Center for the Arts

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts announces highlights of 2025 fall season

Middletown, Conn.—Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) announces the highlights of their 2025 fall season, including an expansion of the Whale Fall project by the CFA’s 2025–2026 artist in residence mayfield brooks; a group exhibition featuring works in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, and sound (DFT 2025), and a solo exhibition of ceramic works by Gary Red Oak O’Neil; the opening celebration of the new Fries Arts Building including a WesGrooves social dance event featuring West African dance with Associate Professor of Dance Iddi Saaka; the first concert by the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus in Connecticut in nearly two decades; and the 49th anniversary Navaratri Festival celebrating the diversity of Indian music and dance including the New England premiere of a work by husband and wife Indian dance stars Srikanth Natarajan and Aswathy Srikanth.

"At a time like this, centers for art like ours are even more important as both incubators and platforms for creative voices that deepen our understanding of cultural difference and exchange, help us to realize new ways of coming together and building community, and champion the right to (as well as the power in) freedom of expression," said Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, Director of the Center for the Arts. "Artists bringing work to the CFA this fall give expression to the possibility of a world beyond the present. From the ancestral ties of Gary Red Oak O’Neil’s ceramics to the cultural transmission of the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus, and from the speculative Black worldmaking mapped in the exhibition DFT 2025 to the interspecies improvisation of mayfield brooks’ Whale Fall—these are projects that remind us how deeply our present is entangled with systems of power and histories of domination that keep us from imagining alternative ways of being together. I hope you will join us to experience the power of art at Wesleyan’s CFA–a transformative force for not only reflecting but transforming the world we share."

Wesleyan’s Dance Department presents the 20th anniversary celebration of the Movement of the People Dance Company led by Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance and African American Studies Joya Powell. The Music Department presents a concert by True North—Wesleyan Cello Instructor Julie Ribchinsky, violinist Artemis Simerson, and pianist Bill Braun—featuring the world premiere of a new commissioned work written for the group by Darian Simerson. And the Theater Department presents a production of the new performance work Marta Becket, Save Us All, conceived and directed by Associate Professor of Theater Katie Pearl.

“This season, at the Center for the Arts, we once again come together for the timeless ritual of finding joy and power in community,” said Roger Mathew Grant, Interim Associate Provost, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and Professor of Music. “In Marta Becket, Save Us All, we learn the stunning story of a performer who took seriously the sacred space of the theater and moved into an abandoned opera house. How fitting, then, that it’s with this season we open the new Fries Arts Building on Hamlin Street and bring our rituals to this new place. We cannot wait to see you in all of our halls, vintage and new, this season.”

Tickets and reservations for fall events at the Center for the Arts will go on sale online on Tuesday, July 1, 2025 at 10am at www.wesleyan.edu/boxoffice. Tickets will be available by phone at (860) 685-3355, or in person at the Wesleyan University Box Office, located in the Usdan University Center, 45 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, during the fall semester. Tickets may also be purchased at the door beginning one hour prior to each performance, subject to availability. The Center for the Arts accepts cash, checks written to “Wesleyan University,” and all major credit cards. Groups of ten or more may receive a discount to select performances – please call (860) 685-3355 for details. No refunds, cancellations, or exchanges. Programs, artists, and dates are subject to change without notice.

CFA ARTIST IN RESIDENCE 2025–2026: mayfield brooks

Death is one of the most powerful life-giving forces in the universe. When a dead whale sinks to the bottom of the ocean, its body feeds an entire ecosystem, from the largest apex predators to the smallest microorganisms. Since 2021, choreographer mayfield brooks has explored the life and death cycle of whales, and through their project Whale Fall extended this research into their embodied practice of vocal and dance improvisation. From the metaphor of the whale fall their project has expanded to explore musicality of whale song and the history of the whaling industry (one of the first integrated industries drawing heavily on Black and Indigenous labor). At its core, Whale Fall asks the question: what becomes possible, inevitable, and necessary when systems break down?

With Whale Fall, a performance cycle in three parts, decomposition is a world-making force, a process of unbecoming that feeds a different existence. Throughout the 2025–2026 academic year, brooks will work closely with Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts to expand the Whale Fall project. During their residency, brooks will develop a new dance-film, an artist book, a series of community gatherings, and teach a class on practice-based research in the Dance Department. In partnership with Jacob’s Pillow, they will be provided with a 10-day rehearsal residency to begin developing a new work that looks to the shoreline as another way of mapping the entanglements of human and non-human worlds. In February 2026, brooks and their collaborators will present all three parts of the Whale Fall cycle at the Center for the Arts, using both the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and the CFA Theater, marking the first time this project is on view in its entirety.

Working in partnership with students and faculty, brooks’ residency will also provide an opportunity to gather its own local pod of thinkers and makers at Wesleyan from the arts, humanities, and sciences. Together they will consider what the death and life cycle of whales, as well as their communal adaptation to catastrophic environmental changes, might offer humans in navigating a similar environmental crisis. They will explore embodied ways of knowing our entangled relationship with the waterways that connect the world. Using brooks’ residency as an opportunity to connect across disciplines, this pod will participate in the work of undoing, or decomposing, the silos of the campus to imagine what else might be possible in our work together.

EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES

Gary Red Oak O’Neil: Excavations
Tuesday, September 9 through Sunday, November 16, 2025
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 4:30pm
Lunch and Learn: Monday, September 29, 2025 at Noon
Artist Talk: Gary Red Oak O’Neil with J. Kēhaulani Kauanui - Friday, October 24, 2025 at 4:30pm
Lunch and Learn - Monday, November 3, 2025 at Noon
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, South Gallery, Reading Room, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

Excavations, Gary Red Oak O’Neil’s solo exhibition in the South Gallery Reading Room of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, features the artist’s ceramic practice, which draws on his deep connection to the land and the materiality of the soil itself. The works include a range of styles reflecting O’Neil’s enduring career spanning nearly 60 years, along with newer pieces inspired by the current archaeological dig taking place at the Lt. John Hollister (1650-1715) site in Glastonbury, Connecticut which has uncovered Native American pottery and other belongings that offer a glimpse of the Wangunk tribe’s interactions with early 17th-century British settlers. To excavate is to ascertain, to determine, to discover that which has been hidden or lost. O’Neil’s pots and trays are vessels that carry the weight of fragmented history like the beveled edges of broken shards. As such, the exhibit speaks to layers of newfound evidence that have been submerged and recovered.

Curated by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui.

Exhibition co-sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities.

This exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, a Wangunk History Symposium, “Emerging from Erasure: Indigenous and Settler Colonial Histories of the Wangunk People,” will take place on Friday, October 24 and Saturday, October 25, 2025. Please contact Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities for more information: www.wesleyan.edu/humanities

DFT 2025
Wednesday, September 24 through Sunday, December 7, 2025
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 4:30pm
Lunch and Learn: Monday, September 29, 2025 at Noon
Lunch and Learn: Monday, November 3, 2025 at Noon
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Main Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

“Dark Forest Theory” (DFT) states that civilizations hide in an effort to preserve themselves. If they were to come out of hiding, they’d risk falling into conflict and being destroyed by another civilization. The theory is an offshoot of the Fermi paradox, which points to the distance between our lack of evidence of alien life and the (high) likelihood of its existence. Rather than applying the theory to the extraterrestrial, DFT is used here as speculative social theory, as a vehicle to explore contemporary human interaction.

The group exhibition DFT 2025 incorporates artworks by artists in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, and sound. The artworks on view and the exhibition’s curatorial strategies toy with core themes of DFT: concealment, elusiveness, and both accessibility and its opposite. The exhibition includes an expansive list of artists and artworks that map a web of relations that extend offsite. Thus the exhibition itself functions as the temporary nucleus of a network, the nodes of which emit multi-frequency transmissions on a spectrum between legibility, hiding in plain sight, and complete concealment.

The exhibition explores how individuals, particularly Black people, may gain agency through concealment. How might a practice of hiding, abstraction (as a tool and strategy), evasion, a refusal of visibility and insistence on privacy, and opting out, facilitate freedom? The artworks and artists included in the exhibition engage with these questions, at once both accessible and clandestine.

Co-curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee '00 and Sullivan Fellow in Art Salim Green '20.

This exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025; and from Tuesday, November 25 through Monday, December 1, 2025.

49th anniversary Navaratri Festival
Thursday, September 25 through Saturday, September 27, 2025

Since the 1960s, the teaching of South Indian music, dance, and the arts have been central to the Wesleyan University curriculum. Formally established in 1976, Wesleyan’s Navaratri Festival (based on the Hindu holiday) is an opportunity to celebrate this legacy, bringing together artists and scholars across campus and from throughout the world, more recently widening the focus to include representation of artforms connected to South Asia that expand the classical canon.

Highlights of the 2025 festival include a music concert by flute master Shashank Subramanyam, and the New England premiere of a gender-bending reimagining of the classical Indian epic the Mahābhārata by husband and wife dance duo Srikanth Natarajan and Aswathy Srikanth.

Traditionally a time to see family and friends, enjoy music and dance, and seek blessings for new endeavors—Wesleyan’s 49th anniversary festival is held in the same spirit of celebration, offering a full weekend of activities that includes student presentations, social gatherings, a Hindu ceremony, and an annual concert of South Indian vocal music by B. Balasubrahmaniyan and David Nelson PhD ’91.

Presented by the Center for the Arts, Music Department, and Dance Department, with leadership support from the Madhu Reddy Endowed Fund for Indian Music and Dance at Wesleyan University. For detailed information about all festival events please visit www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/navaratri. A full schedule of events will be published in August 2025.

Navaratri Festival Subscription
Subscribe and Save 30%

Navaratri Festival Subscription packages include three ticketed performances. For more information, please visit the Wesleyan University Box Office.

• Free for Wesleyan students and anyone under age 18
• $28 for senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, and non-Wesleyan students
• $36 for the general public

Offer ends on Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 7pm.

B. Balasubrahmaniyan: Vocal Music of South India
Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 7pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
$12 general public; $10 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; free for Wesleyan students and youth under 18.

Vocalist and Adjunct Professor of Music and Global South Asian Studies B. Balasubrahmaniyan will be joined by Adjunct Associate Professor of Music and Global South Asian Studies David Nelson PhD ’91 on mrdangam (double-headed drum) for their 21st anniversary Navaratri Festival concert together.

Samavesha with Srikanth Natarajan and Aswathy Srikanth
Friday, September 26, 2025 at 7pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; free for Wesleyan students and youth under 18.

In the New England premiere of Samavesha (2018), husband and wife Indian dance stars Srikanth Natarajan and Aswathy Srikanth’s gender-bending transformation of characters in the Indian epic the Mahābhārata suggest this classical text was ahead of its time. The characters in the Mahābhārata are not just male or female, they transform between male and female (and vice versa) in a process of their becoming. Samavesha—a Sanskrit term—means the “study of self,” implying an active practice, a dance of discovering truth in oneself and one’s relationship to the world.

The artists masterfully work with three Indian dance idioms—Bharatanatyam, Bhagavata Mela, and Mohiniyattam styles—originating from South India and historically thriving in a variety of sites, including royal courts and temples. Combining a rich gestural and technical movement vocabulary derived from these three expressive styles, both artists explore two characters from the epic, Ambha-Shikandi and Arjuna-Brhannala, whose evolutions rely on incredible transformations of gender and identity, including “tritya-prakriti,” an original Hindu concept of a third gender.

Srikanth Natarajan and Aswathy Srikanth started performing together in 2001, and have carved a niche for themselves in the world of South Indian classical dance with their unique performance style and choreographic prowess. They are both powerful soloists with more than two decades of experience, and their performances have won them critical and popular global acclaim. They will make their Connecticut debut at Wesleyan.

The performance will be followed by a talkback with Professor of Dance, Global South Asian Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Hari Krishnan.

Shashank Subramanyam
Saturday, September 27, 2025 at 7pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; free for Wesleyan students and youth under 18.

Shashank Subramanyam is considered one of the best bamboo flute artists in Indian classical music, and has performed in over 50 countries in a career spanning four decades. Trained in both Carnatic (South Indian) and Hindustani (North Indian) music by his father Palghat K.V. Narayanaswami and maestro Pandit Jasraj, Subramanyam started performing in 1984 at the age of six. He has collaborated with bands, orchestras, and musicians across genres including Zakir Hussain, John McLaughlin, Terry Riley, Ustad Sultan Khan, Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan, and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. Subramanyam will be accompanied by Sruthi Sarathy on violin and Patri Satish Kumar on mrdangam (double-headed drum).

Subramanyam previously performed at Wesleyan during the Navaratri Festival in October 2013.

Fries Arts Building Opening Celebration
Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 2pm
Fries Arts Building, 56 Hamlin Street, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

Celebrate the opening of the new Fries Arts Building (FAB) at Wesleyan University with an afternoon of arts events and activities. Programmed by the Director’s Council, a student team led by CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, the afternoon will feature a range of activities, performances, and exhibitions that bring out the artist in all of us. A full event schedule and list of activities will be published in August 2025.

Named in honor of Mike Fries ’85, a longtime supporter of Wesleyan, the FAB houses new performance, teaching, practice, and studio facilities, designed to combine formal and informal areas that will encourage students to collaborate across the arts.

The afternoon will include novice-friendly “Make As You Are” arts activities, an exhibition of artwork by Wesleyan faculty, concerts, and a cupcake toast to the new building. The afternoon culminates in a WesGrooves dance party featuring a West African dance lesson with Associate Professor of Dance Iddi Saaka, part of a new series of social dance events hosted by the CFA that create community connection through rigorous play and creative movement.

The Director’s Council is a student collective, advised by the Director of the CFA, that participates in setting the vision for the CFA of the future. Working to reach new audiences and integrate arts across the campus, council members serve as ambassadors and agents of arts engagement that draw together different disciplines and various forms of study at Wesleyan University through creative making. The Council is governed and operated by the students who, each year, set the collective’s agenda. Students interested in joining the council will apply through Handshake and may direct questions to Joshua Lubin-Levy at jlubinlevy@wesleyan.edu.

WesGrooves Social Dance Series: West African Dance with Iddi Saaka
Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 7pm
Fries Arts Building, 56 Hamlin Street, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

The third event in the new WesGrooves series of social dance events with a vision to create community connection through rigorous play and creative movement will feature a West African dance lesson from Associate Professor of Dance Iddi Saaka as the culmination of the opening celebration of the new Fries Arts Building.

Learn how different dances and music from across the world bring people together to move, play, and express themselves. WesGrooves is a community dance party that explores social dance styles from around the globe, offering a short introductory workshop suited for beginners and led by a visiting instructor, and open dancing to live or recorded music. All are welcome to join in a joyous atmosphere to create connection through rigorous play and creative movement.

Forgotten but Once Known: Signs of Women’s Labor in Japan
Tuesday, October 7, 2025 through Thursday, December 4, 2025
Tuesday through Friday, Noon to 4pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, October 7, 2025 at Noon; includes a celebratory luncheon.
College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center, 343 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

The exhibition Forgotten but Once Known: Signs of Women’s Labor in Japan showcases rarely-displayed works from Wesleyan’s College of East Asian Studies Art and Archival Collection in an exploration of the under-recognized contributions of Japanese women through domestic, productive, and creative labor. Through a selection of Japanese textiles, ceramics, children’s toys, and scroll painting, the exhibition traces histories of women’s roles across private and public life. Categorized under clothing, cooking, child-rearing, and emotional labor, these objects blur boundaries between art and utility while reflecting evolving societal expectations. In displaying seldom-seen works, the exhibition reclaims overlooked histories and highlights the enduring significance of women’s labor in Japan.

This exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025; and from Tuesday, November 25 through Monday, December 1, 2025.

The exhibition was curated by Chloe Duncan-Wald ’26 and Adrian Peoples ’26 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee '00. Exhibition support provided by the College of East Asian Studies.

Two tutorials in visual arts curating are offered by the Center for the Arts each year: the chance to curate an exhibition in the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center, and an opportunity to curate an exhibition in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery highlighting work from the Art Studio Senior Thesis Exhibitions that is on display through Reunion + Commencement Weekend. For more information, contact Ben Chaffee at bchaffee@wesleyan.edu.

Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus
Friday, October 17, 2025 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
$15 general public; $12 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18.

The bandura, often called Ukraine’s national instrument, tells the story of the Ukrainian people more powerfully than any textbook. The plucked-string folk instrument carries centuries of tradition, resistance, and identity. The 60-stringed bandura unifies acoustic principles of both the lute and the harp to produce a sound that is emphatic and gentle, reminiscent of a harpsichord but with greater dynamics and tonal control.

Formed in Kyiv in 1918, the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus has surmounted every challenge in modern Ukrainian history. From Joseph Stalin’s attempts to wipe out the kobzar (Ukrainian bard) tradition, to arrests and wartime exile, the ensemble survived—landing in Detroit, Michigan in 1949, where it preserved the history, spirit, and strength of Ukraine, banned for over 70 years under Soviet rule. The Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus has been awarded the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian State Prize and the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts category in the United States. Today, as Ukraine defends itself against a full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus is a powerful symbol of cultural survival.

This will be the first concert by the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus in Connecticut since 2007.

ARTS DEPARTMENTS

True North
Sunday, November 2, 2025 at 3pm
Memorial Chapel, 221 High Street, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

A concert by True North—Wesleyan Cello Instructor Julie Ribchinsky, violinist Artemis Simerson, and pianist Bill Braun—will feature performances of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Trio Op. 97 ("Archduke") and Rebecca Clarke's Piano Trio (1921), plus the world premiere of a new commissioned work, True North, written for the group by Darian Simerson.

Formed in 2024, the piano trio True North is passionately dedicated to presenting the best of chamber music repertoire in New England. The three Connecticut musicians had previously performed in various combinations for over 40 years.

Cellist Julie Ribchinsky teaches cello at Wesleyan University, and is a Professor Emeritus at Central Connecticut State University. A founding member of the Connecticut Trio, for many decades Ribchinsky performed with violinist Gerard Rosa and pianist Linda Laurent in yearly concerts at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Ribchinsky performs often throughout the area as a soloist and recitalist.

Violinist Artemis Simerson was the Assistant Concertmaster of the New Haven Symphony for 30 years until 2022, and she continues to teach violin at Choate Rosemary Hall. She participates in numerous musical performances in the Wall Street Chamber Players and in recordings, and she is delighted to have time to share her great love of the piano trio repertoire.

Pianist William Braun plays principal keyboards for the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, and is a professor at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford. He has written more than 300 articles for Opera News magazine. He has made recordings for Koch Classics and the PBS TV series American Masters.

Marta Becket, Save Us All
Thursday, November 13 and Friday, November 14, 2025 at 8pm
Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 2pm and 8pm
Fries Arts Building, 56 Hamlin Street, Middletown, Connecticut
$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, and youth under 18.

“Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?”
–Marta Becket

Marta Becket, Save Us All is a new performance inspired by the life of Marta Becket, a Broadway dancer who left New York at the height of her career, moved into an empty opera house in an abandoned desert town, painted an entire audience on its walls, and performed there for the next 40 years whether anyone was there to watch or not.

Conceived and directed by Associate Professor of Theater Katie Pearl, this Wesleyan Theater Department production will feature a student cast, and will be created in rehearsal, taking inspiration from Becket’s life, vaudeville performance, artistic obsession, using “getting lost” as a strategy for finding oneself, and dust devils.

Fall Faculty Dance Concert: Movement of the People Dance Company
Friday, November 21 and Saturday, November 22, 2025 at 7pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$8

Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance and African American Studies Joya Powell’s Movement of the People Dance Company returns to Wesleyan to celebrate their 20th anniversary. Since 2005, Powell’s company has been dedicated to connecting cultures, community engagement, and composing multidisciplinary, immersive, socially-conscious choreography. The performance will feature excerpts from repertory works performed by company members, Wesleyan students, and alumni.