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Along with a number of varied events by renowned artists, the eighth biennial Theodore Roethke Humanities Festival will feature a concert by New York’s cutting-edge brass group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, 8 p.m. tonight at the Williams Center for the Arts.
Tickets are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $18 for the public. They can be purchased by calling the box office at 610-330-5009.
Praised as “more exciting all the time” by Billboard magazine, Meridian will present a program that includes “rock classics” selections by Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and Captain Beefheart; two original works by Meridian members; and “Beyond the Curve,” a new work commissioned by Chamber Music America for brass ensemble, drums, and electronics, written by guitarist Elliott Sharp, who also will play a solo work for electric guitar.
Meridian Arts Ensemble will give a free workshop for brass players 4 p.m. today at the Williams Center. Spectators are welcome. High school musicians in attendance will receive a free ticket to the evening performance.
The Roethke Festival is named for Theodore Roethke (1908-63), a former Lafayette faculty member and noted poet of the 1940s and ’50s. Roethke published several critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including The Waking, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
The theme of this year’s festival is Performance Art. All presentations take place at the Williams Center for the Arts and start at 8 p.m., except where noted.
The festival will continue Sunday, March 28, with a video marathon of performance art classics lasting from noon to midnight. It is expected to include “Koyaanitsqatsi” (with music by Philip Glass), Karen Finley’s “The Constant State of Desire,” Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight,” and sections of the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson masterpiece, “Einstein on the Beach.” The event is free and requires no tickets.
English major Danielle Pollaci ’06 (Trenton, N.J.) and nine other women students will present “Reflections,” a performance art piece about female body image, 7-8 p.m. Tuesday, March 30, in the Williams Center for the Arts lobby. The performance will last 40 minutes and the remaining time will be open for discussion.
On Wednesday, March 31, noted New York University scholar and critic RoseLee Goldberg will give one of two festival keynote presentations, speaking on “100 Years of Performance Art.” She will describe the rich array of performance art that defined New York experimentation and breakthrough accomplishments from Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Eric Bogosian, and many others. The event is free and requires no tickets.
The Bronx-based Universes theater ensemble will perform “Eye Witness Blues” Thursday, April 15, as poetry slam innovators Mildred Ruiz and Stephen Sapp mingle urban rhythms and Latino swagger in an evening of performance poetry and music. The event is free and requires no tickets.
Multi-disciplinary creative artist Laurie Anderson, Lafayette’s Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Visiting Lecturer, will give the festival’s keynote presentation Friday, April 16. She will talk about her career and showcase her one-of-a-kind skills with text, music, images, and ideas. Tickets are free (limited to two per person) and will become available Thursday, April 1. In addition, a conversation with Anderson will be open to students, faculty, and staff 4 p.m. that day.
College Theater will present Caryl Churchill’s Far Away April 21–24. Tickets cost $6.
Childhood innocence, mad hatters, and Armageddon are the apparent subjects of this surreal dystopian theater piece that The Observer praised as “tableau theater in which installation art is given motion and voice.” It will be performed in the Williams Center Black Box under the direction of Suzanne Westfall, professor of English.
Gro Mambo Angélá Noványón Idizol, High Priestess of Haitian Voodoo, will give a shamanist presentation on the Voodoo religion with drumming, chant, and ritual Wednesday, April 28. Drummers will demonstrate the role of the drum in ceremony and the relation of song and dance to the drum rhythm. Her presentation also will include medicines used for healing and other religious artifacts, objects that explain the legend of “voodoo dolls,” and explanations about the myths of zombies. She is head of LePeristyle Haitian Sanctuary and founder of the National African Religion Congress. The event is free and requires no tickets.
The Williams Center gallery will host an installation by visionary artist Meredith Monk, Archeology of an Artist 2, from March 22-May 7. Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. The exhibit includes a reinstallation of “Silver Lake With Dolmen Music,” created in 1981; a film loop of six works (1966 to 1994); and photo panels that document her extraordinary career.
Meridian Arts Ensemble has been praised as “brass wizards” (CD Review) and “superb virtuosos” (Fanfare), possessing “extraordinary command” (The Washington Post) and producing “near symphonic richness” (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times review praised a concert “enlivened by a combination of vigorous, high-energy brass playing and delicate, almost Bachian pianism, supported by percussion writing that varied from the sparkling to the explosive.”
The group has performed in 45 states and Germany, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. It has recorded seven critically acclaimed compact discs on the Channel Classics label.
Meridian has been a repeat winner of the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Adventurous Programming Award and was featured at New York’s Alice Tully Hall for the 25th anniversary of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as well as PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center.
Elliott Sharp is a prolific composer, musician, producer, and installation artist, and leads the music groups Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. His collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, playwright Dael Orlandersmith, cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti, sci-fi writers Jack Womack and Lucius Shepard, blues legend Hubert Sumlin, turntablists DJ Soulslinger and Christian Marclay, and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah. His orchestra piece “Calling” was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Ferienkurse für Neue Musik.
“Sharp’s densely packed and highly rhythmic music restlessly explores intersections: of beauty and chaos, of microtonal variations and larger musical gestures, of styles and genres that might seem divergent and unrelated until you hear him,” states Bomb magazine.
A performance and recording artist, poet, writer, visual artist, and social commentator, Laurie Anderson’s technical wizardry and live shows have earned her a reputation as one of the world’s creative performers. She has created large-scale theatrical works combining a variety of media — music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, New York, as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. A past Grammy nominee, she has released seven albums for Warner Bros., including Big Science, featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to number two on the British pop charts.
Anderson has toured the United States and Europe as a performance artist and while reading from her book Stories from the Nerve Bible. Her collaborators have included Phillip Glass, Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, Nile Rogers, Andrian Belew, and others.
“Anderson is the superstar of the genre, the one performance artist who’s risen from the galleries, lofts and discos of the avant-garde to develop a big audience not only in the United States but in the world,” according to Newsweek. “Anderson does astonishingly well at standing up there on a big stage and being our surrogate, feeling our conflicting emotions, our rueful disappointments, our even more rueful hopes.”
Meredith Monk has been honored with the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, three “Obies” (including an award for Sustained Achievement), two Villager Awards, a “Bessie” for Sustained Creative Achievement, the National Music Theatre Award, 16 ASCAP Awards for Musical Composition, and the Dance Magazine Award. In 1996, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center exhibited a retrospective, Meredith Monk: Archeology of an Artist, and the Walker Art Center later paid tribute with a major installation, Art Performs Life. She holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, The Julliard School, San Francisco Art Institute, and Boston Conservatory.
Monk has made more than a dozen recordings, including a full-length opera, ATLAS: an opera in three parts, which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1991. Her albums Dolmen Music and Our Lady of Late: The Vanguard Tapes were honored with the German Critics Prize for Best Records of 1981 and 1986. Also an accomplished filmmaker, Monk made the award-winning Ellis Island (1981), and her first feature, Book of Days (1988), was broadcast on PBS, released theatrically, and selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial.
The nationally recognized Performance Series attracts more than 10,000 people each season. It has been cited for performing excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, Chamber Music America, Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, Pennsylvania Arts and Humanities Councils, and Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
The 2003-04 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by the F.M. Kirby Foundation; by provisions of the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, and New England Foundation for the Arts.