Festival 2009

Stan’s Cafe: Of All the People in All the World, USA
Friday, February 20 - Tuesday, March 3
Zilkha Gallery and Olin Library Lobby
Opening Reception: Friday, February 20, 5pm; Talk: 5:30pm
Free Admission
Of All The People In All The World is a performance/art installation that uses grains of rice to bring formerly 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, Wesleyan has commissioned Stan’s Cafe to produce a version of the work which will help humanize the issues of climate change. At the conclusion of the installation, the rice will be donated to local food banks.

Alvin Lucier: Glacier
Friday, April 17, noon, Crowell Concert Hall
Free Admission
Avin Lucier, experimental music professor and seminal artist of the sound art movement, will present his commissioned work for solo cello and electronics.

Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change
Tuesday, April 28 through Sunday, May 24, Zilkha Gallery
Reception: Friday, May 1, 5-7pm; Curator Talk: 5:30pm
Free Admission
In conjunction with Feet to the Fire, Wesleyan’s 18-month climate change initiative, Zilkha Gallery will present 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 media from the past three decades by Marion Belanger, Lorraine Berry, Diane Burko, Nancy Cohen, Helen and Newton Harrison, Chris Jordan, Aviva Rahmani, Lenore Malen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Frances Whitehead.

Barbara Croall: Messages
Friday, May 1, 8pm, Crowell Concert Hall
Online Ticketing Is Now Available!
Native American composer Barbara Croall has been commissioned to compose a new work on global climate change that will be performed by the Wesleyan University Orchestra, under the direction of guest conductor Roy Wiseman. 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 for Anishhinaabe musical instruments and for European classical instruments since 1995. Her music for soloists, small and large chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, film, dance and theater have been premiered internationally and across Canada. The program will also feature winners of the the Wesleyan Orchestra Concerto Competition.

Nicole Stanton and Gina Ulysse:
Threshold Sites: Skin to Skin
Saturday, May 9, 4pm, Bessie Schönberg Dance Studio
Free Admission
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 Schönberg Studio. The event will also feature a piece performed by Wesleyan students. Entitled Threshold Sites: Body and Earth, it was collaboratively developed by Stanton and Ulysse with Michael Singer, assistant professor of biology and Andrea Olsen, chair of the dance program at Middlebury College.

Feet to the Fire Culminating Celebration
Saturday May 9, 8pm, CFA Theater
Free Admission
Excerpts from commissioned works by students and faculty, final projects by students enrolled in Barry Chernoff and Ann Carlson’s course in Guyana and video of activities that took place over the course of the eighteen-month project will be showcased in this culminating celebration.