Center for the Arts

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts announces highlights of 2024 fall season

Middletown, Conn.—Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) announces the highlights of their 2024 fall season, including the first public staged reading of a new work by artist in residence Anna Deavere Smith, a work-in-progress showing by artist in residence Sunny Jain, two complimentary concurrent solo exhibitions featuring paintings and sound works by Justin Caguiat and sculptures by Grant Mooney, and the 48th annual Navaratri Festival celebrating the diversity of Indian music and dance.

“I invite students, faculty, and visitors to consider the CFA as more than a space, but rather as a conceptual laboratory for moving between thought and action, from critical thinking to embodied knowledge,” said Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, Director of the Center for the Arts.

Wesleyan’s CFA is also co-presenting the Connecticut debut of the National Theatre from Osaka, Japan. The company will be performing traditional bunraku Japanese puppet theater at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts.

Wesleyan’s Dance Department presents two world premiere dance works choreographed by Hari Krishnan and Patricia Beaman. The Music Department presents three world premiere works by Neely Bruce, and a retrospective of compositions by I.M. Harjito for the Javanese gamelan including the world premiere of a commissioned work. And the Theater Department presents a production of the play “Of Government” directed by Katie Pearl.

“These projects, like much of the programming this season, challenge us to re-route our contemporary creative impulses through tradition,” said Roger Mathew Grant, Dean of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Music.

Tickets and reservations for fall events at the Center for the Arts are on sale now online at www.wesleyan.edu/boxoffice. Tickets will also 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 starting on Tuesday, September 3, 2024. 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.

EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES

Justin Caguiat: Triple Solitaire
Tuesday, September 17 through Sunday, December 8, 2024
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, September 17, 2024 from 4:30pm to 6pm
Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

Artist Justin Caguiat presents his first institutional solo exhibition Triple Solitaire, in which he combines three large abstract paintings made with pigments that oxidize in response to the environment in a singular panoramic triptych with sound works suspended from the ceiling.

In Caguiat’s hands, painting is a slow cinema. His work spans a nostalgia for imagery of the past while speculating on possible futures, expressing a duration that brings together multiple temporalities in the present of the gallery. Triple Solitaire is anchored by three large canvases, abstractions that take time to perceive but also index time through their densely-layered compositions. Even the pigment the artist uses marks time, designed to oxidize in response to the environment in which it’s situated. As the painted images themselves transform, sometimes at a rate imperceptible to the human eye, sound works by the artist suspended from the ceiling immerse the viewer in a different rhythm, a soundtrack to the experience of seeing that itself conditions the viewing experience.

Caguiat’s practice extends across different mediums—painting, sculpture, film, poetry, and sound—and draws on a variety of references to the aesthetics and affective memory of his youth growing up in 1990s Tokyo. At the same time the artist also leans into abstraction. For Caguiat, it is more interesting how his works accrete or defer meaning rather than how they resolve in fixed or knowable images. Similarly, the paintings installed in Triple Solitaire do not assert a sense of fixity or objecthood. They are presented on unstretched canvases inside frames, leaving exposed the textiles’ edges.

The three large abstract paintings installed along the three recessed walls of Zilkha’s Main Gallery comprise a triptych, a singular panoramic work. The panorama, a type of painting popular in Europe and the United States in the 19th century, once presented audiences with the possibility of an immersive viewing experience where the distinction between image and reality could be blurred. As a means of instantly transporting the viewer into an imaginary world, the panorama is a technology of seeing bound up with fantasizing other, different worlds that hold the potential to be both violent and utopian. In making these paintings, Caguiat was particularly interested in “locality paradox,” a phenomenon associated with the panorama wherein a viewer loses awareness of their actual location. How might this experience be altered with a non-representational panorama? Further disrupting the panoramic function of his imagery, Caguiat’s triptych is divided by the gallery’s limestone buttresses as they intersect the white walls.

The exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 19 through Tuesday, October 22, 2024; and from Tuesday, November 26 through Monday, December 2, 2024.

Grant Mooney: calcis
Tuesday, September 17 through Sunday, December 8, 2024
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, September 17, 2024 from 4:30pm to 6pm
Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

In calcis, artist Grant Mooney uses sculptural works made from calcium carbonate in response to the materials and processes of the limestone bricks that are the building blocks of the Center for the Arts, which opened in the fall of 1973.

The works in calcis center the processes embedded in the building, including the routines and functions in what constitutes its various activities, but also its chemical compositions. Calcium carbonate and its material properties are a foreground of Mooney’s practice while also the core architectural component of the gallery’s limestone brick walls. The exhibition extends into the labor production of exhibitions by utilizing existing physical supports as installation elements within the space.

The Center for the Arts is comprised of hundreds of Indiana limestone bricks which were cast and assembled on site. Limestone is a type of rock formed of crystalline calcium carbonate from deposits of seashells. Calcium carbonate is the predominant chemical compound found in cuttlebone, the cartilaginous internal shell of the cuttlefish. Cuttlebone is used for carving and casting metals within jewelry-making practices. Originally trained in jewelry design, Mooney has used cuttlebone in a number of sculptures, foregrounding the material in exhibitions at Progetto in Lecce, Italy (2023) where limestone is a predominant architectural material, and at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York City (2022) where limestone can be found in the gallery’s floor tiles.

calcis, Mooney’s solo exhibition in the North Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, continues the artist’s sculptural practice of attending to the hyper-relational way materials shape and are shaped by their proximal surroundings. Working with the received conditions of the space, Mooney’s work departs from the materiality of the gallery’s limestone bricks.

Though carefully attuned to the social extensions and technological production of this material, Mooney’s approach to sculpture is articulated through forms of ornamentation and touch, paying close attention to the formal and dynamic relationship between often overlooked elements of an environment. For Mooney, artworks are deeply entangled entities.

For calcis, this attuned relationality is also expressed through the interaction of another active material in Mooney’s practice, light. In his words, light itself has “a material consequence,” transitioning substances in and out of visual presence. In front of the large windows leading into Zilkha’s North Gallery, Mooney will install kinetic sculptures, and in the gallery itself, which is partially-illuminated by an ocular skylight, he will suspend a sculpture, activating the vertical axis of the space.

The exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 19 through Tuesday, October 22, 2024; and from Tuesday, November 26 through Monday, December 2, 2024.

Sunny Jain: Love Force
Friday, September 27, 2024 at 8pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students and youth under 18.

Catch a preview of the latest music theater work by composer Sunny Jain, the 2023–2024 CFA Artist in Residence.

Love Force draws on the musician’s family’s experiences to create an immersive performance inspired by the concept satyāgraha (which means “insistence or holding firmly to truth.”) Coined by Mahatma Gandhi during his nonviolent protest against British colonialism in India, and also adapted by B.R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as “soul force” and “love force,” satyāgraha is both a theory and a method of enveloping the oppressor with compassion. Through a deeply personal journey, Love Force draws parallels between the Hindu caste system in India and the history of American racism. In doing so, the work makes vibrant the power of performance to bring unity to audiences—a power Jain likens to a “collective effervescence” that can be essential in confronting ongoing systems of oppression.

As music meets storytelling, Jain takes the audience on a journey that questions cultural traditions and religious dogma, reflecting on the multiple identities that many immigrant families confront in the process of staying connected to the past and imagining new futures. Ranging from baraat music (South Asian wedding processionals) to progressive rock, Jain’s influences also include Bollywood classics recalled from his youth as well as his training in the Black American jazz tradition, sonically reflecting the multiplicity of Jain’s own identities, a harmony of differences that cannot be expressed in words alone.

Created and conceived by Sunny Jain. Performed by Sunny Jain, Almog Sharvit, Alison Shearer, David Adewumi, Armando Vergara, and Julia Chen. Directed by Katie Pearl, Assistant Professor of Theater. Lighting/Projection Design by Courtney Gaston, Assistant Professor of Theater and Design and Engineering Studies. Additional support from graduate music student Shawn O’Sullivan, Asher Weintraub ’26, Tanvi Navile ’25, and Akhil Joondeph ’26.

This event is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is presented as part of the University initiative Democracy 2024: www.wesleyan.edu/d2024

National Bunraku Theater
Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 7:30pm
Quick Center for the Arts, Fairfield University, 200 Barlow Road, Fairfield, Connecticut
Free for Wesleyan students, faculty, staff, and alumni: reserve through the Wesleyan University Box Office.
$35 for the general public: buy tickets through the Quick Center for the Arts Box Office at quickcenter.fairfield.edu.

See a stunning production of traditional Japanese puppet theater as the National Theatre from Osaka, Japan returns to the United States for the first time in nearly two decades. Bunraku, a traditional puppetry theater of Japan created in the 1700s as popular entertainment, involves sung narrative, instrumental accompaniment, and strikingly delicate and realistic movements as three highly trained puppeteers control each puppet. Bunraku has been designated as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO.

This production features two quintessential climaxes from bunraku repertoire: “The Forest by the Tenjin Shrine” scene from The Love Suicide at Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinju), a tragic tale written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, often referred to as Japan’s Shakespeare; and “The Fire Watchtower” scene from Oshichi, the Greengrocer’s Daughter (Date Musume Koi no Higanoko), which depicts a woman’s desperate act to save her lover. With scenography by Kazuo Oga, art director of classic Studio Ghibli anime My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, this performance offers Americans a rare opportunity to glimpse the rich culture not only of bunraku, but of Japan’s second-largest city ahead of Expo 2025, which will be held in Osaka.

The U.S. tour of National Bunraku Theater is produced by Japan Society under partnership with Japan Arts Council, which is supported, in part, by Japan Cultural Expo 2.0, All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., Kikkoman Corporation, and Suntory Holdings Limited. The program is also supported by John and Miyoko Davey Foundation, and Takenaka Corporation. The company’s Connecticut premiere is co-presented by Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts and Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts.

48th annual Navaratri Festival
Navaratri, one of India’s major festival celebrations, is a time to see family and friends, enjoy music and dance, and seek blessings for new endeavors. Wesleyan’s 48th annual festival celebrates the diversity of Indian music and dance from October 10 through October 12, 2024. Co-sponsored 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.

K. S. Subramanian: Music Department Colloquium Lecture–“Vina in Voice in Vina”
Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall, Room 003 (Daltry Room), 60 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

Vina is a historic name in India, a national instrument. But a recent evolution into the current form has brought a different perspective to the raga classification through a scheme of 72 melas attributed to Venkatamakhi (fl.c 1630). A raga is a pattern of notes used as a basis for improvisation, while a mela is a scale. Technically it is called ‘Saraswathi Vina.’ In the performance parlance it is just called vina.

In this colloquium, K. S. Subramanian will be presenting a perspective on vina, as a vina (large plucked string instrument) player, still toiling with ideas of improving upon its use in different platforms as its chances of concert platform appearances have dwindled greatly. Although the reasons for such a state can be pointed out by scholars, what Subramanian intends highlighting here are: 1. observations and experiments in using this instrument to its full advantage, through a fretting system they have devised to adhere to the just intonation, with minor adjustments to bring to a state of accuracy in the tonal positioning of the 24 frets, resulting in octaval unity. 2. The techniques in playing vina to go beyond the stylistic boundaries to make use of this instrument to its full potential, contextually relevant. 3. The concepts of vina in voice and voice in vina, meaning a metaphorical interplay of vina in the body, akin to the ‘chakras’ (centers of spiritual power in the human body) from the point of view of yoga and the vina characteristics in singing voice.

B. Balasubrahmaniyan: Vocal Music of South India
Friday, October 11, 2024 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 B. Balasubrahmaniyan is joined by David Nelson PhD ’91 on mridangam (double-headed drum) for their 20th annual Navaratri Festival concert together. Both are Adjunct Associate Professors of Music and Global South Asian Studies. They will be joined by violinist Shri. V.V.S. Murari, and Shri. K.V. Gopalakrishnan on kanjira (frame drum).

Saraswati Puja (Hindu Ceremony)
Saturday, October 12, 2024 at 2:30pm
World Music Hall, 40 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown Connecticut
Free admission.

Saraswati Puja is a Hindu ceremony that marks the most auspicious day of the year for beginning new endeavors. Open to all, this service is led by Joseph Getter MA ’99 and invites audiences to participate to bring instruments, manuscripts, and other items associated with learning, creativity, and knowledge–making for blessing.

Indian Dance Showcase
Saturday, October 12, 2024 at 3pm
World Music Hall, 40 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

Connecticut-based choreographers Sarada Nori and Rachna Agrawal will be joined by Wesleyan students Akhil Joondeph '26 and Tanvi Navile '25 to showcase short performances from a range of different classical dance styles, including North Indian Kathak, South Indian Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam, and Odissi from Eastern India. The performance will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Hari Krishnan, Professor of Dance, Global South Asian Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Rachna Agrawal runs the Sumbhaav School, which teaches North Indian Kathak Dance in Hartford, Norwalk, Newington, and Stamford, Connecticut. She is Artistic Director for the Sumbhaav Dance Project and the Rasa Dance Project, and is a visiting lecturer at Trinity College in Hartford. She has been a State of Connecticut Commission on the Arts “Master Teaching Artist” since 1993.

Akhil Joondeph '26, a double major in Anthropology and Dance, has trained in the Odissi dance style of Eastern India, other indigenous South Asian dance forms, and various disciplines including contemporary, modern, West African, and hip hop dance.

Tanvi Navile '25, a double major in Psychology and Sociology, previously performed the South Indian dance form Bharatanatyam as part of the staged reading of “The Elephant Is Very Like” in the Theater Department Studio in February 2024.

Sarada Nori has performed the South Indian Kuchipudi dance style for over two decades, and is the Founder and Artistic Director of Layavinyasa company in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Kuchipudi combines ritual dances, courtly dance repertoire, and theatrical dance drama to embody stories from ancient Hindu scripture.

Tea and Samosa with Shakti
Saturday, October 12, 2024 at 4:15pm
World Music Hall, 40 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

Enjoy South Asian cuisine and gather with friends around a sampling of samosa (savory fried pastry) and tea, hosted by Shakti, Wesleyan’s South Asian Students’ Association.

Navaratri Festival Panel Discussion
Saturday, October 12, 2024 at 5pm
World Music Hall, 40 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

This panel discussion will focus on the history of the Navaratri Festival at Wesleyan, convened and moderated by graduate music student Hansini Bhasker.

V.V. Subrahmanyam: Violin Concert
Saturday, October 12, 2024 at 8pm
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.

One of the finest violinists in classical Karnatak (South Indian) music, Shri. V.V. Subrahmanyam returns to campus for his 80th anniversary concert, joined by fellow violinist Shri. V.V.S. Murari, Shri. Trichy Sankaran on mridangam (double-headed drum), Shri. K.V. Gopalakrishnan on kanjira (frame drum), and Smt. Banu Jaiganesh on tampura (four-stringed harmonic instrument).

Navaratri Festival Subscription
Subscribe and Save 30%

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

• Free for Wesleyan students and anyone under age 18
• $17.50 for senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, and non-Wesleyan students
• $22 for the general public

Offer ends on Friday, October 11, 2024 at 7pm.

Anna Deavere Smith: This Ghost of Slavery
Sunday, October 27, 2024 at 3pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18.

With her newest play, This Ghost of Slavery, Anna Deavere Smith combines her signature interview-based documentary theater with research into the archives of American slavery. Exploring the deep roots of historical trauma as it persists in the present, the play also considers how performance might provide new ways of
understanding the collective stories we tell ourselves as individuals and as a nation.

Set in Baltimore and Annapolis, the story is set within a college campus and moves between the 1860s and the present as actors play multiple roles. Drawing from interviews with social justice workers associated with the nonprofit organization Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), which seeks to reduce gun violence and help young people ensnared in gangs or the juvenile justice system, Smith weaves these contemporary voices with primary research in 19th-century archives, transcripts, and diaries (especially on “apprenticeship laws”) to extend her examination of the school-to-prison pipeline to the long legacy of American slavery.

Performed by a cast that includes professional actors and undergraduate artists at Wesleyan University, this staged reading will be followed by a discussion. This event marks the first in a series of engagements that Smith, the 2024–2025 CFA Artist in Residence, is devising with the Center for the Arts to further examine performance as a way of knowing. More information is available at wesleyan.edu/cfa/residencies.

This Ghost of Slavery was originally written for The Atlantic magazine and published in the December 2023 issue. The work is only the second full length play published since the magazine’s first issue in 1857.

Co-produced with the Long Wharf Theatre. Co-sponsored by Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. Presented as part of the University initiative Democracy 2024: www.wesleyan.edu/d2024

ARTS DEPARTMENTS

This Is It! 2.0: The Complete Chamber Music of Neely Bruce—Part IV
Sunday, September 15, 2024 at 3pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

Featuring the chamber music of Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, this festive concert includes the world premiere of Fantasy Variations for oboe, violin, viola, and cello based on Interlude No. 3 from Bruce’s The Bill of Rights: Ten Amendments in Eight Motets. The new work will be performed by Stephen Wade on oboe, Deborah Tyler on violin, Gretchen Frazier on viola, and Thomas Hudson on cello. The concert will also feature the world premieres of A Fugue with Two Subjects for Sam Lowe and A Double Fugue for Ellen and Harvey Knell. And baritone Christopher Grundy will sing “A Garland of Sacred Song.”

Javanese Gamelan in the World: A Concert of Traditional and Hybrid Compositions of I.M. Harjito
Friday, October 4, 2024 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free admission.

The Wesleyan Javanese Gamelan Ensemble and guest artists perform a retrospective of compositions by I.M. Harjito, University Professor of Music, under the direction of the composer and Sumarsam MA ’76, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music. The concert will include the world premiere of the commissioned work “Lancaran Amerika” by Harjito.

Harjito is regarded as one of the finest Javanese musicians of his generation, with an approach to composing that moves between classical Javanese style and contemporary idioms, at times including instruments such as bagpipes and erhu (two-stringed bowed musical instrument) that place the gamelan in dialogue with other musical traditions.

Harjito has made immense contributions to the cultural interactions between the United States and Indonesia, teaching multiple generations of students at Wesleyan University, the University of California, Brown University, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts, as well as at the Consulate General of Indonesia in New York. As a guest artist, he has performed throughout the United States and abroad, and appeared on numerous recordings of jazz and world music.

For this concert, the Gamelan Ensemble will be joined by Javanese musicians teaching at United States universities, including internationally-renowned Indonesian vocalist Peni Candra Rini. A composer and professor of music at Indonesia’s national Institute of the Arts, Candra Rini was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet for their “50 for the Future” project, creating the work Maduswara in 2020. She was also a 2023 Fulbright Visiting Artist Scholar at the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University.

This concert was organized by Wayne Forrest ’74, MA ’77 and is sponsored by the American Indonesian Cultural and Educational Foundation in collaboration with the Asia Society and Wesleyan University, marking the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Indonesia.

This program will be presented again on Saturday, October 5, 2024 at the Asia Society in New York.

Of Government
Thursday, November 7 and Friday, November 8, 2024 at 8pm
Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 2pm and 8pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, and youth under 18.

“Does government have a gender? What if we gendered it differently?”
—Agnes Borinsky, playwright

Katie Pearl, Assistant Professor of Theater, directs Agnes Borinsky’s Of Government (2017)—a queer and hopeful play about making theater and making society. The piano-playing host Ms. Marjorie Blaine and a cast of loveable oddballs—including Barb the Teacher, Deb the Seeker, Heidi the Helper, Tawny the Addict, and Heather the Capitalist—lead the audience through a handmade civic pageant featuring a mermaid musicale alongside scenes and songs of breakdown and possibility. If the question is “what is government?” then we’re just gonna figure it out together. With sequins.

Agnes Borinsky (she/they) is a writer, performer, and theater-maker based in Los Angeles. She is interested in the unintended transformations that become possible when the things we’ve planned fail. Her projects include many plays, including The Trees, A Song of Songs, and Ding Dong It’s the Ocean, the experiments in participation Working Group for a New Spirit and Weird Classrooms, and the fiction novel Sasha Masha. She has made work in collaboration with theater institutions such as Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, and Clubbed Thumb,
and outside of them in basements, backyards, circus tents, community centers, and online.

This event is presented as part of the University initiative Democracy 2024: www.wesleyan.edu/d2024

Fall Faculty Dance Concert: inDANCE and Patricia Beaman
Friday, December 6 and Saturday, December 7, 2024 at 7pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$8 general public; $6 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, youth under 18.

ROWDIES IN LOVE is the latest work by inDANCE led by award-winning choreographer Hari Krishnan, Professor of Dance, Global South Asian Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Eight male dancers blaze through an inspired and inventive movement vocabulary, queering bharatanatyam and contemporary dance from global perspectives. The work is a transformative act that uses dance to resist the continued oppression of queer people, created in response to the prevailing socio-political context in parts of Asia, especially India and Singapore, where Krishnan has roots. The piece is set to a soundscape by United Kingdom-based composer Niraj Chag, winner of an Asian Music Award. Support for this work has been provided by a production grant from the National Dance Project and a Jacob’s Pillow Lab residency.

ROWDIES IN LOVE will be followed by The Jewel Thief both evenings.

The Jewel Thief is an exciting collaboration of Neo-Baroque dance-drama based on Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller To Catch a Thief (1955). Choreographed by Patricia Beaman, University Professor of Dance, and composed by Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, this lavish spectacle weaves the past with the present, drawing inspiration from Madame Sévigné’s reminiscences of the fêtes of King Louis XIV’s court, the 1920s Modernist costume parties of the Bauhaus, and Truman Capote’s infamous Black and White Ball of 1966. Bruce will conduct the live performance of his evocative score, which interlaces Baroque and Modern motifs. The ensemble will include Piano Instructor Carolyn Halsted, as well as Charles Yassky, Alex Waterman, Cynthia Knotts, and Nola Campbell.