlebury, spoke of the “demographic crisis” facing Vermont. Vermont high school graduates, he said, leave their home state for college at a higher rate than anywhere else. “Higher education allows Vermonters to expand their opportunities, increase their marketability, demand higher wages and gain personal fulfillment. I hope Middlebury will find ways to attract more Vermont students; we need to persuade them that there’s a higher education jewel right here in their own backyard.”
Richard Brodhead, president of Duke University and an honored speaker at the ceremony, praised Patton, with whom he worked at Duke. “Laurie actively listens, takes your ideas in and allows them to release thoughts of her own, in a free-form synthesis that’s always opening new vistas. Couple this with her endless energy, her endless interest in others, her passion for teaching and learning and her sheer joy in the drama of education, and Middlebury, you have met your match.”
In all, the inaugural ceremony lasted two hours. Provost Susan Baldridge gave several announcements in between welcome messages by representatives from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, the Bread Loaf Schools, the Language Schools, the Alumni Association and Staff Council. Students at the College read original passages from texts in several religious traditions: Hanna Nowicki ’16 from Zen teachings, Trisha Singh ’18 from the Bhagavad Gita, Gioia Pappalardo ’16.5 from the New Testament, Hasher Nisar ’16.5 from the Qur’an and Josh Goldenberg ’18 from the Hebrew Bible. Natasha Trethewey, the United States Poet Laureate, read pieces of poetry in English, including a poem on learning sacred language in childhood written by Patton.
“The hardest part was the detail,” said David Donahue ’91, special assistant to the president and Secretary of the Corporation. “Luckily, we have amazingly talented staff who take great pride in these kinds of events and who think of everything. Making sure everyone knows where they are going, who’s doing what, shuttles, childcare, housing. Which to me was a thoughtful, thought-provoking, warm and welcoming experience.”
The ceremony ended with the singing of the alma mater, “Walls of Ivy,” and an academic recessional to a bagpipe tune played by Timothy Cummings, an affiliate artist at the College. Following the ceremony, students, faculty, staff and the new president walked up the hill toward Mead Chapel to join in a campus-wide picnic — the breaking of bread.
(10/14/15 6:53pm)
According to Middlebury’s CCI website, LinkedIn is the key to controlling our professional online identity. “LinkedIn profiles rise to the top of search results from sites such as Google, letting you control that first impression.”
So having a LinkedIn profile forces potential employers to troll a little longer to find that embarrassing drunk photo or Facebook post, but what about its value as a professional networking tool? Does a friend endorsing your “Microsoft Excel” skills really mean much to job recruiters?
Of the 121 students we surveyed on their LinkedIn experience, 18% of respondents said that they found job opportunities through the site. Only 6% of respondents actually got the job. With these kinds of results, it is perhaps of no surprise that for some Middlebury students, “Let’s connect on LinkedIn” often comes off as an ironic joke rather than a genuine interest in professional networking. This week, The Campus investigates the value of LinkedIn for the Middlebury student. Is LinkedIn’s popularity all hype and peer pressure or are these student skeptics neglecting the true benefits of the site?
LinkedIn’s Rapid Global Growth
LinkedIn was launched in 2003 by Reid Hoffman, an American entrepreneur who had previously been on Paypal’s board of directors. In 2004, it attracted an impressive 120,000 members. By 2014, it had grown into a global network amassing over 332,000,000 members. As society becomes increasingly connected through technology, rather than face-to-face interaction, it seems only natural that professional networks move online as well.
Despite this societal trend and those impressive membership figures, creating and maintaining a LinkedIn profile can often seem fruitless in terms of actual job offers. The numbers don’t lie; the network is huge, but is it active?
“I’m connected to more than 1,000 people on LinkedIn, but a quick trip to my LinkedIn home page suggests that on any given day, there are probably fewer than 25 people – or 2.5% – that are actively engaged,” wrote Dave Kurlan, author of the Top Sales and Marketing Blog of 2011-2014, “to me, the phone is looking better and better every day.”
Garrett Griffin ’16 is a computer science and Chinese double major was recently recruited by both Google and the CIA via LinkedIn. Even he is still not sold on the site’s usefulness in professional networking.
“I’m jaded about a lot of technology. A lot of it is excessive and unnecessary and I thought LinkedIn just fell into that category. Like Facebook, it appeared as a social media space that doesn’t offer you much more than being a somewhat more formal way of interacting with people that isn’t email,” said Griffin. Initially skeptical, his mom ended up creating his profile last summer so he could keep in touch with the co-workers he had met on his internship with Amazon in Seattle.
Though he now admits his LinkedIn membership ended up being a “pretty good thing”, Griffin still hesitates to recommend the site to his friends, especially those who are not interested in working for internet savvy companies that actively recruit on LinkedIn. “I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends who are looking for say, jobs in art galleries,” he said.
Further, some students tend to shy away from LinkedIn because they are unsure who they want to connect with. For English major Julia Haas ’17, “LinkedIn seems like [a site for] someone who’s looking for a very specific career, and as someone who has no concept of what my major could lead to, I don’t think it’d worthwhile for me. It just seems a connection maker, and I have no idea what kind of connections I’m trying to make.”
LinkedIn Beyond Networking: A Powerful Research Tool?
In response to this skepticism, CCI career advisor Tracy Himmel Isham insists LinkedIn is much more than just a professional network. For students not yet interested in networking, it has the potential to be an efficient way to research companies and careers.
“Say you want to know a little more about social impact consulting, there’s over a 100,000 companies that have put profiles in here.” The company profile features a short mission statement, how they self-identify, their website as a live link, and their specialties listed in keywords.
“It’s all about algorithms, it’s all about keywords,” she said. “LinkedIn is phenomenal for research. Just to give you an idea, I went through and kept clicking through company profiles [based on the “People Also Viewed” feature] on social impact consulting,” she said. Using these profiles, she wrote short company summaries. This document spanned 22 pages. “There’s so much information you can trove out of this. For me, that’s the most exciting part,” she said.
Isham described the Student Jobs section of the website, featuring only entry-level and internship positions, as a personalized MiddNet [alumni database] and MOJO [Middlebury Online Job Opportunities site], combined. Through the use of Advanced Search, members can search keywords, such as Middlebury College and a company name, to see if any alumni work there. They can also filter alumni based on the industry they work in, their skills, and the city where they work. Say, you were interested in working in the San Francisco Bay area in the renewables sector and wanted to connect with relevant Middlebury alumnae. The advanced search feature allows you to do that.
“What’s cool about this [search feature on LinkedIn] is it’s not just a list of names,” she said as she clicked on an alumni’s profile in the Renewables sector. “Now I can go in and see what their trajectory has been. I can see that he’s risen through the company and where he worked before, his major, his class year and where he got his graduate degree,” Isham said.
Making (Valuable) Connections
As MiddNet becomes somewhat obsolete, LinkedIn could become more helpful to current students looking for a familiar hand up into a competitive industry. “I think the younger generation of alums are on LinkedIn more often than MiddNet,” Isham said, “MiddNet is a great source; there’s a ton of alumni on it. But LinkedIn is where I try to make [student-alum] connections happen.”
Though Isham believes LinkedIn can be a useful career tool for all students, she does not recommend students upgrade to a premium account. “I think there’s a ton you can do [without Premium],” she said. This is one reason why she advises students to avoid joining multiple groups where one has no personal affiliation, i.e. interest groups that can over-broaden their search results. Without the Premium filter, it can be near impossible to sort out which people are within a connection’s reach.
In addition to joining groups selectively, Isham suggested being careful with who students connect with and how they connect with them. Although the number of LinkedIn connections is boldly displayed on every profile, she insists it is more important to have high quality connections, rather than a large quantity.
“[In an invitation], my advice is tell people why you want to connect, because then it becomes personal. For me, if I get people who want to connect and they’re just a part of some green group I’m also a part of, and they send me the boiler plate invitation, I ignore them,” she said. Instead of directly sending strangers an invitation to connect, Isham suggests students try to find a mutual connection to introduce them.
“What’s cool about LinkedIn is if someone you know is asking you to connect, your chances are going to be 50% higher,” she said. “The more connections you have, the deeper you can go. If you connect to me, you have a way to connect to all of my connections,” she said.
She recalled connecting a student interested in the sustainable food industry who wanted to work in the new Provisions department for Patagonia. “I know someone [at Patagonia] who is a sustainability person, an alum who I used to work with on climate stuff,” she said. “I introduced them and they kept me in the conversation for the first couple back-and-forths. It was brilliant. They totally connected.”
(10/07/15 11:47pm)
The ladies of Middlebury volleyball have really begun to hit their stride as their season passes the midway point, mowing down NESCAC opponent Trinity on Friday in straight sets (25-13, 25-19, 25-23) before proceeding to dispatch another pesky conference foe, Wesleyan, just as quickly on Saturday (25-22, 25-20, 25-18). After opening the season at 3-2 and dropping their first NESCAC matchup against Bowdoin, the Panthers have not looked back. The squad is now riding an eight-game win streak, the last six of which have come on the road. During the entire streak, the team has needed a full five sets to secure a victory only twice.
Middle blocker Melanie English ’17 was quick to credit the team’s acumen and poise, likely unexpected from such a young team back at the start of the season.
“We were a little unsure of what was going to happen, having such a young team with all these new people being dropped right into the game,” English said. “I’ve been very impressed by the attitudes and the mental toughness, especially of the newer people on the team ... Frankly, there’s even more mental toughness than last year. The moments when people would get frustrated or maybe panicked, I’m not seeing that this year.”
On Friday, Middlebury made their presence known early against the Bantams, jumping out to a 9-2 lead in the first set and never even giving Trinity a chance. The strong early play helped to build confidence for the Panthers, as they brought their high level of play to the latter stages of the next two sets. They pulled away from a 17-17 tie in the second and allowed their opponents the tiniest bit of hope before closing them out in the third, overcoming a 21-23 deficit with four straight points for the match victory.
In past weeks, the Panthers had often struggled to come out firing on all cylinders; at Wesleyan on Saturday, they continued to reverse that trend by putting away the Cardinals 25-22 in the first set. Middlebury’s play only got stronger as they won the next two sets by increasing margins of five and seven points, respectively. The defense really stood out in the third set, where the Panthers held Wesleyan’s hitting percentage to .000.
However, English feels that the team still has room to improve, especially in view of this week’s conference foes, Amherst and Williams, who sit tied for second in NESCAC standings.
“I think we’ll have a much bigger challenge coming from Amherst and Williams this week. Even when we do come out and play really well in the first set, sometimes we’ll still have periods during the middle of the game where we sort of let it slide a little bit,” English said. “Coach Raunecker wants us to be playing good volleyball all of the time, rather than just 80% of the time or 90% of the time. We’re looking not to let points go on silly things.”
As usual, outside hitter Becca Raffel ’18 had a strong weekend for the Panthers, leading all players with 13 kills on Friday and 19 on Saturday. Emily Kolodka ’18, who often plays as libero or defensive specialist for the Panthers, separated herself with 17 digs against Trinity and 23 against Wesleyan.
Overall, English expects good things from the team for the rest of the season.
“I feel really good about our capability, physically, to win. The piece that gets tougher — if you’re playing a game against Williams and you know it’s going to be really even — who wants to win,” English said. “Who can bring it that day? I think that’s what this week will start to tell us: where we are, and how much we need to do before NESCACs.”
At home this weekend, the Panthers face Amherst at 8 p.m. on Friday and Williams at 2 p.m. on Saturday.
(09/30/15 9:59pm)
Panthers’ volleyball kept the ball rolling on this past weekend’s road trip, extending its winning streak to six games and improving its overall record to 9-2 on the season. Having started the week off on the right foot with a Wednesday win over St. Michael’s, the team spent four sets taking care of NESCAC foe Hamilton in Friday’s matchup (21-25, 25-16, 25-20, 25-15), notching its first win in conference play this year. After that, Middlebury cleaned up at the Skidmore Classic on Saturday, taking down Ramapo College in five sets and Sage College in four.
Friday’s conference win was not without drama, however, as the Panthers had to scramble to get ready in New York after a late arrival threw off their warm-up schedule. Coincidentally, during the 2014 season Hamilton arrived in Middlebury about about three hours late, and went on to top the Panthers, 3-1. Facing similar circumstances, Middlebury was angling to turn the tables this time around.
Yet at the beginning, the Panthers seemed to be unsettled by the hectic rush to get ready. They came out of the gates slowly, dropping the first set 21-25 to the Continentals. However, setter Hannah Blackburn ’17 credits what happened next to the team’s tenacity and ability to refocus.
“I think we sometimes take a little bit of time to get going,” Blackburn said. “But this weekend (and in our other games) the good takeaway is that we have that mental endurance to bounce back,” she added.
The Panthers certainly didn’t let their slow start dictate the rest of the match; they quickly found their groove, ripping off victories in the next three sets by decisive margins of nine, five and ten points, respectively.
As a team, Middlebury scored its highest hitting percentage of the year, putting up a .381 (compared to Hamilton’s .214). Outside hitter Becca Raffel ’18 led both sides with 17 kills and pushed her season total to 160 over the weekend, good for tops in the NESCAC. Isabel Sessions ’19, also an outside hitter, added 14 kills. Blackburn, the team’s starting setter, poured in 40 assists on Friday; she sits second in the conference with 9.51 assists per set. Lastly, middle blocker Melanie English ’17 continued her strong play at the net this season with a pair of blocks. She is currently tied for the NESCAC lead with 1.12 blocks per set.
Looking forward, the Panthers will try to keep up their road success as they face NESCAC foes Trinity (3-6 overall, 0-3 conference) and Wesleyan (4-5, 1-2) on Friday, Oct. 2 and Saturday, Oct. 3.
Although this year’s team is young, Blackburn feels that its success will depend largely on its depth.
“For us, having that depth is really good,” Blackburn said. “If someone has a few bad points and needs to be pulled out, being able to give them a breather and have them go back in is something we’re going to be working on for the rest of the season. Everyone who’s jumped in has been ready to go so far for us, which means we can really use that depth without any ‘lag’ when someone comes onto the court.”
The Panthers will return home the following week, when they warm up with a non-conference game against Skidmore on Tuesday, Oct. 6 before taking on conference foes Amherst on Friday, Oct. 9 and Williams on Saturday, Oct. 10.
(09/30/15 9:06pm)
Members of the Middlebury Board of Trustees arrived on campus this past weekend to attend the annual fall trustee meeting. The meeting marks the second year that the board’s new governance structure has been in effect.
For some students, the role of the Board in daily campus life is nebulous. For others, especially those interested in the College’s investments and those who are in more constant contact with trustees, the board’s impact is more apparent.
“The board does a lot of things that students care about, but students may not know that the board is involved in the first place,” said Chair of the Board of Trustees Marna C. Whittington.
According to the College, the Board of Trustees “holds ultimate legal and fiduciary responsibility for all assets and operations of Middlebury College, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), the Middlebury Language Schools and Schools Abroad, the Bread Loaf School of English, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and all other Middlebury schools, programs, centers and institutes.” Such responsibilities include the authority to hire and dismiss the president of the College, setting the College’s financial strategy and budget, advising on capital projects and maintaining the final decision on tenure.
In light of the board’s essential role to the College as a corporation, an effective structure for board governance is essential. The announcement of President Emeritus Ronald D. Leibowitz’s plan to step down came in concert with the conclusion of a yearlong process to review and revise the board’s governance structure.
“Nothing was necessarily broken, but we wanted to step back and ask ourselves, if we were to build a governance program starting today, what would it look like?” said Whittington. A number of recommendations and bylaws were passed in December of 2013 and implemented in July of 2014.
There were both structural and procedural changes to the College’s governance system. Whittington noted that one of the largest shortcomings of the old system was the imbalance in committees overseeing its various business units. Chief among the changes to address this issue was the reduction of the number of standing committees from 15 to five. Now, the role of these committees is to assume responsibility for all substantive issues across all of the College’s campuses and programs.
In addition to these specific standing committees, the board also voted to create three boards of overseers for the College, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), and the “Schools,” which include the Language Schools, Bread Loaf School of English, and Schools Abroad. Each board of overseers is charged with reviewing and monitoring the educational offerings and student life under their respective jurisdiction.
The membership of these committees also changed. “Before, we didn’t have proper constituent representatives. Now we have a student representative, a faculty and a staff on each of the board of overseers,” said Whittington.
In addition to constituent representation, a partner overseer is also appointed to each board. “They aren’t full trustees, but they are subject matter experts in some way,” said Whittington. “For instance, the superintendent of the local school district is coming on as a partner overseer to the College overseers… They have interest in giving their professional expertise to the process of Middlebury.”
Procedural changes to the governance included the implementation of new rules of engagement: how meetings are to be conducted and how trustees are to work with one another. Under the new governance structure, one trustee may not hold more than one leadership position. This created 16 vacancies in various trustee leadership positions, which required “more people to step up and spread the engagement,” said Whittington.
Despite the collective positive effects of these changes, some significant challenges have already appeared after a year of implementation. “I think one of the biggest challenges is that our trustees now are very aware of what they don’t know. Before they were in their committees and didn’t have that insight,” said Whittington. Another challenge is overcoming the time creep and enlisting younger and more diverse trustees to join the board.
(09/24/15 12:53am)
Despite a strong effort by the ladies of Middlebury volleyball in their first home game of the season, an efficient Bowdoin squad ultimately proved too much this past Friday as the Polar Bears wore down the Panthers over four sets (25-21, 25-22, 23-25, 25-18).
In a match that saw almost too many lead changes to count, Middlebury proved itself capable of competing against quality NESCAC competition, but untimely errors seemed to derail the squad’s momentum late in sets when they found themselves neck-and-neck with a Bowdoin team that more than doubled them in hitting percentage (.210 to .099).
Coach Sarah Raunecker felt that her Panthers gave Bowdoin too much freedom to dictate the flow of the game, “even though the set scores were close, we seemed to be playing catch-up most of the time,” Raunecker said. “They’d get ahead by a few points, and then we’d tie it up, only to go down a couple points again. I felt like they were controlling the action more than we were, and we’d like to change that.”
In the first set, neither side led by more than three points until the very end. The lead was traded back and forth until the teams finding themselves knotted at 19-19, the Polar Bears took control late and separated themselves to the tune of a 6-2 closing run. The second set went similarly, but with the score tied at 17, the Panthers failed once again and fell behind 2-0 in sets.
However, Middlebury showed some mettle with a hard-fought win in the third set. Strong play from Melanie English ’17 and Eliana Schaefer ’18 helped keep the Panthers within striking distance. After capitalizing on a pair of Bowdoin mistakes to take a 23-21 lead, Middlebury went on to dispatch the Polar Bears with kills from Becca Raffel ’18 and Isabel Sessions ’19.
The Panthers found themselves once again playing from behind in the fourth set. Although they managed to overcome an early deficit to tie things up at 17-17, Bowdoin wasted no time in racing to a 25-18 victory to finish the match.
Outside hitter Alice Roberts ’18, who suffered an unlucky sprained ankle during Friday’s warm-ups, noted from the sidelines that the squad had room for improvement.
“We’re definitely still trying to find our chemistry … It’s very early in the season,” Roberts said. “We sort of had some, well, I don’t want to say easier competition early on, but this was the second game where we were really challenged, which we have to be expecting for the rest of NESCAC.”
Other notable contributors to Friday’s match were Captain Hannah Blackburn ’17, who set up 32 assists and led Middlebury with 9 digs, and Emily Kolodka ’18, who chipped in with 8 digs. Raffel paced the team with 11 kills and English contributed in a big way on defense with 8 blocks.
Middlebury straightened things out to take care of business in Saturday’s Tri-Match against Cortland St. (25-18, 25-16, 22-25, 22-25, 15-13) and Colby-Sawyer (25-10, 25-17, 25-14). Although the opposition wasn’t quite as strong as Friday’s, Raunecker was nevertheless pleased with her team’s adjustments.
“On Saturday, I think our serve receive was a little better, and our hitters were trying to make more shots and see the court … in addition to the teams not being as good as Bowdoin.”
As the season rolls on with games at Hamilton on Friday, Sept. 25 and the Skidmore classic on Saturday, Sept. 26, Raunecker had good things to say about the team’s future.
“I’m very optimistic and excited about this team moving forward,” she said. “I think we have a lot of growth potential, and as we get used to switching things up and getting comfortable with those changes, that will make us a stronger team. We’ll also continue to work on our mental toughness knowing that many matches will come down to the wire and be decided by only a couple of points, so being able to perform in the heat of the moment with confidence and composure will be a key for our success in NESCAC.”
(09/17/15 10:31pm)
The end of my second week in England is coming to a close. I have started getting into a routine. I finally know how to walk from my building to Oxford’s library. Research has dominated most of my days this week; I have buckled down and started work on my first big project during my study abroad semester here.
I have also been able to experience a lot of English culture since I arrived. My friends and I have visited a long list of different pubs, I have had tea and biscuits in the early afternoon and my program has brought me to a couple of heritage sites, such as the cathedral at Winchester and the Roman structures at Bath.
It has been a fantastic experience so far, and I have already learned a pretty shocking amount about the country, the University and myself. But over the course of my time here I have struggled with a mounting pressure: the urge to do more, see more, achieve more, fill every waking hour with something new so that I get the absolute most out of this time abroad. In other words, it is the pressure to wring as much out of this short semester so that I feel like I have not missed anything.
What I am feeling certainly is not new; it is the perpetual traveler’s curse, the monumental task of trying to fit as much in as possible into an extremely limited time period. But I did not consider that it would affect me this much. After all, I am here for three and a half months, not three days.
And yet, it still nags at me. That voice in my mind that continually compels me to go see a new church, to visit a new part of town, to try a different beer at a pub that I have never been to. As a person who relies heavily on routine and who tries to balance each day with enough downtime to keep mentally healthy, this trip has been a shock to the system. I have been exhausted each day, too busy to sit down for thirty minutes and read a book in my room by myself.
But this week I realized that I cannot just keep going like this. I will burn out if I do. So, I accepted something that is extremely difficult for any traveler to acknowledge.
It is okay if you do not do everything, and it is okay if you do nothing for an hour or two every day.
Being able to sit back and simply be at peace with not doing anything is really tough. It is hard to just let the world go by. But I have found that it is also necessary.
Because traveling and studying abroad is not that different than, say, moving homes or starting a new school. It is really similar to what the Middlebury freshmen are going through right now. You get hit by wave after wave of new experiences, new acquaintances and new routines to establish. You must find that which grounds you and reminds you that things are not so different than they used to be. You have to remember that the mental overload of going to a new place or starting a new phase in your life does not mean that you are a different person or that you have to continually force yourself to explore the entire breadth of that place or phase.
It is okay to do nothing, to sit in your room alone with a book for a few hours, because that is how to find that grounding. I have made myself step away from all the activities and that compulsion to keep moving so that I can breathe and remember that I need to give my mind and body a rest.
After all, traveling, studying abroad and starting college are not about trying to do everything. They are about doing what makes you happy. I find that I am most content when I let myself go sit in a park for a while or read a book somewhere secluded. This allows me to appreciate those places I do want to go visit even more.
I have realized that I need to stop worrying about what I am missing or what I might not get to see, and instead focus on those places and people that I do see. I have to accept that it is all right that I will probably not go to Ireland or France while I am here, just as it is all right that I might not get to try out as many restaurants or pubs as I originally thought I would. What really matters is that when I actually go somewhere with my friends, I recognize the moment and experience that moment to the fullest. I should not worry about what is next. It is not the sum of all the different things that I do here that determine the worth of my experience, just like it is not the number of people you meet or things you do at college that decide college’s value. Rather, I have to remember that my abroad semester’s value comes from simply having a few meaningful experiences and appreciating each of those individually.
(09/17/15 6:01pm)
The Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) will offer a $10,000 Legacy Scholarship to Middlebury College alumni and their family members.
Family members include an alumnus’ parents, siblings, spouses, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. In its initial press release the College defined alumni as anyone who has completed “any Middlebury undergraduate or graduate degree program including those offered by the Language Schools, the Bread Loaf School of English, and the Institute itself.” Any legacy student who meets MIIS admission criteria and applies for the scholarship will receive it. Students entering
MIIS in the Spring of 2016 will be the first class the scholarship is available to.
Recently-hired Executive Director of Enrollment Management Rebecca Henriksen said she was struck by the power and impor- tance of the College’s alumni network and the role alumni play in MIIS’ enrollment.
“Intellectual curiosity, cultural awareness, social and environmental consciousness, an adventurous spirit and the desire to make a positive impact seem to run in the family throughout Middlebury,” she said.
“Many of our best students over the years have been legacies, and MIIS also sees a good number of Middlebury graduates moving on to earn their master’s degree with us here in Monterey. I thought implementing the Legacy Scholarship was a way for us to show our thanks to our alumni,” she said. Henriksen estimates that of 780 MIIS graduate students, 15 are Middlebury alumni. The legacy program is not funded by a private donation but instead uses institutional funds earmarked for scholarships for incoming students. The decision to offer the scholarship was the collaborative effort of a number of MIIS administrators: Director of Alumni Relations Leah Gowron, Vice President and Dean of the Institute Jeff Dayton-Johnson, Director of Admissions Sadia Khan, Associate Vice Pres- ident for Marketing and Creative Services Robin Gronlund and Henriksen.
Henriksen will be on campus on September 24th to host an information session on the scholarship.
(05/06/15 3:39pm)
Dance-making has deep roots, in the experiences of choreographer and dancer alike. For the four senior dance majors whose choreographic work composed “Threshold” this past weekend, their research in various fields deeply informed their pieces. For all of the works, the choreographers engaged in dance as a mode of research – Stevie Durocher ’15.5 in connection with English literature, Doug LeCours ’15 with creative writing, Afi Yellow-Duke ’15 with sociology and Sarae Snyder ’15 with physicality and anatomical study.
Pervasive through the evening was a constant questioning of what it means to be a body, a person, in relation to societal expectations. Perhaps the most narrative work of the evening was Stevie Durocher’s “Reasons,” performed by Krystal Egbuchalam ’18, Olivia Raggio ’15.5, Julia Rossen ’16, Esme Valette ’16 and Durocher herself. Durocher’s solo and duet work with Egbuchalam followed the opening of the piece, in which the audience saw only shadows of dancers on the illuminated surface of the white scrim at the back of the dance theater – effectively creating images of smooth, ballet-esque movement like shadows on the stage of Durocher’s memory as she performed an intensely reflective and inwardly-focused solo. She hesitantly put on a pair of pointe shoes and moved between uninhibited leaps and stillness on pointe, embodying the intersection between a classical ballet background and modern dance forms.
LeCours’ work, “MY SAD GIRL DEAD BOY PROM NIGHT PITY PARTY,” shed light on the American narratives of sad girls and mourning rituals alongside the dialogue of LeCours’ queer male body. The piece invited a space of “radical mourning” that challenged audience members to laugh, to cry and to grieve the traumas, large or small, that we have all experienced. His five dancers, Juliette Gobin ’16, Emily Luan ’15, Annie Powers ’15, Sarae Snyder ’15 and Meredith White ’15, formed a group of wraith-like women clad in white nightgowns. Their distant, sorrowful gazes lent their movement an almost involuntary or sleepwalk-like feel, interrupted only by moments in which Gobin, and later White, broke apart from the other women for solo moments, collapsing out of the automatic motion into a more pained expressiveness. White’s tangible agony accompanied the sound of her whimpers and sobs as she struggled between the distant, reflex motion and her emotional collapse, and heel-toed offstage.
Sarae Snyder’s duet work, “Vowels,” was brought to life by Miguel Castillo ’17.5 and Meredith White ’15, in an exploration of how physicality and interaction develop meaning throughout the creation and performance process.
“I am interested in how content emerges from otherwise ‘meaningless’ physicality,” Snyder wrote in the Program Notes.
While watching dance, it is often tempting to try to uncover a narrative behind the piece, but Snyder’s work defies this attempt by presenting varied and innovative movement forms that make the viewer’s experience very much their own. What we take with us after witnessing such a performance are glimpses of what the dance has provoked in us. This narrative was enhanced by portions of the audio: Compiled by Snyder, recordings of Castillo and White’s voices speaking words and non-words created sounds that defied meaning in the same way as their movements.
The ending phrase of “Vowels” invited this interpretation: For a moment, the pair held hands and leaned their upper bodies away from each other whilst placing their feet close together, united in gaze and breath. Before long, they gradually twisted and fell away to run to separate spotlights on either side of the stage, hands on their chests. This moment read as an expression of both a mutual need for connection and an acknowledgement of our need to stand on our own – simultaneously together and alone.
Choreographed by Afi Yellow-Duke ’15, “Post American Mess” engaged in a deep questioning of fear, the unknown and our confrontation of it – or rather, our lack thereof. The piece flickered into view with a stark light on dancers Rachel Getz ’15.5, Andrew Pester ’17 and Julia Rossen ’16 as they paced onstage, periodically raising their trembling hands beside their heads. Audio from various public safety announcement-like texts contributed to an atmosphere of worry and impending danger, amplified by evocations of run-duck-and-cover movements of bomb drills and jarringly contrasted by mocking, circus-like and patriotic music. Perhaps the piece’s most evocative movement was the morphing of an anxious hand twitch into a saluting hand – addressing the notion of how America, as a concept, a place and a society, can stand at the root of our anxieties.
The evening’s last work was a second duet, created and performed by Sarae Snyder and Maggie Ammons, a student of dance and neurobiology at Bennington College. The work’s title “(Co)incidents” is layered in its significance, as it reflects the collaborative process of creation, whilst also sounding very much like ‘coincidence’ – a possible reference to the manner in which meaning and content emerged.
Snyder and Ammons exemplified a level of synchronicity in their unison phrases that deeply satisfied the aesthetic instinct – a particularly impressive feat in moments of silent movement. A note of humor arose as deep, club-like rhythms accompanied Ammons’ and Snyder’s empty-gazed, slack-limbed movement. At one point, they disregard each other to the point of bumping into and dancing over each other’s bodies – an allusion to practices of embodiment within dark, loud and bass-pumping music environments. But this physicality is dance as well. Within this piece, as in the works of the other senior choreographers, artists engaged in an exploration of the threshold of physicality and human experience in relation to culture, art and meaning.
(04/29/15 9:28pm)
The second faculty show of the semester, Spring Awakening, will usher in a 19th-century tale of sexuality that proved to be far ahead of its times. Written by German dramatist Frank Wedekind in 1891, the play offers a harrowing perspective of suicide, rape, child abuse, abortion and other difficult themes, which frequently led to the banning or censorship of the play during the author’s lifetime and beyond. (Indeed, the first uncensored production in English took place in 1974.) This weekend’s rendition will grapple directly with these complex issues, under the direction of Associate Professor of Theatre Claudio Medeiros ’90. The content is for mature audiences only.
Spring Awakening follows a group of adolescents in a small town in late-19th-century Germany. Within their sexually repressive culture, they experience an awakening into sexuality. But in a world where people still believe that storks bring babies, this pubescent transformation holds scandalous implications. As such, Medeiros described the premise of the play as “living the tension between those emotions and desires and the ideology of the time.”
To understand the context for their performances, cast members conducted research specific to their roles and spoke with Professor of German Bettina Matthias. With 21 student actors, one faculty actor and a five-student production team, the making of this show has proven to be no small feat. In contrast to the small cast of his last faculty show, Medeiros chose Spring Awakening for its wide breadth of roles.
“Directors have lists of plays in their heads that they would like to do in the future,” he stated. “Each time you direct, you have to take into consideration the students who are available and the roles that you can offer for those students.”
While casting last semester, Medeiros was extremely upfront regarding the sensitive and potentially triggering content of the play. During the reading process, he chose particularly difficult scenes for students to run through so he could read their level of comfort as they confronted the full extent of the show’s material.
Later on in the production process, following the devastating loss of one of the College’s students, Medeiros felt it was necessary to discuss the mature subject matter of Spring Awakening with the administration, and to question whether or not to proceed with the production.
“In light of recent events, some on campus were concerned about what impact the play might have on the community and, in particular, on vulnerable members of the community who might be struggling with their own reaction to recent events,” Andrea Lloyd, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, explained.
“You start questioning what you are doing,” Medeiros stated. “But we always felt that the demonstration was taking great care to look at the issue and think about it very, very carefully.”
The cast and crew discussed the issue heavily. A small group of faculty, including Medeiros, engaged in an open dialogue with the senior administration about the complexities of the show. Ultimately, it was decided that the play should go on, with a clear warning to all audiences about the mature content.
“I hope that members of the community make informed choices about whether attending is the right thing for them,” Lloyd said. “And I applaud the cast members for the work they have done grappling with very difficult subject matter.”
Indeed, the controversial nature of Spring Awakening ought not to overshadow the meticulously passionate work of the cast and crew in bringing this piece to life. Medeiros chose British playwright Edward Bond’s translation of Spring Awakening, as he preferred the economy of the text over the overwritten quality of other versions. Last semester, students in his first-year seminar, Power and Sexuality Onstage, proved integral in helping him unravel certain scenes of the play. Meanwhile, in rehearsals, the cast has demonstrated an unprecedented chemistry in piecing together this thought-provoking work.
“This company has been a total joy to work with. Usually you try to do a lot of ensemble-building. But they created an ensemble practically on their own,” Medeiros said. “The only thing I did was create an environment that was playful and comfortable. I was really fortunate.”
In particular, he lauded the initiative of Adam Milano ’15 and Chelsea Melone ’15, who play the challenging roles of Melchior and Wendla, respectively.
“I would come in and shape the material,” Medeiros said. “But the first draft they would come up with on their own.”
Of course, crafting this difficult piece has not come without its challenges. Students initially struggled to grasp the sense of sexual ignorance that embodied the era. Additionally, the poetic nature of the text has posed both theoretical and technical demands for the cast. The challenge lies in making the meaning of the dialogue understood and articulating the words so that they are clearly heard, since the spacious Wright Theater creates a tricky situation for acoustics.
“The moment an audience member moves forward to listen better, some of the effects are already drained,” Medeiros explained. In terms of the nature of the text, he stated, “It’s more expressionist than realist. Instead of representing life as it would happen outside the theater, the playwright is trying to represent the essence of experiences, not all the contours in detail. So the language is somewhat poetic, elevated. It’s not people sitting at a table having coffee and chatting. There’s a clear sense that this is poetry, or art.”
The task of the actor, then, is to ensure that the dialogue is understood not only for its surface meaning, but also for what is underneath it.
Structured as a poem, the play is composed of scenes that juxtapose each other but are unlinked by cause and effect. The visual concept is minimalist, with an abstract material space that clearly suggests a real place. Lighting shines down upon the same set to evoke scenes within a house, a forest or any number of different settings. As Medeiros put it, the space is “more of a surface that suggests something, but that resonates differently in different scenes.” Throughout the show, the visual focus falls mostly on bodies in space, lights and costumes.
In contrast to previous renditions of Spring Awakening, Medeiros chose to incorporate a dancer in this show. Through fluidly choreographed movements, Artist-in-Residence in Dance Scotty Hardwig will portray a mysterious figure known as the masked man, opening up a physical language onstage.
In breaking open difficult ideas and transcending modern times to an era of oppression and scandal, the cast and crew of this production have worked diligently to do justice to the original text.
“For us, it has been pleasurable work,” Medeiros said. “It is an artful play.”
The long-anticipated Spring Awakening debuts tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Wright Memorial Theater. Two subsequent showings on May 1-2 will also take place at 7:30 p.m. Running time is approximately two-and-a-half hours with intermission. Tickets are available through go/boxoffice.
(04/29/15 9:11pm)
Few things give me more satisfaction than experiencing peers’ and professors’ work. Sometimes it’s too easy to get lost in the system of Middlebury and forget the passion and purpose driving this college experience. So many students are working on so many incredible things that we often take our friends for granted.
This Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m. in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (MCA), four seniors offer the final culmination of their studies and a last hoorah before graduating in a few weeks. Stevie Durocher ’15.5, Doug LeCours ’15, Sarae Synder ’15 and Afi Yellow-Duke ’15 have spent months examining the intersection between dance and their various unique areas of study, from creative writing to Chinese. Each student has choreographed pieces that map this intersection in mesmerizing, ephemeral movement. To help quench my fascination with what students are doing on this crazy campus, each artist spoke to me about the importance of dance in his or her life.
Durocher’s piece began with research for her thesis for the English and American Literature department, The Lies They Tell Our Daughters, where she examined perceptions of the dancer in children’s literature. Durocher is focused on ideas of body image and the ideals society puts forth regarding beauty to both the individual and the collective.
We can’t fully appreciate children’s literature without also realizing the effect is has on its readers. Durocher began with the focus of choreographing a piece as a direct manifestation of this research, but the project turned into an expression of her own story – that of her childhood in today’s world.
Through dance she was able to put herself into her research, to engage and discover her own identify and how society has influenced her, specifically her ideas of beauty and belonging. Though she was classically trained and doesn’t “look like what a ballerina is supposed to look like,” she said, “Dance has always been the one time I feel completely myself. I’m someone who doesn’t like to be seen, but when I take a ballet class, I wouldn’t care if the whole world saw me. That’s something I’ve been able to take with me everywhere I go.”
Durocher has the great fortune of being a Feb, so she is not yet “consumed by post grad plans,” but she hopes to work in children’s publishing after leaving Middlebury.
“Dance is something that will be part of my life forever, as it is an immensely important part of who I’ve always been, but I don’t see it being my career,” Durocher said.
LeCours is a Dance and Creative Writing double major who sees film as a mediator between movement and text. His piece focuses on his interest in what happens when the queer male body is asserted in the narrative of sad girls.
Specifically, he asks the question, “What happens when we investigate the power and agency within a queer male figure embodying some of the ideas of these tragic women I keep finding myself coming back to….”
“Dance is, at its best, a space for radical transformation,” LeCours said. “It has been one of the most important things in my life for fourteen years. I guess it’s what I know best.”
With this thesis work, LeCours takes the enjoyment and release he finds in movement and combines it with an exploration of his identity.
“Dance opens up new ways of viewing the world and my own experience, allowing for a nuanced approach to everyday life and relationships to self, other, and earth,” LeCours said. “Without making and performing dance I wouldn’t be able to view or confront my education as critically as, I hope, I do.”
Following his graduation from Middlebury, Doug will be moving to New York to perform and choreograph.
Sarae Snyder is working on two pieces. The first is a duet between two Middlebury students, sourced from one of Snyder’s solo performances and focusing on the unique humanness of the dancers. She is collaborating on the second piece with a senior from Bennington College featuring much stricter, practiced movements progressing into spontaneity and chaos. On a basic level, Snyder is interested in how she can create two distinct pieces though she is the choreographer of both while also simultaneously navigating the roles of choreographer and dancer.
As with the other dancers, to Snyder the significance of her studies touches beyond the stage.
“My studies in dance have opened up my awareness of the politicization of bodies,” Snyder said. “[Dance] has provided me with a new lens for viewing culture and history. It has made me more aware of the power in seemingly trivial aspects of human behavior. It has turned me into an aspiring artist.”
Yellow-Duke’s piece is an investigation of both her personal relationship with society and the creation of systems that create and respond to fear. She looks at events of panic in the U.S. such as the Cold War and 9/11 and hopes to question and poke fun at the systems we put in place to “protect and placate ourselves.”
She believes fear and uncertainty have been “mobilized to unite us as Americans but have also allowed us to contest and redefine who deserves the title of American.” Such categorizing can “further push people to the margins and reinforce systems of power.” Through movement and sound, Afi “hopes to link her history with panic attacks to this larger cultural framework of anxiety.”
After attending the Fall Dance Concert, I cannot wait to witness the inspiration and weight of these pieces and enjoy an evening as diverse and layered as the artists’ intellectual pursuits. Doors will open at 8 p.m. in the MCA Dance Theatre. Tickets are $6 for students; $15 for faculty, staff, alumni, and other ID card holders; $20 for general public. Check with your Commons Office for discounts! Visit go/boxoffice or stop by one of the offices.
