Creative Campus at the Student Activities Fair (Friday, September 14, 2pm)

Want to know what arts events are happening on campus? Are you involved in arts events and want to get the word out about them? Are you creative and want an outlet for that awesome expression? Or maybe you want to offer up your fresh take on what’s happening on this very creative campus.

The Creative Campus website was created collaboratively with Wesleyan students, artists, and staff. It is intended for anyone who wants to know what is going on with creative life on this vibrant and inspirational campus. It is a way of aggregating and collecting the creative life on campus, across disciplines, passions, departments, and student groups.

And speaking of student groups, Creative Campus will have a table at the Student Activities Fair tomorrow, Friday September 14, from 2-5pm! Come check us out to find out how you can get involved, to promote your student group through Creative Campus, or just to say hi. Hope to see you there!

Precision Dance Ensemble annual dance show “Chaka Pose: Khan Style” April 20 & 21

Wesleyan University’s Precision Dance Ensemble presents its annual dance show, “Chaka Pose: Khan Style” in the Memorial Chapel, located at 221 High Street in Middletown, at 8pm on Friday, April 20 and Saturday, April 21, 2012. Admission is free, tickets are not necessary.

In conjunction with the show, the public is invited to attend a dance workshop and learn some moves from the show. The free workshop will be in the Fayerweather Dance Room on Saturday, April 21, 2012 from 3pm to 4pm.

For more information, please email Precision Dance Ensemble co-director Cynthia Tong ’14 at ctong@wesleyan.edu.

Theater Professor Ron Jenkins discusses his new work “To See the Stars”

Wesleyan Theater Professor Ron Jenkins was invited to present a new work at a Harvard University conference on race, class, and education called Disrupting the Discourse: Discussing the “Undiscussable’’, sponsored by the Graduate School of Education’s Alumni of Color, March 2-3, 2012. The work by Jenkins, which was commissioned by the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan as part of Feet to the Fire: Fueling the Future and was presented as a reading at Wesleyan on September 28, 2011 under the working title Recylcing Pain, has been revised and retitled To See the Stars.

The play is based on interviews conducted with participants of Jenkins’ prison education program inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Department of Justice Report on the Federal Prison Industry’s electronic recycling program. The play serves as a reminder that the importance of conserving and recycling the human resources in our jails is no less important than the challenge of conserving and recycling the natural resources of the planet.

“The play is an outgrowth of my prison outreach class,” Jenkins described. “I was happy to present it for a conference at Harvard that focused on the issue of race in education, because the prison system is one of the most blatant examples of racial injustice in American society, and the course gives students a chance to learn about that system from the inside and do something to help change it. The title of the conference was “Discussing the Undiscussable”, and I think it was important for the students of color in my prison outreach class to be part of a national discussion about race that included formerly incarcerated women of color, whose voices are rarely heard in public discourse. In addition to performing and participating in the post-performance discussion, my students had a chance to listen to Harvard Professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot’s eloquent keynote address on the challenges that higher education faces in regards to social justice.”

Amber Smith ’13, who took the prison outreach class last year, expressed her experience at the conference. “It’s hard to come from an affluent college and go into prison, but these are people who are just like us. We are all related to them, because we are all affected by the prison system and we have to do something to help.”

Amber Smith ‘14, Esi Quagrainie ‘14, and Alma Sanchez-Eppler ‘14 sang during the performance. The performers with them were Saundra Duncan, Lynda Gardner and Deborah Ranger, who also performed at Wesleyan for Recycling Pain.

To See the Stars was also invited to perform at Brown University on March 1 as part of Arts in the One World: A Life’s Work conference. The conference focused on best practices for art in the prison system.

Swerved to host ‘Alumni in the Arts’ panel and discussion on March 31

On Saturday, March 31, Swerved will be hosting an “Alumni in the Arts” panel and discussion. Alumni in the panel will include:

Katie Gavriel ’09 – publication

Nathan Rich ’02 – architect

Andy Vernon Jones ’05 – photographer

Jessica Shaefer ’03 – Director of Communications at Creative Time

Ashley May ’07 – multimedia artist

So come to Albritton 311 from 4:30 to 6, this upcoming Saturday!

Swerved Installation in Usdan through April 19

Swerved invites you to a display of Wesleyan student artwork, on display in Usdan until Thursday, April 19, 2012. There will be a selection of 3D and 2D pieces, curated entirely by Wesleyan students. Swerved is an organization that seeks to promote and display all manner of artwork from Wesleyan students. Their website serves as an excellent repository of submissions, displaying the many outlets of Wesleyan creativity. Here is a list of the student artists and their pieces.

Nick Kokkinis ’13

Untitled, Polyester blanket, canvas, wood, and hardboard
Cora Engelbrecht ’12
Untitled
Monoprint
Ariana Todd ’14
Growth, Digital Photograph
Aaron Forbath ’12
Master Bedroom, Princeton, NJ, Digital Photograph
Harry Hanson ’12
Emily, Digital Photograph
Max Skelton ’12
Untitled, Woodblock Print
Gabe Gordon, ’15
Lost at Sea, Oil on Canvas
Timmy Lee ’12
Amethyst, Oil on Canvas
Alex Chaves ’12
Untitled, Oil Pastel, Watercolor, and Charcoal on Paper
Wyatt Hodgson ’14
It’s Complicated, Technology
DonChristian Jones ’12
Untitled, Oil on Canvas
Brittni Zotos ’12
Untitled, Etching

Swerved also has released a mixtape available on Soundcloud, made up of songs from Wesleyan student musicians. Artists and groups include Sankofa, The Appledaughters, Robert Don ’15, Milo Grey, Faith Harding ’14, Kilbourne, Cybergiga, Khari, Don Jones, and Alaska Chip.

Apply to tell your story as part of “RISK!” on Friday February 10

Do you have uncensored stories that you share with your good friends, that you want to try sharing on stage?

RISK!

“RISK!”, the live show where people tell true stories “they never thought they’d dare to share in public,” is coming to Crowell Concert Hall for two performances (7pm and 10pm) on Friday February 10, co-sponsored Desperate Measures Improv(e) Comedy and the Center for the Arts and featuring San Francisco-based comedian W. Kamau Bell (Comedy Central).

“RISK!” is looking for a total of 8 storytellers – 4 Wesleyan students, and 4 Wesleyan community members (i.e. faculty, staff, etc. ) – to be a part of these shows!

There will also be an audio podcast created of the performances. The stories are usually 8 to 10 minutes long, zero in on one incident (or series of incidents), and have a beginning and end. They can even be tragic, rather than funny.

Here’s two episodes so you can hear how it works!
Because we’re producing a podcast, “RISK!” creator Kevin Allison (from MTV’s “The State”) will need to see a pitch of your story to consider how it might fit into the show at Wesleyan. Your pitch should be somewhere between 100 and 250 words long. It should include how the story ends, and ideally it should cover these five points:

1) SET THE SCENE – Where were you in life when this began?

2) WHAT GOT THE BALL ROLLING – What incident made taking action necessary?

3) WHAT WAS AT STAKE – What hope or fear drove you? What did you stand to gain or lose?

4) HOW I TURNED THE CORNER – What finally changed this situation, for better or worse?

5) WHAT’S RISKY ABOUT THIS –  Why do you feel it’s daring to be sharing this?

Kevin will let us know if he is interested in hearing more about your story.

The theme for the stories at Wesleyan is “Discovery.” So, these might be stories where a person tried something they didn’t think they’d like, but did. Or when someone didn’t think they had it in them to succeed, but they did. Or when someone was confident they were on the right track, but life gave them a surprise they learned from.

Send your pitches to kevin@risk-show.com
W. Kamau Bell

If you have any other questions, write to Carrie Cohen ’12  ccohen@wesleyan.edu

And you can watch videos of W. Kamau Bell at http://www.wkamaubell.com

 “[RISK! is] jaw-dropping, hysterically funny, and just plain touching.”

–Slate.com

 

“W. Kamau Bell is ferociously funny!”

–Robin Williams

 

“W. Kamau Bell is the most important guy doing comedy right now. Do yourself a favor and go see him. He’s got the most astute, hilarious and completely righteous material going and he’s going to be a legend in his own lifetime like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. Think Bill Hicks but slightly taller.”
–Margaret Cho

 

“W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.”
–Vernon Reid of the Grammy Award-winning band Living Colour

Nate Dolton-Thornton ’15 wins Freshman Writing Contest

“I consider myself a writer in the same sense I consider myself a woodworker: I think it’s a wonderful craft that I would be incredibly content dedicating my life to, but as of right now I wouldn’t hire me out to make your table.”

Nate Dolton-Thornton ’15 sent us an engaging and eye-opening editorial about the other energy crisis: our unsustainable food production system. His contest-winning piece troubles the relevance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway in the face of the more immediate needs of the masses and provides well-researched alternatives to current, inefficient agricultural techniques that rely too heavily on fertilizers and pesticides.

“While a few powerful world players have realized the potential magnitude of the impending catastrophe if our current unsustainable food systems continue,” Nate writes,  “their reactions seem to be based more on ensuring their own safety in light of coming calamities than on avoiding them. If any truly significant changes are to be made to actually negate this calamity, they must be made at a grassroots level, and they must be made soon.”

The hardest part about writing this piece, Nate told us, was making it controversial enough.  He initially envisioned it as a response to these issues in the form of fiction, but decided that hard facts would be preferable, in this case, to a more conceptual argument.  With the help of his writing mentor, Nate developed nuance in the editorial while retaining a strong argument for making responsible food choices and joining in the effort to promote organic farming.

Nate admires the science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin for “the clarity and elegance of her prose, the philosophical and imaginative content of her stories, and her attitude towards writing.” He is also a fan of the storytelling techniques of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Borge, and enjoys reading the works of Astrid Lindgren, E.B. White, Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Milne, most of C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

We’re looking forward to reading more works by the fabulous freshmen writers who have joined us on campus this year.  Nate’s advice to members of the class of ’15: Write, edit, write, and get a writing mentor!