Events
2009
November 7, 2009
Where on Earth Are We Going?
Global Environmental Change and Freshwater Resources:
Hope for the Best or Change to Prepare for the Worst?
Patrick L. Osborne, PhD, Executive Director
Harris World Ecology CenterUniversity of Missouri – St. Louis
Dr. Patrick Osborne is the Executive Director of the Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He obtained his Ph.D. in aquatic ecology from the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom in 1978. He has 30 years experience in tropical ecology research, education and environmental consultancy in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Kenya and the Philippines. He was Head of the Biology Department at the University of Papua New Guinea and Deputy Director of the Water Research Center at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. His research has focused on phytoplankton ecology and paleolimnology of tropical wetlands and lakes as a means to elucidating ecosystem function and change. He has co-authored Freshwater Plants of Papua New Guinea (University of Papua New Guinea Press) and is working on the second edition of his student textbook, Tropical Ecosystems and Ecological Concepts (Cambridge University Press). He currently teaches courses in conservation biology, tropical biology and conservation, and ecology.
Water in a Changing Climate—The Role of the National Forests in the Water Infrastructure
Frank H. McCormick, PhD, Program Manager
Air, Water and Aquatic Environments, Rocky Mountain Research Station
Dr. Frank H. McCormick is the Program Manager of Air, Water and Aquatic Environments program in the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the US Forest Service. He has 17 years of experience in managing natural resource programs as a research ecologist and program manager with the USEPA and Forest Service. He worked with USEPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) and led assessments of watershed health and restoration, water availability and quality. He conducted research on fish assemblages as indicators of ecological conditions in streams and rivers and the development of biological water quality criteria. He holds a doctorate in zoology from the University of Oklahoma and has research interests in fish and aquatic ecology.
The 17th Annual Dwight Greene Symposium: Green the Ghetto and How Much It Won’t Cost Us
Majora Carter ’88, President and CEO, The Majora Carter Group
Founder, Sustainable South Bronx and River Heroes
September 12 - November 8, 2009
Paul Villinski: Emergency Response Studio
Emergency Response Studio was inspired by artist Paul Villinski's visit to post-Katrina New Orleans in August 2006. He wished he could transport his studio from New York to the Lower Ninth Ward to create work in response to the conditions he found. Instead he created Emergency Response Studio by playfully rethinking and transforming a 30-foot Gulfstream Cavalier trailer--virtually identical to the 50,000 trailers built by Gulfstream for FEMA--into a rolling, off-the-grid live/work space that can house displaced artists or allow visiting artists to "embed" in post-disaster settings. It will be installed on the Center for the Arts' courtyard and accompanied by an exhibition in Zilkha Gallery detailing Villinski's construction process and featuring additional information on movable housing as well as green technology and building materials. Born in York, Maine in 1960, Villinski received a BFA with honors from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York in 1984. The exhibition is curated by Nina Felshin.
Sepember 4
First-Year Student Common Experience Program (F2F: H2O)
Students were invited to Foss Hill to join in the Common Moment for the class of 2013. Produced by the Center for the Arts, students were led in a dance warm-up by Chair of the Dance Department Nicole Stanton. They were then divided into six groups led by master teachers from six different cultures where the power and preciousness of water is an important part of their dance and music traditions: Korean, Cuban, West African (Ghanaian), Japanese, Irish and South Indian. Assisted by Peer Advisors, students spent twenty minutes learning a dance from those traditions and then had the opportunity to perform the dances for each other. They were then assembled at the baseline of a huge histogram drawn on the field which represented the results of the survey they had taken the night before. Led by Director of the Environmental Studies Program, Barry Chernoff, they danced into the histogram, cheered for a class photograph, and then were entertained by the student fire-dancing group, Prometheus.
May 23
WESEMINAR: Seeing Green: Artists Tackle Climate Change
Many artists, often in collaboration with scientific and other experts, have enlisted their creative energy in the global struggle against environmental destruction. "Seeing Green" will examine how art that delivers challenging content with aesthetic power can be a major force in raising public consciousness. This panel is presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change" at Zilkha Gallery.
Moderator:
Nina Felshin, curator of exhibitions, Zilkha Gallery, and adjunct lecturer in art history, conceived and organized "Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change" as part of Feet to the Fire, the 18-month campus-wide initiative on climate change.
May 22
WESEMINAR: Feet to the Fire: Exploring Global Climate Change from Science to Art
A seminar by Pamela Tatge, Director of the Center for the Arts and Barry Chernoff, Director, Environmental Studies Program, for alumni and parents about the campus-wide project that used art as a catalyst for innovative thinking, scientific exploration, and student engagement, to foster a deeper understanding of climate change and its implications. The project has included an eco-arts festival, pedagogical exchanges within existing courses and new experimental courses, and a First Year student common experience program. The presentation will include performances of some of the commissioned works.
May 9
Feet to the Fire Culminating Celebration
This event was cancelled due to the May 6 tragedy on campus. Project leadership, family and friends gathered with students in the Guyana course to view the retrospective film of the project and the ten minute film by Paul Horton that focused on Guyana.
May 9
Nicole Stanton and Gina Ulysse: Threshold Sites: Skin to Skin
POSTPONED
Nicole Stanton, associate professor of dance, will premiere her commissioned work, Threshold Sites: Skin to Skin, a collaboration with Gina Ulysse, associate professor of anthropology. It looks at the ways in which choreographic processes can explore and address the social and cultural issues that contribute to lack of ecological awareness. The piece features several dance faculty members as performers/collaborators and will be performed in the new green performance space in the Bessie Schonberg Studio. The event will also feature a piece performed by Wesleyan students entitled “Threshold Sites: Body and Earth” collaboratively developed by Stanton and Ulysse with Michael Singer, assistant professor of biology and Andrea Olsen, chair of the dance program at Middlebury College.
May 1
Messages by Barbara Croall (Performed by the Wesleyan University Orchestra)
Native American composer Barbara Croall has been commissioned to compose a new work on global climate change to be developed and performed by the Wesleyan University Orchestra. Croall will make two visits to Wesleyan to workshop the piece with the orchestra prior to its premiere. Croall is Odawa and balances her time between work in outdoor education rooted in traditional Anishhinaabe teachings and composing music. She has been actively performing and composing on Anishhinaabe musical instruments and for European classical instruments since 1995. Her music for soloists, small and large chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, film, dance and theatre have been premiered internationally and across Canada. She is a graduate of the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany and the University of Toronto where she was the recipient of the Glenn Gould Award in Composition in 1989.
April 28 – May 24
Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change
In conjunction with Feet to the Fire, Wesleyan's 18-month climate change initiative, Zilkha Gallery will presents an exhibition that explores this phenomenon though the lens of visual artists. Although many have collaborated with scientists, social scientists, planners and architects, the aim of Global Warning is to increase awareness of climate change through challenging content that is laced with poetry and aesthetic power. Included in the show are works in a variety of mediums from the past three decades by Lorraine Berry, Diane Burko, Nancy Cohen, Helen and Newton Harrison, Chris Jordan, Aviva Rahmani, Lenore Malen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Frances Whitehead.
April 17 & 18
Hari Krishnan: Liquid Shakti
As a part of the Spring Faculty Dance Concert, Indian dance artist-in-residence, Hari Krishnan, will premiere a solo work inspired by the myth of the river goddess Ganga which responds to the depletion of natural resources by aggressive industrialization, told from the point of view of some of the most vulnerable populations.
April 17
Alvin Lucier: Glacier
Experimental music professor and seminal artist of the sound art movement Alvin Lucier will present his commissioned work for solo cello.
April 15
Earth Day Lecture: Shalini Kantayya, A Drop of Life
Sponsored by the Environmental Studies Certificate Program
Filmmaker, eco-activist, and reality television survivor Shalini Kantayya
captured the attention of the nation during the television series On the
Lot, a reality show created by Steven Spielberg for the purpose of finding
Hollywood's next great director. Out of over 12,000 filmmakers, Kantayya was the only woman to finish in the top ten. Kantayya's films aim to make social change irresistible. In honor of Earth
Day, Kantayya will screen her recent film a DROP of LIFE, a futuristic
sci-fi film about the mounting global water crisis that has been used by The
African Water Network as an organizing tool in over 40 villages across
Africa.
February 20 - March 3
Stan’s Cafe: Of All the People in All the World, USA
Of All The People In All The World is a fascinating performance/art installation that uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life. In this captivating exhibition, each grain of rice is equal to one person and you are invited to compare the one grain that is you to the millions that are not. Over a period of days a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be subtle, witty and thought provoking. The work has been performed in cities from Los Angeles to Melbourne, Madrid to New York City and past installations have included the people born today in the world and those who will die today, everyone who was killed in the Holocaust, all the millionaires in the USA and everyone who is HIV positive. As part of Feet to the Fire: Exploring Global Climate Change from Science to Art, Wesleyan has commissioned Stan’s Cafe to produce a version of Of All the People in All the World: USA which helps humanize the issues of climate change.
January 28
A Personal Journey into the Music of the Arctic
Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer’s imagination and every corner of his compositions. Adams will discuss his upcoming book, The Place Where You Go to Listen, which proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. The Place Where You Go to Listen is a sound and light environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as “a place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us.”
2008
November 21 & 22
Tere O’Connor: Rammed Earth
Filtered through a rigorously personal and philosophical lens, Tere O'Connor's radical reinvention of the formal conceits of concert dance distinguish him as a truly original presence in the dance world. The bewitching, illusory worlds he creates on stage are richly textured, disturbingly beautiful, and often darkly humorous. He returns to Wesleyan with Rammed Earth, which explores architecture as a fundamental, subliminal force in the choreographic form as well as in the human experience. Audience members are seated on the stage of the CFA Theater where they are incorporated into the expanding, contracting, liquid space of the work and are escorted into different viewing positions. O'Connor's interest in "sentient architecture," in which structures change form in response to temperature, climate or human interactivity, is a catalyst for this work. One of Rammed Earth's central metaphors is "raising the dance up from the moment you are in."
November 20
Dance as Non-Product: A Talk by Tere O'Connor
Tere O’Connor shares his ideas about choreography and sustainability and talks about the creative process that led him to Rammed Earth.
November 15
Trio Globo: Sounds from a Beautiful World
Trio Globo has crafted a totally original voice in contemporary acoustic music with combustible spontaneity, rhythmic influences derived from six continents and diverse musical roots that span jazz, classical and sacred traditions. Eugene Friesen (Paul Winter Consort), Howard Levy (Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Paquito d'Rivera) and Glen Velez (Paul Winter Consort, Steve Reich) bring three unique musical visions together to create original work that is instantly recognizable as their own. For their Wesleyan program—Sounds from a Beautiful World—Trio Globo integrates musical beauty from the rhythms and melodies of the world. In the hands of these three original masters, seemingly disparate musical traditions are transformed into personal revelation and synthesized into unexpected marriages. Trio Globo creates a unique performance charged with virtuosity, rhythm, melody and wit.
November 12 (through May)
Ron Kuivila: The Weather, at Six
Wesleyan University is the site of a new sound installation that bridges the gap between thinking about global climate change and experiencing it. Professor of Music Ron Kuivila’s sound installation The Weather, at Six employs the synthesized sound of the carillon bells in Wesleyan’s South College bell tower to create a sonic interpretation of weather data collected for the current day’s date over 130 years. Each day’s “piece” can run between 5 and 15 minutes. Every day at 6pm, speakers mounted in the bell tower in Wesleyan’s South College play “today’s weather” with rhythmic structure derived from the pattern of rainy (or snowy) days and bell selections following the contour of daily temperature readings.
November 7
Music from Siberia: Klavdia and German Khatylaev
The Khatylaevs perform a fascinating and little known musical repertoire rooted in the animist and shamanist traditions of their native Yakutia, a.k.a. Sakha, the vast region of north central Siberia whose fragile ecology is now under increasing pressure from rampant natural resource extraction. Using jaw harps, archaic fiddles, percussion, and a variety of extended vocal techniques, the Khatylaevs create a magical soundscape that represents the dynamic forces of spirit and nature in traditional Yakut spirituality.
November 5 – December 14
A Photographic Window on
Causes of Climate Change
A visual documentary exhibiting waste and carbon use excesses on campus by students in Professor William Herbst's Seminar on Astronomical Pedagogy (created through a Feet to the Fire class module co-taught with photographer, Marion Belanger).
October 18
Where on Earth Are We Going: 4th Annual Robert Schumann
Environmental Symposium
Where on Earth Are We Going is a series of three seminars dedicated to global climate change issues which featured a progress report on climate policy by Gary Yohe P’02, Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, and a senior member and coordinating lead author on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize; a presentation on the psychologies of global warming by William Blakemore ’65, former Wesleyan trustee and television correspondent for ABC News for 38 years, who reported on many wars, popes, and other international stories as well as science, environment and education, before shifting focus exclusively to global warming four years ago; and a look at the role of the carbon cycle in global warming by Dr. Richard A. Houghton, deputy director and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., an independent, nonprofit institute focused on environmental science, policy, and education.
September 5
Off the Beaten Path: A Jazz & Tap Odyssey
Off the Beaten Path explores the American art forms of jazz and tap and their unique cultural influences. The full-evening performance was created under the direction of award-winning New England dancer/choreographer Drika Overton and musician, composer and educator Paul Arslanian, in collaboration with renowned tap dancers Brenda Bufalino and Josh Hilberman (Wesleyan '88). Fusing heritage with innovation, Off the Beaten Path: A Jazz & Tap Odyssey weaves diverse themes inspired by Rachel Carson, pioneer of the modern environmental movement, throughout the production's storyline into an exhilarating and compelling journey for audiences of all ages to experience.
August 25 - 29
First-Year Student Common Experience Program
Wesleyan University’s First Year Matters program embraced the theme of Feet to the Fire for the class of 2012. Over the summer, students received a series of readings including scientific articles, prose and poetry that examine issues of climate change. During their orientation week, students attended lectures given by faculty in the social sciences and in the humanities about climate change. These were followed up by intimate conversations in residence halls led by faculty where a poll was taken. Students voted on the most critical threats to the planet and the most important actions that can be taken to ameliorate climate change (derived from the UN’s Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change’s findings). The next day, August 29, 2008, 550 students went to Foss Hill where they were led by upperclassmen and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in a dance that embodied aspects of climate change. As part of the performance, the students assembled in the shape of a histogram that outlined the results of the poll they had taken, physically demonstrating what they as a class can do to address global warming. The night concluded with a performance of fire-dancing by the Wesleyan student group Prometheus. The First Year Matters program on climate change for first year students continued with a lecture by Native American activist, Winona LaDuke.
May 10
Feet to the Fire Festival 2008
Veteran’s Park, Middletown, CT
The festival featured campus and regional artists who created installations and performances that used the arts as a means to understand the impact of climate change and imagine a sustainable future. The Festival also featured a farmer’s market and interactive exhibits coordinated by the Jonah Center for Earth and Art that highlighted energy conservation, sustainability and resilient communities.
April 26
Where on Earth Are We Going: 3rd Annual Robert Schumann
Environmental Symposium
Where on Earth Are We Going is a series of three seminars dedicated to global climate change issues which featured Dr. Johan Varekamp, Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science and Chairmen of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University (“Measuring and Modeling Climate Change”); Dr. A. Townsend Peterson, University Distinguished Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Curator, Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas (“Implications of Changing Climates for Biodiversity: Considering Sea-Level Rise, Climate Change and Secondary Interactions”); and Dr. Joe Fargione, Regional Science Director for The Nature Conservancy Central US Region (“Biofuels: Threats and Opportunities”).
April 22
Earth Day Lecture: Gina McCarthy
Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Gina McCarthy presented the 2008 Earth Day Keynote Address at Wesleyan titled “Meeting the Environmental Challenges of the 21st Century.”
January 31
Focus the Nation
Wesleyan was one of 1,550 universities, schools, businesses, and places of worship that took part in Focus the Nation, a nation-wide day of education, discussion and activism to address climate change. The student-run Environmental Organizer’s Network (EON) led three panels on policy response, corporate and institutional response, and climate and social justice. The Feet to the Fire initiative was launched at the start of the day’s activities.
2007
April 18
Earth Day Lecture: Richard Blumenthal
The Feet to the Fire initiative and grant were announced at the Earth Day celebration. The keynote address, titled “Connecticut’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming,” was given by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to students, faculty, staff and members of the local community.