Community Engagement

Michelle Agresti ’14 talks to Ronald Kuivila about MiddletownRemix Festival (May 11)

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Take a Deep Breath and Open Your Ears
A preview of “Rainforest IV” and “Lighthouse, beside the point”

Michelle Agresti ’14 talks to University Professor of Music Ronald Kuivila about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm. The world premiere of Professor Kuivila’s sound installation commissioned for the festival, “Lighthouse, beside the point,” will be located in the glass pavilion atop the Community Health Center at 675 Main Street. Professor Kuivila and Wesleyan University music students are also reconstructing David Tudor’s “Rainforest IV” (1973) inside of 635 Main Street.

Wesleyan University Professor of Music Ronald Kuivila reconstructing David Tudor’s “Rainforest IV” (1973) inside of 635 Main Street in Middletown in preparation for the MiddletownRemix festival on Saturday, May 11.

For MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound on Saturday, May 11, Wesleyan University Professor of Music Ronald Kuivila will be premiering his sound installation “Lighthouse, beside the point,” as well as realizing  David Tudor’s sound composition “Rainforest IV.” To interview Professor Kuivila, I visited the future site of “Rainforest IV,” which is in an abandoned storefront on Main Street. I watched with curiosity as Ron briskly strode across the unfinished floor, past the roughed up dry-wall, and in between bare pipes stretching from the ceiling, setting up a speaker. While I followed him with my recorder, Ron explained his vision and purpose for the installation.

“[It’s] based on this idea that loud speakers can be themselves instruments,” Professor Kuivila explains. “The idea of ‘Rainforest’ is to take objects from the junk pile, say a door, oil drum, bicycle rim, and turn them into loudspeakers that have their own distinctive voices.”

The way that Professor Kuivila would accomplish this is by attaching a transducer, or the coil and magnet from inside of a loudspeaker, to the part of the object with the most resonance. The way speakers work is by that coil causing a piece of cardboard, or some other light material inside the speaker box, to vibrate back and forth—“Rainforest IV” just replaces the cardboard with a door, or an air duct, or suit of armor. Then, sounds (but not composed music) are broadcast through the transducer, causing the object to vibrate and give off a unique voice.

The abandoned shop front at 635 Main Street will soon be filled with objects like this, all of which will be giving off sound at varying times and volumes. The “performance” is always going on—for hours at a time. People will be let into the room on Saturday, May 11 from 2pm to 5pm, and allowed to wander at will.  Professor Kuivila says that “Rainforest IV” experiences tend to go like this: the first half hour is spent touring all the pieces (“like a science fair,” he says), then it shifts to a “cocktail party”-like atmosphere with people chatting with each other, and finally, about 45 minutes in, everyone settles down and really begins to listen.

“You become acquainted with these objects, which have sculptural properties. It really is like a sculptural installation,” he describes. “You’re becoming aware of them through the sounds they are producing, and becoming aware of their physicality through that sound in a way that you would find difficult to do without the sound. The composer David Tudor described [that] his goal was for a tuned environment.”

This work is “Rainforest IV;” there are also “Rainforests” I-III, all composed by David Tudor, from 1968 to 1973. These works (especially “Rainforest” and “Rainforest IV,” the only two that are recorded) have been re-created and performed at various places.

Even though the production of “Rainforest IV” in Middletown is in the preliminary stages, Professor Kuivila was still able to demonstrate part of the installation. Taking the speaker that he had been plugging in all over the room in search of a working outlet, he feeds the microphone connected to the speaker into a silver tube, which is attached to a long pipe on the ceiling. Discontent with the sound produced, he screws off the silver tube and just puts the microphone into the pipe. The pipe, he tells me, is connected to the outside of the building.

“If you actually listen, you can hear the outside filtered through the resonances of the pipe. It’s generally quite beautiful,” says Professor Kuivila.

Listening to the loudspeaker, the noises of cars honking, trucks driving by, and children yelling are converted to haunting, lingering versions of themselves. Ron is unsurprisingly right: the ordinary sounds of afterschool traffic are transformed into something captivating. I remark that the particular reverberations we are listening to sound like the background to a horror film—but that’s just me. As it turns out, individual experiences with this piece are important.

In fact, according to Professor Kuivila, “the point of the piece is to create a situation where everyone has a very unique and original encounter with the soundworld.” With construction barely started, I was able to have my own, in a compelling way.

As for “Rainforest IV” as a whole, Professor Kuivila says, “it’s really a piece about learning how to do electronic music. It’s a piece to teach people about this idea of hearing sounds not as part of a tonal continuity, but as kind of complete in themselves. It’s a way of thinking of music not based on the voice, but based on the world.”

Professor Kuivila is also putting up his own original work commissioned for the MiddletownRemix festival, called “Lighthouse, beside the point,” in the beautiful glass pavilion atop the new Community Health Center at 675 Main Street. “Lighthouse” is based on transferring some of the phenomena of looking out a lighthouse into a soundscape. He uses “very very” directional speakers, that shoot sound out in very specific streams—you have to be directly in line with the sound stream to hear it, mimicking the very specific sightline of the light of the lighthouse.

“I was interested in this idea of connecting sightlines to particular sounds that would somehow reveal what you’re looking at,” explains Professor Kuivila.

Additionally, in the room, which Ron describes as furnished “like a set from ‘Mad Men,’” there will be old-fashioned telephones placed around. They will ring occasionally, and once picked up, will broadcast half of a word into a person’s ear. The other half of the word will be broadcast by a speaker into the room. While the sound broadcast into the room will sound like a vague noise, the syllables coming through the phone will make it recognizable—if you’re listening with both ears.

“You’re having to listen in this way you never do with a telephone, “ says Professor Kuivila. Instead of just focusing on what is coming through the phone, like we would normally do, you are forced to expand your attention to the environment around you.

In fact, this “direction of attention,” a phrase that Ron used a variety of times during our interview, is very much a part of not only “Lighthouse” and “Rainforest,” but it is a major theme of the entire MiddletownRemix festival. Professor Kuivila describes the event as a way of creating an alertness to the sounds of Middletown, instead of ignoring them as part of daily life. It is using sound to raise aural awareness and lead people to appreciate the world around them more.

“Because we live so much texting and looking at little things here,” says Professor Kuivila, indicating his phone, “we tend to lose sight of the extent to which our giving our attention over to something can become a very powerful and beautiful experience.”

For the complete MiddletownRemix festival schedule, and to capture, contribute and remix sounds from Wesleyan and Middletown using the free UrbanRemix app for iPhone/iOS and Android devices, visit http://www.middletownremix.org

Aletta Brady ’15 talks to DJ Arun Ranganathan about MiddletownRemix Festival (May 11)

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Music & Public Life Intern Aletta Brady ’15 talks to DJ Arun Ranganathan about MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, taking place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2pm to 5pm.  Arun has been commissioned to create a 30-minute remix based on the sounds of MiddletownRemix, which will be performed live at both 2pm and 4pm on the main sound stage outside of It’s Only Natural Market at 575 Main Street, interspersed with remixes by Wesleyan student DJs.

DJ Arun Ranganathan

I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Arun Ranganathan—also known as DJ N.E.B.—a local hip hop artist, producer and DJ from Middletown’s North End. DJ N.E.B. will be dropping beats on the main stage during MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound on May 11. A beloved member of the Middletown community, he told me about his work, and why he’s excited about the upcoming festival. Here are some excerpts from our interview:

Aletta Brady ‘15: How did you get in to DJing?

DJ N.E.B.: Friends of mine back in the day, like, 1983, got me into hip hop break dancing, and then they were like “Oh you gotta see this guy DJ,” and we went out to Plaza Drive, and one of the kids there, this Puerto Rican kid named RC, used to set up his turn tables and DJ for the entire courtyard, and we’d all get together and dance, and that was when I was like “Ah man I gotta get myself a pair of those.” I started in 1985, I was eleven, and then I never stopped.

Why did you decide to be a part of the MiddletownRemix festival?

I got a call from a few friends of mine saying that there was this cool remix project. My buddy Topher showed me [the MiddletownRemix] website and I signed up for it like six, seven months ago. I would go there once in a while and listen to what other people did and I was like “wow.” When Erinn [Roos-Brown, Program Manager at the Center for the Arts] called me up [in the spring] and explained it to me, I just liked the idea. I’ve always wanted to get into recording ambient sounds like we used to do it a long time ago, just gather stuff. I like to experiment with sound and record samples through speakers or in hallways and see how it sounds. And people were gathering sounds already. All I had to do was take them and manipulate them. When [Erinn] said “do you want to do it?” I was really excited about that ‘cause its something that I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a step away from sampling records or creating my own sounds out of samples, ya know? That was a new challenge for me, something refreshing, something I haven’t done before.

Tell me about the remixes that you’re creating for the MiddletownRemix festival. 

So far, I have three that I’ve done, and I have a couple concepts for the next two. I’m going to make about three ½ minute pieces, but I’m going to be DJing them live, so they’ll end up being five minutes a piece, ‘cause I’m going to do some turn-tableism with them. I just try to be inspired by something, so I just go through the samples that I grab from the [MiddletownRemix] website, and I don’t really have any plan, but when something is just like “Oh yea that was really cool” I’ll experiment and something happens, something comes out of it. [One] song was inspired by my friend Brian, he’s sort of like a grumpy artist around here, and the recording that the person got was perfect, ‘cause they were like “hey talk” and [Brian] was like “no, we’ve already been through this, stop recording,” and I thought that was hilarious, ‘cause it illustrated him, so I made a beat, and then just used that as the main. Another one that I most recently made was entirely off of sounds, I got somebody banging on a table for a kick drum, and I created a snare out of it, and somehow somebody made a weird sound with their mouth, and it sounded like a high hat, and I strung together a piece called “bells,” the St. Johns Bells, and that sounded really cool. It also incorporated a sample of a kid, a rougher sample. The contrast of these kids getting into trouble and the pure bells in the background seemed like a cool contrast.

How does the MiddletownRemix project connect with your community?

I’m recognizing people, and I know a lot of people that uploaded stuff. I’m familiar with the ambient sounds, it reminds me of my neighborhood and it just feels good that I’m able to do that, living in that neighborhood, using sounds mostly from that neighborhood. It’s truly a collaboration, because I’m using other people’s recordings which [is] fun. It’s a lot of fun. I feel like I’m connected to my community even more now,  ‘cause I can take audio samples and make a piece out of it.

What are you most looking forward to about the MiddletownRemix festival?

I hope that people come out and recognize things that I sampled, and maybe like “ah that’s something I recorded.” I’m looking forward to being able to just mix my own pieces that are from that environment and hear it loud. That’s the best part of it all.

For the complete MiddletownRemix festival schedule, and to capture, contribute and remix sounds from Wesleyan and Middletown using the free UrbanRemix app for iPhone/iOS and Android devices, visit http://www.middletownremix.org

“MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More” Festival Launch Party on Monday February 4

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Take a moment to close your eyes and listen. What do you hear? Take a quick inventory. Now what if you could take those sounds, mix them up and make something new with them?

That’s what we are doing with MiddletownRemix.

MiddletownRemix is a year-long, Middletown-specific sound project presented by the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University in collaboration with numerous organizations in the community. MiddletownRemix invites everyone in Middletown to record sounds (up to one minute long each) and upload them to the MiddletownRemix website where they are geo-tagged on a Google map. For individuals who do not have access to a smart phone, 10 devices have been made available to checkout at the Green Street Arts Center, located at 51 Green Street. We want to hear the sounds that make up your daily life and create the soundscape of your city.

But you can do more then just record sounds – you can create new ones. After recording your sounds, you can remix them, and any of the other sounds on the site, with the tools on the website, or by downloading and remixing the sounds with your own software. Then, share it with your friends on Facebook or Twitter (@WesCFA #MTownRemix). By revealing the composer within us all, this project can challenge or change perceptions of Middletown. Every week, we are featuring one sound and one remix on our website so be sure to check back often to see if your sound or remix has been selected.

Since the project began in May 2012, Middletown community members have already recorded over 660 sounds and created 75 remixes, and we anticipate gathering over 1,500 sounds and remixes by the “MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More” Festival on May 11, 2013. The Festival will celebrate the community’s work on this project. Stationed in the North End Arts District, the Festival will include commissions of local sound and visual artists, a flash mob, a gallery walk, a laptop orchestra commission [the world premiere of “MTRX” (2012) by Jason Freeman of UrbanRemix], live remixing and other sound related programming – all of which will be based on the recordings of MiddletownRemix. We believe that if people listen deeply, they will see more.

If you are interested in learning more about the Festival, join us at the Community Health Center, located at 675 Main Street, on Monday, February 4, 2013 at 5pm for a presentation and question and answer session.

Sarah Wolfe ’12 reflects on the role of Theater

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“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

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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.

Community, Communication, and Presentation: In the Field with Hannah Cressy ’13

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

Sonya Freeman '12 has tea with Professor Jill Sigman's father.

Sunday, April 22 was our last in Brooklyn, and the culmination of all the conversations, tours, library research, video editing, and personal interviews we’ve conducted over the past month.  We’ve been traveling to Greenpoint-Williamsburg nearly every weekend in April to the Arts@Renaissance space of St. Nick’s Alliance to learn about the area from locals. We developed projects to document the neighborhood’s rich history and bring awareness to issues of trash distribution, educational equality, pollution, health, and space preservation.  Our goal for Sunday was to present our findings to members of this community and to talk with them about their viewpoints on these issues, and we are very happy that the weekend succeeded in promoting neighborhood communication, honoring long-time local activists, and beginning plans for our professor Jill Sigman’s upcoming project in Arts@Renaissance.

We spent Saturday finishing up and rehearsing our presentations, and were happy to get a taste of the local food scene in Williamsburg!  Our class has grown very close since January, as we meet two to three times per week; the same can be said for our relationships with both of our professors.  We’ve been very lucky to spend weekends with Gillian and Jill outside the classroom environment; hierarchal boundaries dissolve and a more egalitarian group-consciousness arises when working on real-world projects such as ours.

A lifelong Greenpoint resident shows Haley Perkins '13 her childhood home on a map.

On Sunday, we invited anyone living in Greenpoint-Williamsburg to stop by Arts@Renaissance during the afternoon to hear about our projects and to join in a community discussion.  We were a little nervous and very excited to see the final products of our classmates’ hard work.  There was no need to worry; the room
was full of community members the entire afternoon, ranging from their 20s to their 80s, both lifelong Greenpoint residents and new transplants.  The afternoon began with a witty ukelele performace from a former Ms. Greenpoint, who sang of public bath houses, Brooklyn’s trash issues, and the Exxon oil spill.  Then we moved into student presentations.  Several of my classmates made an incredible short film to document the overwhelming number of open-air trash dumps in Williamsburg and locals’ accounts of their asthmatic effects; another group created a walking tour past these transfer stations.  Another group focused on the inequality and self-confidence issues that arise with charter school invasion, and my group led attendees through a short history of the hospital complex that now houses St. Nick’s.  Interactive stations around the room allowed community members to draw their memorable neighborhood places on a big map, to look through news archives, or to listen to interviews with local members of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women.  The afternoon was a fantastic break from the chaos of everyday life for everyone involved; we gave ourselves time to reflect, connect, plan, and learn about each other.

Charlotte Heyrman '13 and Jesse Jacobson '12 talk with community members.

It is this separation from the ordinary that allows a ritual, and its subsequent changes in consciousness or action, to occur.  What we’ve learned in this class is that one need not travel abroad or join a religion to participate in ritual since we do it all the time.  The next part of the afternoon employed a ritual familiar to most of us: that of serving tea.  Jill, one of our professors, has built six “huts” around the world, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts; in preparation for hut #7, she set up a tape scaffold on its upcoming site, and prepared tea in the center made with herbs grown in a nearby urban garden.  We sat in a circle on her handmade T-shirt pillows and invited attending community members to join us in one-on-one conversations about their visions for the hut and opinions about pollution and garbage in the area.  I was surprised and enlivened by the openness of every attendee to our project.  Eighty-five year old men sat down on floor pillows and drew on small squares of paper, imagining what this hut will look like.  Tea continued for an hour or so, biscotti and fresh bread were passed around, and we “talked trash”.

By the end of the day, nearly everyone who’d shown up was still there, talking with neighbors or with us,
listening to interviews, or marking their childhood homes on the map.  The hut scaffolding was covered with clothespins holding pieces of paper; people had drawn ideas for the hut or written down which items of trash should be included.  We were exhausted from the weekend, but so thankful for the community members’ participation and fantastic ideas.  Though our Brooklyn trips have ended, we’re continuing to finish up our projects here at Wesleyan and will have final products ready in several weeks!

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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

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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.