Center for the Arts

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

Middletown, Conn.—Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) continues the celebration of its 50th year with a spring semester featuring an anniversary exhibition and live performances by alumni, plus staged readings and workshops on campus.

Highlights of the CFA's 2024 spring season include “Always Being Relation,” an exhibition in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery which puts in dialogue work by artists who studied at Wesleyan with artists who have exhibited their work in the gallery since its opening; Scapegoat Garden, under the direction of Deborah Goffe MA ’19, presenting the latest iteration of her work “Liturgy|Order|Bridge;” Brooklyn, New York-based performance ensemble Urban Bush Women leading a community dance workshop, “Dance for Every Body;” and a staged reading of the one-act play “The Elephant Is Very Like,” written by Ankita Raturi, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, and produced by Malaika Fernandes ’23.

Pianist Donald Berman ’84 returns to Wesleyan to perform works by Charles Ives (1874-1954) in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Ives' birth, and the world premiere of a commissioned work by Eve Beglarian, “as syllable from sound.” For the 21st annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend, Craig Harris’ sextet will make their Connecticut debut, performing the music of saxophonist Sam Rivers (1923–2011) in celebration of Rivers’ centennial anniversary.

“As the CFA’s 50th anniversary continues, we’re also spending time rethinking the legacy of artists who have touched our spaces, the impacts they’ve made, and how this might provide guidance for the future,” said Center for the Arts Director Joshua Lubin-Levy ’06. “From an alumni exhibition in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery that rethinks the very concept of the ‘alum,’ to Scapegoat Garden’s performance which is based on a deep community work to imagine a liturgy for this place, how does art give us tools to build new kinds of collectivity across space and time?”

“We turn to art, in times of trouble, in order to make sense of a disordered world,” said Dean of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Music Roger Mathew Grant. “The works brought together for the spring '24 season at the CFA form a pathway through that disorder, with embodied interventions by Deborah Goffe and the Urban Bush Women guiding the way.”

Tickets and reservations for spring events at the Center for the Arts are on sale now online at www.wesleyan.edu/boxoffice. Tickets will also be available starting on Monday, January 29, 2024 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. 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.

LIVE PERFORMANCE

Scapegoat Garden: “Liturgy|Order|Bridge”
Friday, February 9, 2024 at 7pm
Saturday, February 10, 2024 at 2pm and 7pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18.

"Liturgy|Order|Bridge is…inspired by communal embodiment in the Black church."
—Berkshire Magazine

“In our gardens flowers grow to human scale, liturgical vestments adorn more than one body at the same time — we just might bloom ourselves as we sing together, clap together, find virtuosity in a chorus of step touches and bear witness.”
—Deborah Goffe

Scapegoat Garden, directed by Deborah Goffe MA ’19, presents the latest iteration of “Liturgy|Order|Bridge,” a participatory dance ritual that fuses sacred traditions and secular performance modalities to make porous the border between audience and performance. Calling on Black church traditions, a group of performers, along with a chorus of local artists and change-makers, brings guests into a collective score of movement, clapping, and vocalization.

Drawing from practices of Black cultural and religious life, the work is a contemporary ceremony for gathering—through acts of care, hospitality, and shared witness. “Liturgy|Order|Bridge” stages an encounter through which participants can identify and establish shared connections among and to one another in ways that ripple out beyond the performance itself.

“Liturgy|Order|Bridge” has been developed with support from Creative Capital; and from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) “New Work New England” program, whose support is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Rescue Plan, Seedlings Foundation, the Fund for the Arts at NEFA, and individual donors.

The work was also incubated during a Pillow Lab Residency at Jacob’s Pillow, and is co-commissioned by the Prior Performing Arts Center at the College of the Holy Cross.

An early iteration of the piece was part of “New England Dance on Tour” at Wesleyan in February 2020.

“Dance for Every Body:” A Workshop with Urban Bush Women
Friday, February 9, 2024 at 4:30pm
Bessie Schönberg Dance Studio, 247 Pine Street, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE! Registration required.

This 90-minute movement jam/dance class led by members of the Brooklyn, New York-based performance ensemble Urban Bush Women embraces the ideas that each individual has a unique and powerful contribution to make, and that our bodies are a powerful source of agency. The goal is for “every body” to find their level of challenge and comfort and partake according to their abilities, and to appreciate the groups’ diversity as an attribute to their community. This is a movement class designed for the community so no prior dance experience is needed. Participants explore the dance company’s technique with close attention to the use of breath, weight, call and response, and polyrhythm.

Members of Urban Bush Women taught Wesleyan students choreography during the “Common Moment” in August 2023. Read Wesleyan’s Newest Class Shares a ‘Common Moment’ with Collaborative Dance Experience in The Wesleyan Connection. 

Wesleyan has a long-standing relationship with Urban Bush Women and the company’s founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, including residencies and performances, as well as the company being one of the partnering organizations for the University’s Embodying Antiracism Initiative.

“The Elephant Is Very Like:” A Staged Reading
Thursday, February 15, 2024 at 7:30pm
Theater Department Studio, 275 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE!

When we speak, whose language are we speaking? What language can we call our own?

Written by Ankita Raturi, the one-act play “The Elephant Is Very Like” tells the story of a woman who cannot say any words that have not been spoken to her, and a man who tries and fails and tries again to help her. Together, they reach for multilingual poetry, prose, and the South Asian dance forms of kathak and bharatanatyam in their pursuit of a language of her own.

Staged over a week of intensive rehearsals, “The Elephant Is Very Like” will be brought to life by Wesleyan students in a reading directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar and produced by Malaika Fernandes ’23, in consultation with Assistant Professor of Theater Maria-Christina Oliveras and Professor of Dance, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Global South Asian Studies Hari Krishnan.

A post-show conversation with some of the artists will follow the performance.

The play has previously been developed at workshops in New York in 2019, and readings in San Diego in 2020. Co-presented by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, the Fries Center for Global Studies, and the Theater Department.

This reading is being held in conjunction with the Fries Center for Global Studies’ second annual “Power of Language Week,” organized by Global Language and Outreach Fellow Thais García Bagué ’23. An opportunity to celebrate multilingualism and embrace the language community that exists on campus, “Power of Language Week” events are held in celebration of the Bengali Language Movement, International Mother Language Day, and Ekushey February—a worldwide annual observance held on February 21 to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism.

Donald Berman Piano Concert: “Other Transcendentalists”
Friday, April 5, 2024 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE!

Pianist Donald Berman ’84 returns to Wesleyan to perform a solo piano program, which pairs two works by 20th-century iconoclast composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Ives' birth - Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass. 1840-60” and “Impression of the St. Gaudens in Boston Common (Black March)” - with four newly commissioned musical portraits of women who were pivotal figures in American Transcendentalism, written by Eve Beglarian, David Sanford, Marti Epstein, and Elena Ruehr. This concert will be the world premiere of Eve Beglarian’s work "as syllable from sound." Berman previously performed “Celebrating Chopin's 200th Birthday” as part of the Crowell Concert Series on campus in November 2010.

Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend: Craig Harris and Friends Play the Music of Sam Rivers
Saturday, April 27, 2024 at 7pm
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.

Trombonist, composer, and bandleader Craig Harris has performed around the world with a wide range of progressive jazz luminaries, including Sam Rivers, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Charlie Haden, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and Oliver Lake, since 1976. At Wesleyan, Harris’ sextet will make their Connecticut debut, performing the music of saxophonist Sam Rivers (1923–2011) in celebration of Rivers’ centennial anniversary at 8pm. A brilliantly innovative composer, Rivers taught at Wesleyan in the early 1970s. Harris will be joined by David Murray on tenor saxophone, Don Byron on clarinets, Jerome Jennings on drums, Alexis Marcelo on piano, and Jordyn Davis on bass. The concert opens at 7pm with a 45-minute set performed by members of the Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra, directed by Professor of Music and African American Studies Jay Hoggard ’76, MA ’91. This concert is the conclusion of the 21st annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend. Don Byron previously performed "Jungle Music for Postmoderns" as part of the Crowell Concert Series on campus in February 2002.

EXHIBITIONS

“Always Being Relation:” 50 Years of the Gallery at the CFA
Tuesday, January 30 through Sunday, March 3, 2024
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Exhibition Opening Party: Tuesday, January 30, 2024 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE!

There is a tradition at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery of celebrating anniversaries with exhibitions that reflect on the legacy of Wesleyan alumni artists. For “Always Being Relation,” the gallery’s 50th anniversary exhibition, the notion of "alumni” expands beyond its conventional definition of University graduates, putting in dialogue work by artists who studied at Wesleyan with visiting artists who have exhibited in the gallery since its opening in 1973.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from Gertrude Stein’s “Lectures in America” (1935). In her talk “Plays,” Stein speaks about the function of relationality within landscape in the theater. Even without moving, the individual aspects of the landscape are always in relation to one another, “the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other.” In Stein’s treatment everything is contingent except for the presence of relationality itself.

For the past 50 years, the gallery has presented the works of both students and visiting artists. Though these exhibitions are usually not at the same time, they have always been in relation. This exhibition will bring both together amidst ephemera and images from the gallery’s archives, examining the multifarious histories of the space and its role in bringing contemporary art into conversation with the liberal arts at Wesleyan for the last five decades.

Although it is not an exhaustive survey, the exhibition helps us to consider many different narratives that have transpired or are transpiring in the gallery, looking at how relationships between the gallery’s walls and the artists/artworks presented within them have formed. As Stein put it, “the story is only of importance if you like to tell or like to hear a story but the relation is there anyway.”

Artists include Janet Biggs, Daniel Buren, Julien Creuzet, Anthony Discenza ’90, Vincent Fecteau ’92, Tony Feher, Ariadne Fish, Renée Green ’81, Salim Green ’20, Lyle Ashton Harris ’88, Rachel Harrison ’89, Elana Herzog, Dana Hoey ’89, Kahlil Robert Irving, Karrabing Film Collective, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon ’82, Hon. ’12, Alvin Lucier, Melissa Marks ’87, P ’23, Nick Raffel, Cameron Rowland ’11, Fred Sandback, Aki Sasamoto ’04, Beverly Semmes, Cindy Sherman, Diane Simpson, Jessica Stockholder, virgil b/g taylor ’15, Franz Erhard Walther, Andrew Witkin ’00, and Carrie Yamaoka ’79.

Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00, with Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox. Special thanks to 2023 Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery Exhibitions Interns Madeleine Levinsohn ’23 and Emmett Levy ’24.

RELATED EVENTS

Karrabing Film Collective: Film Screening and Conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Bajalia
Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at 4:30pm
Zilkha Uncommons Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE!

The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery presents a screening of the Karrabing Film Collective’s most recent film, “Night Fishing with Ancestors” (2023, 25 minutes), followed by a conversation with founding member of the collective Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Assistant Professor of Anthropology George Bajalia as part of the gallery’s 50th anniversary programming.

The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots media group that comprises approximately thirty members of different generations, most of whom live in the Belyuen Community in Australia’s Northern Territory. The work of the collective dramatizes and satirizes the political, social, and economic conditions faced by the indigenous population in Australia, challenging historical and contemporary structures of settler colonial power. The Karrabing Film Collective was included in the gallery’s group exhibition “A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS” in 2020.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective and has known and worked with the members since 1984. She is also an anthropologist, activist, and Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University.

Artist in Conversation: Carrie Yamaoka and Claire Grace
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 4:30pm
Zilkha Uncommons Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE!

Artist Carrie Yamaoka ’79 and Claire Grace, Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies, and Program Director of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Wesleyan University, will be in conversation on the occasion of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery’s current anniversary exhibition “Always Being Relation: 50 Years of the Gallery at the CFA,” and Yamaoka’s most recent solo exhibition in the gallery, “seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again,” which was presented in 2023.