Community Engagement

Sarah Wolfe ’12 reflects on the role of Theater

by

“If our imaginations can lead us to profound, performative empathy, I believe even more strongly that the space of performance must be harnessed to imagine love instead of hatred. I need to believe that theorizing and documenting, witnessing and creating performance will continue to grace our lives with meaning, generosity, understanding, and memory, however provisional and fleeting.”

-Jill Dolan, forum on tragedy after 9/11

Sarah Wolfe '12 as Hecuba in "Lift Your Head," photo credit Ariella Axelbank.

Before coming to Wesleyan, theater lacked definition in my life. I understood why I did it, to some extent, but I didn’t completely understand its role in society, in the broader picture of how I interact with the world. I loved doing theater with children for its educational and confidence building qualities, and I loved performing with my peers for its incredible power to build a community over a common goal.

Photo credit Andy Ribner.

Throughout my time at Wesleyan I’ve been given the opportunity to look at not just how we perform, but why we perform and what our performances mean.  For my senior thesis this year I was particularly inspired by an essay called Notes About Political Theater by Tony Kushner. The essay is something of a manifesto on why the playwright chooses to make political theater and what in fact that term means. Mr. Kushner sees political theater as theater that responds to, that is reflective of, that understands events in contemporary society. He recognizes the stigma against political theater that prevents audiences from wanting to  see plays that make them think, or make them feel guilty, then goes on to call to all theater makers to make good political theater that negates this stigma and allows theater to be used as a tool for understanding and sparking change in the world.

It’s a big idea. Yet, at the same time, it’s not. We live in a beautiful, awesome, marvelous world filled with pain, hurt, violence, and destruction. Mr. Kushner is not asking us to fill our plays with decay and depression, but rather to engage

Photo credit Andy Ribner.

with the world that we all must be a part of in everything that we do. Theater cannot simply be an escape from that world. It must be a response to it.

My thesis, Lift Your Head, was on Euripides’ Trojan Women, an ancient story about the devastation of war that has survived to resonate and share its wounds with modern audiences who still suffer through war. It was a capstone project for me in many ways, not least of which in helping me define what kind of theater I want to watch and be a part of in the future. I have come to realize that if and when I make and watch theater in the years to come, I want it to be political theater. I want to be a part of theater that understands that the world we live in is both challenging and amazing and attempts to address that world. This is not to say that I don’t and won’t enjoy the occasional musical or light comedy, but the theater that is most enjoyable is that which makes me reflect on how I inhabit, how we all inhabit this world, and the choices we make that affect it.

I am entering a completely different industry when I graduate at the end of this month, but theater will always play a huge role in my life. The ideas and ways of talking about theater that I have learned here will stay with me as I move forward from Wesleyan into that grand, awesome, and terrifying world.

What it Means to Heal: Hannah Cressy ’13 reflects on Service-Learning in Greenpoint-Williamsburg

by

Hannah Cressy ’13 concludes her four-part series on Wesleyan’s interdisciplinary course Ritual, Health, and Healing.

Community members Guido and Tish Cianciotta of GREC (sitting), Laura Hofmann of OUTRAGE, Chris Henderson of St. Nicks Alliance, and Pat Dobosz of GEM, pose with ANTH 289 students and faculty Gillian Goslinga and Jill Sigman at the close of the community ritual.

After weeks of seminars, movement labs, bus rides, and a lot of bonding time, our “Ritual, Health, and Healing” class has come to a close.  We had our final movement lab on Tuesday, which gave us a chance to reflect, share our thoughts, and be together as a group for the last time; half the class will be graduating this month.  We sat in a circle, drinking lemongrass tea and allowing time for final words, though we found ourselves still talking, laughing, and shedding a few appreciative tears for an hour after “class” had ended.  One student sent an email to all of us this week that began with “Hey fam!”; we definitely feel like we have moved beyond classmates to become a family because of the work we did together at Wesleyan and especially in Brooklyn.

Students Andrew Pezzullo '13 and Kate Enright '15 talk with Guido Cianciotta at a community meeting.

I’ve been blogging for the past month and a half about our trips to Brooklyn, where the class has been working at the St. Nick’s Alliance and in surrounding Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhoods.  We’ve met, interviewed, gone on walks, had tea, and celebrated with community members who taught us about their lives’ work.  Pat and David Dobosz are public school teachers who talked with us about the harmful social and educational effects of charter schools’ division of neighborhoods, and have been very inspirational for the future educators of our class, including my fellow blogger Shira Engel ’14.  Guido and Tish Cianciotta are the founding directors of Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation, and have worked for decades to keep the Greenpoint Hospital complex serving the needs of the community; a group of students created a Wikipedia page for their organization.  Jan Peterson is a tireless (and very spunky) activist, feminist, organizer, and founder of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, among several other activist/feminist groups; several students interviewed Jan and Tish among other lifelong residents of the neighborhood for an oral history project on the women of Greenpoint.  I could go on for pages about many more incredible people we have been so lucky to learn from.

Pat Dobosz of GEM (Grassroots Education Movement) discusses with Shira Engel '14 how a public school education enriches a community.

Stepping outside the classroom walls taught us things we can’t learn from professors; it is a privilege to sit down with neighborhood residents and hear their stories of health issues due to environmental damage, struggles with educational equality, building rights, and organizing strategies, and we have truly come away with a new sense of what it means to be a neighbor.  As I’ve written before, Jan Peterson’s best advice to us was “if you live here, you have to do something.  You can’t just have brunch”.

We all began the course wondering how West African shamanism, Brooklynite activism, Japanese dolls, Wikipedia, and Peruvian water rituals would fit together.  During our final lab, we were asked to say one word each to sum up the course: I said “us”.  Any ritual, health, or healing requires a community consciousness, a sense of group wellbeing.  My classmates growing closer to each other was the overall lesson of the class:  whether you’re fighting a disease, spirit loss, or a trash dump, healing comes through a healthy community; it’s about us. 

For more reflections and information about the course, check out a recent article about the class here.

Sarah Wolfe ’12 previews “Junk Redemption” by Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14

by

Sarah Wolfe ’12 interviews Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14 about her upcoming play “Junk Redemption,” opening this Friday, May 11 through Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 8pm, in front of the Whisper Wall (on Washington Terrace).

This weekend Second Stage is presenting a new play, written and directed by Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14. The play, Junk Redemption, goes up Friday through Sunday at 8pm in front of the Whisper Wall (located on Washington Terrace) in the Center for the Arts. Earlier this week I sat down with the student playwright to discuss the play, the process, and her aspirations as a playwright. The process of writing the play began in her Intermediate Playwriting class as an exercise in character driven playwriting, which was a new experience for Ms. Sanchez-Eppler. But as the writing process continued, Ms. Sanchez-Eppler found that historical facts from her own family history had trickled into the piece.

“It wasn’t until after the play was pretty much done and I was just editing it that I realized how much it relates to everything my grandmother has done in her life.”

The play follows the life of an isolated artist as she is discovered by a Baltimore gallery. Flashbacks narrate the story of why the artist began her work of creating sculptures out of available junk. Ms. Sanchez-Eppler calls the play “an homage” to her grandmother, who is currently suffering through the early stages of dementia.

“[My grandmother] was a social worker, and that’s a pretty big aspect of the show, and she was a tour guide in the New York Folk Art Museum for a very long time. She’s one of the most imaginative people I know. I love being around her because it is necessary for me to have an immediacy to my interactions with her. It requires a presence of being and a presence of mind and not much concern for referencing anything in the past.”

Ms. Sanchez-Eppler notes that she is someone who tries to find all of the interesting places on the Wesleyan campus, which is why Junk Redemption is not going up in a more traditional theatrical setting. The Whisper Wall, on the back side of the CFA facing Washington Terrace, is an interesting, if little known, architectural structure of the CFA. From the outside it is a semi-circle of concrete with a tree in the middle, but if one person stands inside the wall and whispers, the sound resonates so that a person standing on the other side can hear every word perfectly. Aside from this semi-magical feature, which is impossible to feature in a theatrical production, Ms. Sanchez-Eppler still felt something appropriate about the space for this particular production.

“It feels like you’ve entered this other world. It doesn’t feel like Wesleyan when you’re in that sort of enclosure, that semi-circle. The set required a tree and there was a tree there. It provides a natural stage.”

Ms. Sanchez-Eppler is a first time director, and spoke to the challenges of directing her own piece, which is what most student playwrights must do in order to show their work.

“I was lucky enough in high school to have one of my plays I wrote then directed, and it was really nice to push the bird out of the nest and just have it happen without me being there. I’d love for people to want to direct shows of mine. That would be dreamy.”

However, as she moves forward at Wesleyan, she is particularly interested in collaborative theater making. She cited Augusto Boal and The Medea Project as particular examples of theater that inspires her. Both tie into another focus of Ms. Sanchez-Eppler’s: work that is done creatively around prison reform. She has worked closely through her time here with Professor of Theater Ron Jenkins, whose classes bring students to local prisons to learn and teach about social activism through theater. She hopes to continue to have chances to learn about and create collaborative and empowering theater in her time at Wesleyan and after.

Come see Junk Redemption this weekend! The show is free and unticketed, so show up at 8pm at the Whispering Wall on Washington Terrace. Don’t miss this wonderful example of student creativity at Wesleyan!

Ritual, Health, and Healing: Reflecting in the Classroom with Shira Engel ‘14

by

A personal account by Shira Engel ’14 of “Ritual, Health, and Healing”, a course which is part of the Creative Campus initiative of the Center for the Arts.

As anything comes to a close, reflection seems to be in order. Journals emerge, nostalgic conversations take place, and commemoration and commencement activities ensue. College courses are no exception to this rule. This is especially the case for Ritual, Health, and Healing, a class rooted in the creative self-reflection of both the students and the professors.

My friend, Hannah Cressy ’13, has covered wonderfully our trips to Brooklyn as a class to work with the St Nicks Arts @ Renaissance community center. Both Jill Sigman and Gillian Goslinga have emphasized for us the importance of deconstructing the invisible barrier between “process” and “product.” This course is all about process because that is what inspires authenticity and the ability for self- and group-reflection to take place.

To be perpetually engaged in process is not an easy task. As college students, we are, at times, taught to pump out ten-pagers and study, study, study, just for the end product of an exam. Process means to do, and then let go of results – to do for the sake of doing and let the results be what they are. This is, at least, my definition.

Two weeks ago, as we geared up for our final field trip to Brooklyn, we were a product-driven bunch. We were scrambling to find time to finish our offerings to the community. At the same time, we were unsettled with this shift in perspective – this constant doing. So, we used our Monday seminar to step back, take a deep breath, and see what it is we are actually doing in the process. We made a list on the board of the common themes of our offerings and of our experiences with the community. They included: reciprocity, interconnectedness of community, the power of listening, valuing lived experience, choosing engagement over disengagement, family, and teachers. Writing them up on the board to be seen was clarifying. It put the passion back into what we were doing and allowed us to see that the offerings we were making to the community were also offerings to ourselves, giving ourselves the gift of all that we had mentioned.

Sarah Wolfe ’12 reflects on “The Big Draw: Middletown”

by

Sarah Wolfe ’12 reflects on “The Big Draw: Middletown”, a public art event hosted by the Friends of the Davison Art Center.

In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Friends of the Davison Art Center put together The Big Draw: Middletown this past Sunday. The event was intended to celebrate the art of drawing in its many forms and was a unique opportunity for drawers of all ages and skill levels to try their hand at different techniques for free!

Tableaux vivants. Image by Nam Anh Ta '12.

I had the pleasure of being a member of the student staff for the event. Tired and unhappy about the wet and dreary weather, I trudged over to the Davison Art Center Sunday morning to learn exactly what I would be doing. My attitude almost immediately improved as I watched about 15 Middletown High School students parade around the historic rooms of Davison dressed in costumes ranging from My Fair Lady to Pride and Prejudice to Kiss Me, Kate! That particular workshop, called “Tableaux Vivants” was organized by the students, who were members of the Middletown High School Art Club, provided an opportunity for participants to draw the costumed students in their historic setting.

I was placed at the Earth Day Collaborative Mural Project station. Stationed in the Art Workshops Lobby, I watched drawers aged 3 to 40 come and contribute a drawing of what they thought represented Earth Day on a huge piece of white paper on the wall. (“Go ahead, kids, you can actually draw on the walls today!”) The drawing skills ranged widely, as did the subject matter, the attention span, and the colors used. But by the end of the day, all of the staff was impressed by the beauty of what had been created with so many hands.

Earth Day Collaborative Mural Project. Image by Nam Anh Ta '12.

Nearby was the Scavenger Hunt, one of the activities that would have benefited from warmer, dryer weather. However, many families and students picked up a booklet to save for a later day. The hunt, entirely student designed, was a booklet of twelve different drawing challenges, ranging from: “Find a surface in nature with texture. What does it feel like? Make a rubbing of it by placing this page over and rubbing the side of your pencil on top” to “Draw a tree or a flower you see without looking at your page and without lifting your pencil.” Though there were some young boys who were disappointed with the lack of prizes involved with this particular scavenger hunt, most participants were excited to save it for a day they could do it outside.

Down the hall from where I was stationed was the Model Marathon, where supplies and a nude model were provided for participants to do some figure drawing. This was one of the most popular workshops in the event as it was a phenomenal opportunity for practice figure drawing without having to pay for a class.

These were only four of the ten workshops that were available for free to anyone who came and registered. Despite the grey weather, the turnout was good, and it was wonderful to see such a mix of Wesleyan students and outside community members participating in the joy of putting pencil/charcoal/marker to paper. There are plans to continue and grow the event, and I hope to see it become even more popular in the years to come.

Conversations, Research, and Exploration: In the Field with Hannah Cressy ’13

by

Hannah Cressy ’13 continues her report on the service learning factor of Wesleyan’s inter-disciplinary course Ritual, Health, and Healing.

Photo by Marie Scarles.

Our “Ritual, Health, and Healing” class returned to Greenpoint-Williamsburg, Brooklyn this past Saturday to continue our conversations with community members and to do more historical research and neighborhood exploration.  We are focused on seeing and collecting (interviews, photo, film, trash, and more) and are planning to give our account to members of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood in two weeks.  Our projects range from a short film to a waste transfer station walking tour, but all are meant to aid local grassroots organizations with their long-running goals of community awareness, communication, and activism.  The past two visits have greatly expanded our concepts of health and healing; both are intertwined with environmental conditions, politics, neighbor dynamics, educational equality, and simply feeling seen and heard in a city of 8 million.

David and Pat Dobosz, two local public school teachers, met with us again to have breakfast and taught us much more about educational reform in New York.  They spoke of the influx of charter schools and its effect on the economic, academic and emotional lives of local families.  Having met and married as public school teachers in their youth, they have been active for over forty years in the struggle for inclusive and equal public education for Brooklyn’s children.  Both David and Pat teach in buildings recently invaded by charter schools; they described the plunge in self-worth experienced by their students when charter school students receive better facilities and supplies than their public school.  Furthermore, we were surprised and upset to learn that charter schools generally do not accept students with Individual Education Plans, learning disabilities, and developmental disabilities, effectively reversing disability activists’ endless struggle for integrated classrooms.  David and Pat are active in the Grassroots Education Movement of New York and showed us much of their film, “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman”.

Photo by Marie Scarles.

A group of students especially interested in education equality continued the conversation with David and Pat while the rest of the class split into working groups to address other areas of interest, including garbage equity and environmental justice, neighborhood women’s histories, and archival research of the Greenpoint Hospital site which now houses St. Nick’s Alliance. The trash group, who is working with OUTRAGE, went on a tour of the neighborhood; they learned that many of the mini-dumps, plastic factories, and piles of trash they saw aren’t officially classified as waste transfer stations by the city, and thereby go unrecognized by outside environmental protection organizations.  In class on Monday, students recalled a baseball field above the Exxon Mobil oil spill, sandwiched between piles of street salt, discarded sheet metal, and plastic.  The group is collecting video and photos, and is working on a brochure to direct the public in a similar walking tour.

My group returned to the Brooklyn Public Library in the afternoon to continue poring over newspaper articles up to 100 years old detailing the long-running struggle to keep the Greenpoint Hospital open and in the hands of the community.  The area has a history of healthcare turmoil: we saw that current activism against insufficient and inequitable healthcare started long ago in Greenpoint-Williamsburg.   We hope that by presenting and recording our findings, we may provide further historical insight into the resilience and devotedness of the citizen-activists of the neighborhood.  In two weeks, we’ll return for a final weekend, where we will gather with many community members to celebrate the history of ideas, people, and place in Greenpoint-Williamsburg.  On that day, our professor Jill Sigman will also officially begin The Hut Project at St. Nick’s, in which she will build a hut out of found materials to serve “as a catalyst for local activities such as performance, video, artistic collaboration, and community dialogue”, as she has done in several other sites around the world.  We are all busily working on transcriptions, videos, posters, brochures, and websites, and are eager to share what we’ve learned with neighborhood residents on April 22, 2012. We hope this gathering of community members will be a step in healing a place that has faced years of struggle for health, education, unity and equality.

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

by

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.

Ritual, Health, and Healing: In the Classroom with Shira Engel ’14

by

A personal account by Shira Engel ’14 of “Ritual, Health, and Healing”, a course which is part of the Creative Campus initiative of the Center for the Arts.

Photo by Hailey Still.

“Ritual, Health, and Healing” is an interdisciplinary class that transcends disciplinary boundaries. It is cross-listed in Anthropology, Science in Society, and Dance. It is co-taught by Anthropology professor Gillian Goslinga and Artist in Residence Jill Sigman. Gillian Goslinga has an academic background in ethnographic research on ritual practices. Jill Sigman comes to Wesleyan from New York City, where she is a choreographer working in performance and installation, and directing her company jill sigman/thinkdance. She is currently engaged in her Hut Project. She also has a background in philosophy. The course is a true blend of the disciplines it is cross-listed in as well as the disciplines of the professors. As a student in the course, I find my mind being constantly expanded to think not in terms of a singular discipline, but to creatively combine them in ways that allows the material to sink in.

The course is divided into two segments. The first quarter of the semester, we learned about ritual, health, and healing and what these broad terms means to different cultures. This comprised the necessary theoretical component of the course that feeds into the service learning we are currently doing in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, Brooklyn (but I will let my lovely classmate Hannah elaborate on that in posts to come).

The course is also comprised of a three-hour seminar on Mondays and a movement lab on Tuesday evenings. On Monday, we discuss readings on the cultural and theoretical significance of ritual, health, and healing and on Tuesdays, we embody those readings and theories in movements that transcend the definition of dance.

Because we are constantly encouraged in this course to be self-reflexive, I will come out and say that I was attracted to this course in large part because on WesMaps, the description said that people without any dance experience are encouraged to apply. I do not consider myself a dancer and this course allows for a lack of labels. It allows for a blurring of the lines between disciplines, as well as a blurring of the lines between self-identified labels of artistic identity. After class, I talked to Jill Sigman about what makes this course creatively unique and she said, “This isn’t strictly a dance class. We may be using dance in the context of learning about other things, but there are people who are totally not here to learn to point their foot and that’s what makes it fascinating to me.”

This course shifts disciplinary boundaries in ways that make us – the students – uncomfortable, thrilled, challenged, self-reflexive, and on our toes. It challenges preconceptions of academic work, teaching us that it is inherently creative. Jill Sigman’s studio in Brooklyn is called “The Border.” In many ways, we exist on the border between disciplines, definitions of art, activism, and service in this course as we grapple with definitions of ritual, health, and healing. I am excited to see how these definitions will continue to unfold as we progress into the service learning, creatively translating the work we have done in the seminar and movement lab into practice, while realizing that all is part of the same process.

Ritual, Health, and Healing: In the Field with Hannah Cressy ’13

by

Hannah Cressy ’13 reflects on Ritual, Health and Healing, co-taught by Gillian Goslinga, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science in Society, and Jill Sigman, Choreographer and Founder of ThinkDance.

Photo by Hailey Still '12.

Last Saturday, our Ritual, Health, and Healing class took our first trip into Brooklyn to begin the service learning aspect of the course.  The class is cross-listed in Anthropology, Dance, and Service Learning, and during the month of April, we meet three times per week: once for a classroom seminar, once in a dance studio, and once in St. Nick’s community center in the heart of Williamsburg.  We have been invited to participate in a project with the citizen-activists of Greenpoint-Williamsburg that mixes community building, archival, art, and oral history, and found on Saturday that these three weeks will undoubtedly be more influential for our own ideas of community, activism, citizenship, art and democracy than we’d thought possible.

We arrived very early Saturday morning to St. Nick’s Alliance, and entered a former hospital basement and homeless men’s shelter that is now filled with the brilliant paintings of local children.  We were introduced to community members who’d lived in Greenpoint-Williamsburg their entire lives, and a few who’d just moved into the area.  Much like many post-graduate Wesleyan students, they were just beginning to learn what it means to live in the neighborhood.

Photo by Hailey Still '12.

We went around the circle to introduce ourselves; even in these first moments, we heard everyday people begin to tell their stories, naming lists of organizations they’ve been involved in for ten, twenty, or thirty years.  Issues faced by the community seemed endless, but so did the people and grassroots organizations that have long worked to better the area’s social and environmental climate.  Personal histories arose of unfair housing situations, families plagued by the same disease, identification with toxic sites—but never a hint that anyone wanted to leave.  This is their home, and they will stay and fight to make it safe.  Other community issues that came up in open-circle discussion included environmental justice, in reaction to a high density of waste stations in the area, fairness in education, the struggle to unify across ethnic, racial and income boundaries, gentrification and rising housing costs, and the loss of a community feel due to modernization.

Photo by Hailey Still '12.

Smaller groups formed to address more specific issues with organizations such as GREC (Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation) and OUTRAGE (Organization United for Trash Reduction and Garbage Equity), while others took the opportunity to hold one-on-one conversations with community elders and longstanding citizen-activists from Greenpoint. Three students, including Haley Perkins ’13, Val Pucilowski ’13, and myself, will be conducting further archival research at the Brooklyn Library on the history of the Greenpoint Hospital complex that now houses St. Nick’s, affordable housing, and a smaller homeless shelter.  The use of the remaining unoccupied space is highly contested, and neighborhood activists are currently battling real estate developers to reclaim a building to be used for a much-needed affordable senior home.

In class on Monday, we discussed the most striking idea we’d heard on Saturday: we agreed, nearly unanimously, that Jan Peterson summarized the day’s most personal and influential message: wherever you live, you must be involved.  “You can’t just have brunch.”  Because we are in a community, we must give to it.  We should know our neighbors.  We are lucky to have the opportunity to join this community for the next few weeks in helping to preserve its spirit and connect its population while ourselves learning what it means to be a neighbor.

Shira Engel ’14 previews the Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition (Mar. 10-18)

by

Shira Engel ’14 contemplates the upcoming Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition, opening March 10.

Twice a week, I foray off campus to the Woodrow Wilson Middle School as part of the student-run community partnership between Wesleyan and the full-time residents of Middletown. Wesleyan is replete with a plethora of programs that serve as points of connection between neighbors, creating pores in a much-talked-about campus bubble. These programs involve tutoring, among them WesReads/WesMath, Woodrow Wilson, and Traverse Square. They also inherently involve the arts, either implicitly through the tutoring programs, or explicitly through the work students from kindergarten to high school ages do through facilities like Green Street, Buttonwood Tree, and Oddfellows Playhouse.

I knew about a lot of these programs and venues before my time at Woodrow Wilson, but one of my tutees has enlightened me further with his firsthand account of all they have to offer. The first thing he told me when I said I went to Wesleyan was that he loves going to dance performances in the Center for the Arts. Creativity served as a perfect and much-needed icebreaker for our first session. Creativity is a link between our different lives and age groups.

This week, after talking to my tutee about dance at Wesleyan, I returned my “Wesleyan Tutor” badge to the main office only to see a poster for a Middletown Youth Arts Exhibit, which, come Saturday March 10, will be held at the CFA’s very own Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery.

Right when Wesleyan students go on spring break, Middletown kids will take over the CFA with their original art, claiming their rightful place in Wesleyan creative life, which is representative not just of this campus, but of the greater world. It is a true creative collaboration between the schools and Wesleyan University.

So, if you happen to be hanging around campus an extra day and can free up an hour from your thesis work or whatever may have you chilling here, come check out this talent! At 5pm on Saturday, March 10 is a free opening reception for the exhibit, which is sponsored by the Middletown Board of Education, Middletown Public Schools Cultural Council and Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. Come support your neighbors through the common bond of creativity.

The exhibition will be open from Saturday, March 10 to Sunday, March 18 at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, noon to 7pm and Saturday & Sunday, 1pm to 4pm. The opening reception will held from 5pm to 7pm on March 1o. Admission is free.