Liberal Arts Voices

Read the perspectives of our current students

French Film Series

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Posted By: Career Enrichment Network

The Department of French and Francophone Studies invites you to their French Film Series. Films are screened in 113 Carnegie Building, Wednesday nights at 7pm. There is free admission.

See the list of selected films for this year below.

Summertime:  Wednesday, October 26

In 1971, Carole and Delphine meet and fall in love. When Carole follows Delphine back to her family farm, the two find lesbianism and feminism are not as easy in the countryside.

Far From Men:  Wednesday, November 16

In 1950s Algeria, a schoolteacher (Viggo Mortensen) agrees to deliver an admitted murderer (Reda Kateb) to a French court for trial.

Hippocrates, Diary of a French Doctor:  Wednesday, January 25

A darkly comic portrait of a Paris hospital as seen through the eyes of a young intern, Benjamin, played by Vincent Lacoste (Eden), who begins his internship at the hospital ward run by his father.

In the Shadow of Women:  Wednesday, February 22

Pierre and Manon are a pair of poor documentary makers, who scrape by with odd jobs. When Pierre meets young trainee Elisabeth, he falls for her, but wants to keep Manon at the same time. But the new girl in his life finds out that Manon has a lover. When she tells Pierre, the time comes for difficult decisions all round.

School of Babel:  Wednesday, March 22

Children who speak little to no French in France are placed in a special reception class. They are taught the language and other classes until they are ready to join their peers in regular classrooms.

 

Program Spotlight: Puebla, Mexico

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Posted By: Career Enrichment Network David Goodwin, Puebla-Mexico Summer 2015, Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico just outside Mexico City

Liberal Arts student, David Goodwin, recently returned from a summer abroad in Mexico. David took part in the Spanish Department’s Faculty Led program to Puebla, Mexico: Spanish Language, Art and Mexican Culture.  The Puebla program is six weeks long, to be eligible students need to have 0-2 semesters of Spanish and a minimum gpa of 2.5.  Learn more about David’s experience below:

Content and photos contributed by: David Goodwin, majoring in Economics and Spanish

David Goodwin, Puebla-Mexico Summer 2015, Sanctuario de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in Cholulu, Puebla, Mexico.I chose the Puebla, Mexico study abroad program offered by the Spanish department. Puebla is right in the middle of Mexico, and the location was perfect! We were fortunate enough to travel to different cities each weekend anywhere from 1 hour up to 5 hours away. Traveling throughout Mexico was cheap, easy, and very safe. Not for one second in my six weeks in Mexico did I feel unsafe. The main reason I chose this program, was for the homestay experience. Being a Spanish major, I knew that living with a Spanish speaking family would be the best way to fully immerse myself in the language. These six weeks fit in nicely with my schedule and allowed me to still have a good amount of summer left when I got back to America.

No matter what line of work I end up in, I would like the Spanish language to be a part of it. After my time in Puebla, I feel substantially more confident in my ability to converse with native Spanish speakers, as well as read and comprehend the language. Because of the homestay experience, I was forced to speak only in Spanish, which is exactly what I wanted. I really felt like I was a member of their family.

Academically, the program was great. The courses we took while in Puebla were challenging and interesting, but also left time for us to take trips and experience the culture of Mexico. We had class Monday thru Thursday which allowed us to leave Thursday afternoon for weekend trips. The university that we attended, Ibero University, in Puebla was beautiful.David Goodwin, Puebla-Mexico Summer 2015, Penn Staters at Ibero University where classes were held

I would absolutely recommend studying abroad. The life experiences you gain from being out of your comfort zone and immersing yourself into another culture are invaluable and simply cannot be taught in a classroom!

David Goodwin, Puebla-Mexico Summer 2015, Streets of Downtown PueblaMy favorite memory is of our trip to Cuetzalan. For a day, our group visited a very poor village in the mountains of Puebla. We brought food and school supplies to an elementary school there. After eating lunch with the kids, we played soccer for over two hours. Despite losing badly, it was something that I will never forget. The kids in the school were extremely thankful. It was a very humbling experience for me.

To learn more about study abroad, attend the Education Abroad Fair on September 30, 2015  from 11am- 4pm, in the Alumni Hall at the HUB!

All Liberal Arts students studying abroad are eligible for Enrichment Funding. To learn more, please schedule an appointment via Network Symplicity or email Jackie Smith, Global Experiences Coordinator (jds54@psu.edu).

 

 

In the Red and Brown Water

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intheredwebgraphic_0.jpgThis past weekend, I attended Penn State Centre Stage production of “In the Red and Brown Water,” and I was sitting on the edge of my seat from start to finish, very much enraptured by the actors’ portrayal of the complex characters and the production’s handling of the intense themes.

The play, directed by Steve Broadnax and written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, centers on the main character Oya’s coming of age and maturation within the realm of the Louisiana housing projects. Oya, a young African American woman known for her running talent and speed, is offered a scholarship promising to take her to college and away from the projects, but she sacrifices her dream to take care of her ailing mother.

Throughout the rest of the play, Oya struggles with the repercussions of her decision, feeling empty inside and unhappy, spending most days sitting on her front porch. As Oya watches her neighbors have children, she desperately yearns to have her own baby, someone to give her purpose and a meaningful life, someone she can look at and then see her “mirror image.”

Two young men pursue Oya, further affecting her inner turmoil. Shango, a passionate, sexually charged lover who she argues with but clearly loves more, brings out her smile and the fire within her. On the other hand, her time spent with Ogun Size, a sweet, stuttering mechanic who simply wants to protect her and keep her safe, only exacerbates her melancholic feeling.

While the overall main plot carries a tone of despair, there is still a more humorous and comic side, which is in part due to the play’s unique writing style. The playwright, McCraney, writes the stage directions into the dialogue of the play, such as “Shin hums,” “Shango enters in his recruitment army uniform,” and “Aunt Eleuga weeps.” In this sense, the characters assert what they are going to do before they do it, and then the actions (Shin’s humming, Shango’s entrance, and Aunt Elegua’s weeping) immediately follow. For example, when Oya watches her Aunt Eleuga dance, the character Oya first remarks, “Oya laughs, because how can she not,” then pauses, then laughs out loud.

In my view, this original method definitely highlights the characters’ self-awareness and self-consciousness of their inner mindsets and actions. It especially adds comic relief and a break from the drama when a character interrupts a serious scene to interject with a stage direction, such as when a grieving Oya says, “Oya comforts her aunt” and then proceeds to pat her weeping aunt’s back.

These asides also break the fourth wall (the imaginary wall usually built to separate the audience and the actors), since the characters often faced the audience while stating their stage directions and then turned back to the action on stage. This allowed the audience to feel an even greater connection and interaction with the characters.

Even amidst the very tragic themes of heartache and loss, the characterization of some added another layer of humor. For instance, Aunt Eleuga’s flirtatious behavior, particularly with one of her godniece’s friends, earned a lot of laughs from the lively audience. The incorporation of music, such as the Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons” and the song “Bump ‘N Grind,” also contributed to tempering the heavy themes.

Ultimately, I was incredibly impressed by Centre Stage’s performance and how it included elements of singing, drumming, and modern dancing, which were seamlessly interwoven into the dramatic play and added tremendously to the play’s cohesiveness, energy, and overall impact. I left having enjoyed a fine night of theatre in State College and eagerly looking forward to attend more of their productions in the future.

Image: Penn State Centre Stage

The Merchant of Venice

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Merchant of Venice.jpgHello, everyone! My name is Grace Schmidt, and I will be following in former “Art Actually” blogger Paige Cooperstein‘s footsteps this semester as the new arts blogger. I am excited to explore and blog about the wide range of artsy-related events offered here at Penn State, from musical theatre shows to poetry readings.

Last week, the Center for the Performing Arts presented the Actors from the London Stage performance of The Merchant of Venice, a William Shakespeare play that centers around a merchant, Antonio, who signs a bond agreeing to allow the lender to cut off a pound of his flesh if he fails to repay his debt. A host of other subplots–such as the courtship of Portia, who can only marry after her suitors solve an elaborate puzzle her father created, and the rebellion of Jessica, a Jewish daughter who runs away to marry a Christian–intertwine and create a breadth of characters.

As I sat in the audience prior to the show, I wondered how five actors would be able to put on the entire show, which includes twenty vastly different characters. It didn’t take long for me to become extremely impressed by how quickly the actors were able to transform into entirely different personas without even leaving the stage or substantially changing their costumes or props. They repeatedly demonstrated their ability to adapt, swiftly taking on the often diverging motivations, resentments, and back stories of the various characters they portrayed.

For example, one actor took on the roles of both Jessica and Nerissa and switched back and forth between them, differentiating the two by wearing a piece of cloth as a shawl when playing Nerissa and then wrapping it around her head when performing Jessica’s parts.

In some instances, the actors even played several different characters in one scene, which I think added a lot to the humor of the show. As I learned in my sophomore Shakespeare class, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s more controversial plays because it grapples with issues of prejudice and the concepts of justice and mercy. There has traditionally been debate over whether it is a comedy, and it is often labeled as a tragic comedy due to its heavy themes and dramatic scenes. Ultimately, the switching back and forth between characters in a single scene, such as when the one actor transformed from doomed Antonio into the clown figure Lancelot, added substantially to the comedy of the performance.

The stamina, energy, and talent that the actors brought to their unconventional portrayal of the play (without elaborate sets, costumes, crew, or even a director) amazed me. The Actors from the London Stage are made up of five British artists who travel to perform at different universities, seeking to make Shakespearean plays more accessible to modern day audiences, according to the program. In my view, they were definitely successful.

Photo Credit: Peter Ringenberg

Portrait of the Artist on Blue and White Weekend

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Blue and White Film Festival
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU

On Penn State’s annual Blue and White weekend (April 20 – 22), the art makers across campus premiered their final showcases. As Matt Toronto, a Penn State theatre professor who premiered his first feature film at the State Theatre in March, would say, a premiere must be taken seriously.

Duly, Matt and Aaron Toronto rode into the State College premiere of their film The Pact on “man-sized” tricycles.  

Matt explained, “When we rented the red carpet, there were these man-sized tricycles that were just sitting there, calling out to us. We started riding them around the store while we were waiting for them to get our carpet ready, and my brother said, ‘We need to enter on these!’ And so we rented them that day, spur of the moment.”

Matt’s wife Jordan Toronto, who plays the local bartender in The Pact, didn’t even know about the tricycles until she saw them enter the State Theatre for the premiere on Saturday, March, 31st (The Pact ran at the State Theatre until Wednesday, April 4th with a different set of student films showing as previews on each night). I got a taste of more student films at the Student Film Organization’s (SFO) Blue and White Film Festival on Sunday the 22nd, but more on that later.  

First, on Saturday, the members of Blue in the Face (BITF), one of Penn State’s A Cappella groups, premiered their 2012 CD. Blue in the Face filled 105 Forum with smoke and purple-blue lighting. I filed into the full house with 15 of my closest art appreciating friends for the two-hour show.

Some in the audience had signs, since BITF’s spring concert also functions as an end of year celebration for its senior members, but my two rows had 16 (including me) pairs of hands to clap and hoot and holler for Ravi Shah, BITF’s resident vocal percussionist. Also a member of the Blue Band’s drum line, Ravi provided a well-timed and adaptable backbone to each song BITF covered, including a dub step vocal approximation in the song “Louder.”

The 2012 concert felt especially special to all the seniors, who started their time at Penn State at the same time as Blue in the Face formed in 2008. The class of 2012 is the first official class of BITF-ers. Many of its senior members had a hand in starting the vocal group and have been with BITF since its inception. Audience members and performers alike could feel the magic of the last night for the senior singers.   

Blue and White Sunday, Penn State student film makers had the same chance to say “See what we have accomplished in our time at Penn State.” SFO filled the State Theatre for a three and a half hour festival featuring over 17 films. The audience responded instinctively to their classmates’ films, laughing at the funny parts and gasping at the scary parts. I must say that “Sins of Another” really got my knees bunched and knuckles linked. I peeked through braided fingers to watch their supernatural mini-thriller.

But the real stand-outs of the night were the animated films and the documentaries. For student films with limited production resources, using a concentrated topic enables the film to succeed. “Specs,” an animation sublime in its efficient execution, features a guy who’d rather remain in his room with his imagination – through the lenses of his glasses his drawings come alive – than go out with a friend. I only fault the sound production for providing muffled lines of dialogue slightly incongruent to, and made redundant by, the subtitles for the speech. But visually, “Specs” was a well put together short.

Of course, I can’t not mention the perfect animated short, “Space for Sale,” directed by Alyssa Timoteo. This short was one of the student films I saw as a preview to Matt Toronto’s The Pact. Alyssa created a focused plot, compiling five reasons why monsters don’t live under your bed. She employed paper made characters in stop-motion animation to illustrate the monster under the bed in each example. She has a compact sense of humor that expresses itself perfectly in a short film. One hilarious rationale for monsters not wanting under-the-bed real estate: Humans are messy. The blue kidney-shaped monster then runs back and forth under the bed, toting a trash can to catch the pizza and dirty sock discarded by the unicorn-shirt wearing, human inhabitant of the room.

SFO’s Blue and White Film Festival closed the night with a handful of documentaries. Kelsey Hoffman provided a good range of interviews in her “Adam, Meet Eve,” a film that sought to dissect male-female relationships. She featured herself and two friends with their boyfriends, as well as Penn State professors of psychology and sociology, plus a doctoral candidate in women’s studies.

Caitlin Keller provided the most entertaining documentary of the night, and again I will compliment the topic choice. Her documentary, “On Tour with My Hero Zero,” followed the State College cover band with a hefty following among Penn State students. Keller even had on stage footage of the band playing at THON 2012. Many in the audience had seen this band play live, so they felt especially connected to the short film. And it didn’t hurt that the guys in the band were that right blend of quirky and charismatic.            

Over the course of Blue and White weekend, I saw many Penn Staters taking stock of their time here with their overarching presentations of their work. No wonder, when you consider the kernel of the Penn State Blue and White tradition; Penn State’s annual Blue and White football game has a complex scoring method not seen in any usual game of Nittany Lions football. Since the Offense plays the Defense, each team must play their usual role plus a little extra outside their comfort zone to score points.

In fact, haven’t we all done that with our time at Penn State? Performed our usual role – in my case as an English student – plus a little extra – here a hat tip from your campus arts blogger of three semesters. On May 5th, I, and thousands of others, will graduate from Penn State. This Blue and White weekend, I took stock of my time here, and I’ve had four valuable years. Hats off to the Class of 2012, I hope you all continue to pursue your own arts!  

All the Skinny Jeans in State College want Sloppy Seconds

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Waring Commons
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU

SOMA, not only the drug of choice in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, also houses a majority of the Penn State hipster artist scene. Operating under the acronym for Students Organizing the Multiple Arts, SOMA’s famed events include open mic nights in Waring Commons and Arts Crawl, the mass migration held every spring in and around the Visual Arts Building for a sampling of visual and audio arts.

The hipster feel is so homegrown amongst this group of tight knit friends that constitute the club that before SOMA’s most recent open mic night began, a guy from the audience observed, “I think 90% of the skinny jeans in State College are in this room right now! Not that I’m judging. I mean, hey, I have skinny jeans too.” He looked down at his own pants longingly, almost wishing he had toted out his skinny jeans for the occasion.       

Enter the Valentine’s Day themed open mic night coupled with a “Find your SOMAte” date auction, together deemed Sloppy Seconds. One of the emcees for the evening, Sam Hopkins, told the audience that SOMA’s annual Valentine’s Day open mic night/date auction usually rakes in big bucks for the club. With SOMA’s main event a little over a month away (this year’s Arts Crawl will run on March 30th), some fundraising was definitely in order.    

Performers could sign up separately for the two halves of Sloppy Seconds. In between the many performances – so many guitars and so many amps! Again reminding me of their close knit hipster-ness when Devin William Daniels took to the stage and realized he dropped his pick: “Can someone get me a pick? I know someone else has got to have a pick in this place!” – the people who signed up for the date auction with snarky personal ads sold themselves in the name of art. The typical bid was $5. For the majority of the night, I watched the winners claim their dates with a handshake and a rose. Everyone treated their “SOMAte” playfully, escorting their date off the stage with its candy heart backdrop.

But things got serious after the threesome of Ian, John and Ryan played their cover of “the mouse that is modest” (or Modest Mouse for the uninitiated). When Ian auctioned himself off, his value jumped from the traditional $5 to a fetching $22. I think it was his answer to favorite pick-up line that really sold him: WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF US MAKING OUT RIGHT NOW??? Ian’s friends filled out the form for him, but he owned the moment when he explained that you had to yell his pick-up line, hence the all-caps, otherwise it didn’t have nearly the same success rate.

I thought for sure Ian would represent SOMA’s highest take for the night. But then Cassandra Yatron took to the stage. She came from Problem Child, a Penn State Literary Magazine that also set up shop at Sloppy Seconds to sell Valentine’s Day poetry. Her bidding war also ended in $22. Turns out Sam wasn’t kidding. SOMA, with the help of its skinny jean wearing contingent, fundraised with the best of them.

SOMA might even come out richer still if they take advantage of some parting advice from the audience. When Sam’s fellow emcee took the stage towards the end of the night and spotted Devin’s pick lying on the floor, an audience member called out, “You can probably get ten bucks out of him for that!”

“Oh really?” the emcee chuckled.    

V for VAGANZA

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On Friday the 13th, theatre kids rose like the full moon. 111 Forum was characteristically bright on the first Friday night of the semester, but this time, was not preparing for a No Refund Theatre show to begin. At 6 pm, about 15 people gathered in Forum waiting for a specific set of instructions that would begin the 2012 VAGANZA weekend.

Steve Travis, a 2010 meteorology grad, who organized this year’s VAGANZA, explained, “This year, you have the opportunity to adapt a big-budget movie for the stage, on no budget at all! These are movies that no one would be crazy enough to try to adapt into a play. But the key is parody. Don’t take a script word-for-word and shot-for-shot…please don’t. That would be illegal. But you can mock it all you want,”

In the past, VAGANZA gathered teams on the first weekend of the Spring or Fall semester, and gave each team a word. Teams had 24 hours to write, produce and rehearse their own 30 minute plays, somehow utilizing the theme word.

When Steve participated in VAGANZA, the word was “field,” which his group turned into “Play the Field,” a Dating Game inspired show. Another year included the word “inflation.” One team that year turned the word into a musical based on the Hindenburg. According to Steve, VAGANZA has been around for at least a year or two before he joined the club in 2009.

But, Steve noted that recently interest had waned in NRT’s annual theatre challenge: “And then one day, I was joking around with my friends. We were talking about how weird it would be, taking movies that are just so ridiculous and saying, ‘Okay, now we’re going to put them on the stage.’ And then we just put the two together and said, ‘That would be a really good idea for the VAGANZA.’ It was something I would really want to do, so I thought I could get a lot of people interested in it.”

That proved true for the 2012 participants. VAGANZA allows newcomers to NRT a chance to get their feet wet with the club. Anyone can participate. This year, Max Simone, current president of NRT, made sure that everyone cannonballed into the theatre pool, and had some fun splashing around in it before Steve assigned the teams, and those teams battled it out for their movie choices.

First came the license to let go and let the creativity flow. Everyone formed a circle, revealed their favorite Pok�mon, and passed an imaginary bunny back and forth. And with that, they immediately bonded with their new teammates.

Team Max Simone included junior in English and film, Max Simone; freshman in nuclear engineering Brian Gutierrez; senior in computer engineering, Josh Angstadt; and senior in wildlife and fisheries, Luke Abercrombie. VAGANZA’s Friday served as their first introduction to each other. Although Josh said he did participate in the pit for NRT’s production of Dr. Horrible, in which Max also participated.

“I wore flannel!” Max said.

Brain bantered, “And nothing says participation like flannel!”

It was clear I was witnessing the birth of a great theatre collaboration.

Team Vince Tran included sophomore in telecommunications, Vince Tran; 2007 grad in secondary education, Dustin Yenser; senior in secondary English education, Martin Byrne; and freshman in civil engineering, Rachel Taylor (on the night of the show, Matt Kaye filled in for Dustin.) 

A pantomimed shoot-out settled the dispute of who would choose their movie first. Team Max Simone got the Jurassic Park movie they were gunning for, while Team Vince Tran decided to perform the complete works of Harry Potter…abridged! Martin thought the rule that prohibited teams from buying supplies for their shows provided the most excitement for the challenge.

“Being poor is a parody of being alive,” he said. 

On the night of the show, however, no expenses were spared. The VAGANZA cup, which Steve deemed “legit” for the $60 he spent on it, sat center stage.

“This is what they’re really playing for,” Steve reminded the audience.
And play they did. Watch Brian strut around stage lamenting his sexiness as the lothario, Dr. Ian Malcolm, or watch Luke flip a piece of paper that says “Boy” on one side and “Girl” on the other to let you know which of the Murphy kids he’s portraying, and all you can do is hope to see these faces again in future NRT productions. And the Jurassic Park troupe didn’t forget the classic trembling water glass. Max, center stage, head hung solemnly, tapped a water glass three times with a walking stick to create the ripple effect, thus announcing the entrance of the T-Rex (who pushed through a cellophane window, no less, to get to its sibling prey.)  

When the Harry Potter troupe took to the stage, they covered book one with a nod to Penn State. When the sweets trolley rolls up on the Hogwarts Express, Vince as Harry Potter asks, “Yo, do you take Lion Cash?”

The trolley keeper answers yes, but can’t get the card to swipe properly. Darn Micros, the ever faulty Penn State cash register system! The audience ate it up. The same way they did during book four when Vince and Matt came out with their bro handshake.

“Godfather! Huh!” they grunted in unison before exiting the stage. Vince poked his head around one of the flats, “The end.” He announced the only important plot point to come from book three of their abridged version of Harry Potter.  

And the winner…Team Jurassic Park. It seems you can’t beat velociraptors who converse in tea time intellectualisms before attacking. And you certainly couldn’t beat the laughs the Jurassic Park troupe got for Brian’s Elmer Fudd bit. He tip-toed across the stage and whispered to the audience, “Be very, very quiet…I’m hunting waptors.”

As Max did his victory lap with the VAGANZA cup, it became apparent that Rachel’s tagline for VAGANZA was true: “It’s a place where dreams come true!”

Three African Voices

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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Gebeba Baderoon and Shailja Patel entered Foster Auditorium like a storm two weeks ago. Thirty minutes before their poetry reading was scheduled to begin, I watched them strategize about microphones and drag the book table from its usual corner to the center of the room. While they were laboring, Wesley readjusted her gold and black head wrap and exhaled, “My son keeps telling me I’m in the 1%, but I promise, I’m a poet, I’m in the 99!”

Even as a professor at Penn State Altoona, Wesley was aware of the Occupy movement in University Park. Again, these poets reminded me how poetry is never far from a social consciousness. Throughout the evening, Wesley, Baderoon and Patel shared poems about their life travels that led them out of Africa. These three poets who represented Africa for an evening gave a unique perspective on America from the outside in.

Baderoon started the evening humbly. Referring to her fellow poets for the evening, she said, “I’m going to read as the opening act to the grown-up poets.”

She read a poem called “Old Photographs” about her coming to America, which she admitted she did for love. Because Baderoon started with an open source love poem to South Africa, she paused to contemplate before her next poem: “You might wonder why I left. That’s a mysterious question. I don’t quite know yet…if I have left.”

When she contemplates her lover in “Old Photographs,” Baderoon asks, “Was this the beginning of leaving?” It was clear to the audience that we were seeing a South African woman, even in the midst of our American world. She never lost what it was in her to be South African because she continued to mine that identity in her writing.

Wesley came to the podium next with her poem “Home Coming.” She gave the popole chant of mourning before she began, which she translated as “The world is ending, come, we finish.” In the Liberian civil war, Wesley said her brother, her brother-in-law and her brother-in-law’s entire family were drowned by the military. The hurt inspired her to write about what it would be like for her to go home after that tragedy, after so much time away.

She started her poem “Home Coming” with the line, “I don’t want to be a stranger when I come home/ I want my brothers to take me in.” Wesley later asks, “If they kill all my brothers/ who will welcome me home?” She wants to return to Liberia so her brothers can recite her praise names, in their proper order, to incessant drumming.

Wesley concluded her portion of the reading with a poem “for [her] children growing up in America.” For her that was a foreign concept and she said that sometimes it was sad to think that her children were only growing up in America, even though she did ultimately love the country.

Patel went through a similar love-hate relationship with America and closed the evening with a portion of her “Migritude,” which she read by memory. Migritude is a word that Patel made up to create the image of a migrant with attitude. Being a third generation Indian in Kenya who was then deported to England and eventually made her way to California, Patel knows a thing or two about being a migrant.

In “Migritude,” Patel detailed the story of her parents flying to visit her and her sister in San Francisco. Her parents got detained in the airport, after flying for 17 hours, because of some small inconsistency on their passports. And when her mom hears the customs officer saying he’s hungry, she offers him a bit of her sandwich even though she’s just been traveling for 17 hours and isn’t even allowed to leave the airport in America. But as Patel’s Migritude shows, she learned from her mother to love the people around her.

Patel’s final offering of the evening was to discuss her open source love poem to Oakland, California, which closed the evening on another Occupy movement reference. She detailed how Occupy Oakland had come for the city she loved and the people she loved. Baderoon and Wesley both praised Patel for the recurrence in her poem of “the city I love” and “the people I love,” because, after all, their evening of poetry together was about love – love of each other, love of poetry, and most importantly love of the respective places that these women have found themselves in their lives.  

Heaven is a Modern Dance

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Paul Taylor had Graham Spanier talking about his moves. Before Taylor came out to greet the audience, Spanier said, “For a dancer like me,” pause for laughter, “whose right hip doesn’t know what his left is doing, I consider [Taylor] a marvel!”

That, if nothing else, makes Taylor worthy in my book of being the 2011 recipient of the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) Medal for Distinguished Achievement. Incidentally, Taylor is also special for being the only medal recipient to be born in Pennsylvania, giving the crowd attending Taylor’s performance last Thursday at Eisenhower Auditorium a rush of home state pride. Taylor’s performance was one of the first few performances thus far in the 2011 – 2012 Center for the Performing Arts season, which is shaping up to be a good one! 

At the top of the evening, Michael B�rub�, the IAH director, introduced the video that would detail Taylor’s trajectory from professional dancer to choreographer. The video, produced with the help of WPSU, featured an exposition of Taylor’s work written by B�rub� and Amy Vashaw. To hear B�rub� talk is to listen to an engaging essay, but even hearing his writing contribution narrated by Patty Satalia, it was clear he could articulate a thesis like nobody’s business. The video got me jazzed to see Taylor’s work live, especially his finale, choreographed to Piazzolla Caldera. I knew from the moment I caught a glimpse of this dance in the introduction that it was going to be my favorite performance.

But just like anything that’s good, it was saved till the very end. I flicked through my program one last time to get a feel for the evening ahead before the house lights dimmed and the show was about to begin. Once the curtain rose, I was glad I did take that extra second to scan my program. I happened to catch the name Jennifer Tipton as the “Lighting by” credit, and I was glad, as the show began, that I had a name in mind to be thanking. The opening dance was lit in such a crisp white light that the entire stage looked fresh, including the dancers in their deer and moss colored costumes. Tipton was just as much a contributing artist to the scene as was Taylor in his crafting of the leaps and twirls that seemed to tell an early forest awakening through the movements of Bach’s Brandenburgs. Every time one of the women spun across the stage, her skirt bellowed out in a velvet lily. 

More female dancers came out for the second sequence in the ensemble of dances. The ratio was almost even as the men and women entered the stage in torn, gauzy red-blue or green-brown leotards. The dance Taylor choreographed to The Uncommitted was much more active and much less fragile than the first sequence. Taylor created such a sad illustration of being alone in the world. All eleven dancers on stage lined up in a circle, first walking around it then gradually running around it, until two circles broke off from the original one as if in mitosis. One girl was left out in the middle. She looked to the right and made as if to join that circle, but didn’t quite fit, so then she looked to the left and tried to jump in, but that was hard, too. Finally, she fell in behind the left circle, but I was left with such sadness for the lonely dancer that still didn’t quite fit.

But finally, finally, my anticipation was satisfied with the dance to the Piazzolla Caldera. Taylor was quoted in the introductory video as describing this dance as the physical narrative of the sex act. There was great movement in this tango-tap hybrid dance that Taylor crafted, which was perfectly complemented by the tattered dresses that registered every movement, and the moving metal light fixtures that mirrored the fanned out shape of the dresses worn in Brandenburgs. The intensity of the dance was on edge the whole time. Each movement hit with the tight perfection of passion. The dance was the perfect combination of all the previous elements Taylor had exhibited in his choreography.

I didn’t want it to end. But when it inevitably did, I walked out of the auditorium feeling incredibly grateful to the Center for the Performing Arts for giving me the opportunity to attend the Paul Taylor Dance Company performance. I encourage everyone to check out the rest of the performances that the CPA has to offer!

The Magic of the Twice Told Tale

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Linda Gregerson is a poet who loves multiple voicing. She admitted to this slightly self-effacingly somewhere near the middle of her poetry reading in the Foster Auditorium last Thursday. It made every poetry student in the room want to run up and hug her, comforting her with, “It’s okay, we love you, we appreciate every ‘she,’ ‘you,’ ‘they,’ ‘us,’ and ‘I’ perspective you managed to cram into a single poem.”

This past week, students in every poetry class on campus were reading either Magnetic North or The Woman who died in her Sleep in preparation for Gregerson’s arrival. So when Gregerson finally did arrive, all white blonde hair and pixie stature, the crowd watching her was a self-contained interpretive community (shout out to Stanley Fish!) coming to her reading from equal preparation.

Normally, I go to readings by authors in the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series because I figure I better take advantage of the opportunity to hear an author read their work live. But this time, I had the added benefit of foreknowledge of Gregerson’s poetry. From my poetry seminar with Robin Becker, I had the poems from The Woman who died in her Sleep on repeat in my brain for over a week before the reading.

At the reading, Professor Becker introduced Gregerson. Of course I had heard Robin Becker do her fair share of poetry reading in class, but there’s something about putting her behind a podium and a microphone that heightens the drama of her voice, which already gives the feeling that something is truly at stake. Even Becker’s prose had a stylized attention to rhythm, so much so that when Gregerson approached the podium and kissed a greeting to Becker, her first words were, “I think I should just have you read my poems.”

But Gregerson’s no slouch with her voice either. She opened her reading strong with the one-two punch of “Sweet,” from Magnetic North and “For the Taking,” from The Woman who died in her Sleep. She’s not afraid to look at you when she reads or give her characters voices besides her own in the poem. Her readings were always an engagement with the audience.

Throughout, Gregerson was tightly hilarious in her delivery. In “Sweet,” Gregerson reads the line, “Sweet, he said./ Your mother’s wrong but sweet,” there was a brief pause for laughter here. Gregerson appreciated the laughs in a later poem she read called “The Selvage.” Describing a story her daughters told her about canvassing for Obama, she wrote the lines, “they used the word/ we’ve all agreed to banish from even our/ innermost thoughts, which is when/ I knew he was going to win.” When a light skittering laughter made its way across the room, Gregerson said, “I love when people laugh there.”

At the end of her reading, Gregerson returned to “The Selvage” to talk about its evolution as a poem. This was great to hear from the poet’s own mouth the journey she took and the struggle she had with her own words. She explained how later in her writing life she turned to writing dramatic monologues.

“I like this dramatic monologue business,” she said, “because it’s an exercise in restraint for me.”

But outside of the dramatic monologues (which she has written for Dido, St. Peter, and Ananias to name a few), she said she could never quite manage to write a short poem. Her poems usually occur in several movements. After writing the first movement of “The Selvage,” which detailed the story about canvassing for Obama, Gregerson initially congratulated herself on finally writing a short poem! But the next morning when she came to the poem again, she shook her head and realized, “Nope, I just can’t end it here. The ironies are predictable and the images clich�d.” It takes a strong poet to realize when your own work isn’t right. Gregerson wasn’t afraid to struggle with her stunted attempt at a poem instead of abandoning it altogether.

Gregerson said she’s learned a lot by forcing herself to write, either through commissioned pieces (which she announces as her “Favorite!”) or through not being afraid to keep writing until she feels the writing is done. By the end of her reading, which she joked about as being long and arduous, Professor Bill Cobb opened the floor for the post reading discussion. His contribution to the talk, as hilarious as was his interaction with Rebecca Rasmussen, was to make a surprise announcement to his Intro to Creative Writing Class.

By way of posing a question to Gregerson, Professor Cobb said, “They don’t know it yet, but my intro class is about to get their first poetry assignment,” here he paused so that the members of his class at the reading could absorb his mischief, “So…do you have any suggestions for them?”

Gregerson, it turns out, is a big fan of prompts. She exalted, “I believe in prompts that are very arbitrary and obtrusive. That way you can spend your time being annoyed and angry at me. I think it’s a good place to start writing from, if you have something to write against.”

So what was her prompt? Quite simple, actually, for a lover of obtrusive prompts, but arbitrary enough. She wanted Professor Cobb’s poets in training to write a poem about anything, with any line types. The only rule was that the poem had to start with the word, “No.” The poets had to figure out where they could go from there.

I thought that was such a good idea that I want to pass along that assignment to all you LAUS blog readers out there. Think of your own poem that starts with the word, “No,” and post your result in the comments below.

And, if you’re not too exhausted already by reading this long post, I encourage you to take advantage of some more reading. In response to the final question from the audience for the night, Gregerson recommended some good books to check out:

We don’t Know We don’t Know by Nick Lantz (Poetry)

Citizen by Andrew Feld (Poetry)

Percival’s Planet by Michael Byers (Novel)

Happy Reading (again!)

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