Tag: Arts

  • Nation & World

    Sing a song of praise

    Every Monday a small group of students gathers in Andover Hall for a sacred musical journey.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Remembering the ‘American War’ of the ’60s

    How do nations remember? In part, they remember through monuments — public art designed to capture a national memory and carry it through the ages.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Paulus reaches beyond boards

    Clad in black and white, her brown hair loose about her shoulders, her green eyes intense, Diane Paulus sits in her office and smiles. Against the window rests a stolen treasure from her days as a Harvard freshman, a poster of the American Repertory Theater’s (A.R.T.) production of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Handel’s ‘Saul’ to be performed in memory of John Raymond Ferris

    The Harvard University Choir and the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra will present Handel’s magnificent oratorio “Saul” on April 26. The performance is dedicated to the memory of John Raymond Ferris, University organist and choirmaster from 1958-1990, who passed away last summer.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Seniors Buzney, Barron win Mellinger Award

    Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) members Catherine Buzney ’09 and Christine Barron ’09 have been named recipients of the Rachel Mellinger Memorial Award.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Inaugural Playwrights’ Festival

    Eleven undergraduate playwrights will present staged readings of their plays as part of the inaugural Harvard Playwrights’ Festival, held April 23-26 in New College Theatre. The plays will be performed with the collaboration of professional directors, graduate actors, and dramaturges from the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Playwrights find a venue

    Chris Gummerson ’12 was driving past the headquarters of a scrapple factory in a small town when an idea for a musical came to her. What if the town’s livelihood depended on the factory, and what if a USDA official made a surprise visit that culminated in a product-recall panic, and what if the meat-eating…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Roughing it on Great Brewster

    On the hot day of July 15, 1891, four women set off for the adventure of a lifetime in Boston Harbor. For nearly two weeks the quartet — well-educated, upper-class women from the Lowell area — “roughed it” in a quaint yet ramshackle cottage on remote Great Brewster Island, a place they considered “an enchanted…

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Yannatos retires after 45 years, concert planned

    With music filling his ears, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) Conductor James Yannatos will retire after 45 years by giving his final concert on April 17.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Jehn is appointed director of the Harvard College Writing Program

    Thomas R. Jehn, an expert in writing pedagogy, has been appointed Sosland Director in the Harvard College Writing Program, effective immediately.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Pros teaching prose

    Clicking keyboards provide a soundtrack to the semester’s end, as students put finishing touches on term papers, theses, dissertations, and the like. But amid the flurry of traditional writing assignments, there are other projects afoot. Short stories, for example. Screenplays. Fiction manuscripts. Personal essays.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    National Endowment for the Humanities supports preservation of Qajar dynasty

    The National Endowment for the Humanities has made a $346,733 grant to a team of Qajar historians. The purpose of this grant, which lasts from May 2009 to June 2011, is to develop a comprehensive digital archive and Web site at Harvard University that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Cinematic reverberations

    The writing of culture watcher and critic Louis Menand — Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English — has cast a wide net over the years.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Poet/critics and the state of the art

    A triumvirate of prominent poet-critics – each with strong Harvard ties – took on the meaning of contemporary poetry last week. And despite a lively discussion, none of them provided a comprehensive definition.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gail Mazur reads at Radcliffe

    After removing her soaked red sneakers, Radcliffe Fellow Gail Mazur read aloud from new poems Monday (April 6) in dry black socks. The poet was undeterred by the onslaught of gray rain that thrashed Radcliffe Gymnasium’s windows — a fitting backdrop for Mazur’s charged, emotional poems.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Creativity through cerebration

    Contemporary composer Kay Rhie hasn’t had many watershed musical moments. The romantic ideal of a composer “deeply entrenched in creative epiphanies,” she admitted on a recent damp spring afternoon, is “not my story.”

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Atkins, Dennehy to perform poems of T.S. Eliot

    In the first lines of “The Waste Land,” a touchstone of modernist poetry from 1922, T.S. Eliot offers an ambiguous view of the very month we are in: April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    History of a ‘scribal machine’

    Starting in the 1920s, Chinese writer Lin Yutang earned a reputation as an urbane essayist and translator who moved easily between the literary cultures of the East and West.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    OfA, OCS name 2009 Artist Development Fellowships

    The Office for the Arts at Harvard (OfA) and Office of Career Services (OCS) are pleased to announce the 2009 recipients of the Artist Development Fellowship (ADF). This program supports the artistic development of students demonstrating unusual accomplishment and/or evidence of significant artistic promise. The ADF program represents Harvard’s deep commitment to arts practice on…

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Peabody preserves rare daguerreotypes

    Thirty-six rare daguerreotype portraits from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology have recently been stabilized and preserved for future generations, in collaboration with the Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University Library and the Mellon Foundation. Until photo conservators got to work, some daguerreotypes were nearly obscured by the deterioration of glass and other components,…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Playwright plumbs texts, ancient and modern

    You know Noh, no? Chiori Miyagawa does. The Bard College playwright-in-residence, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, has steeped herself in Noh theater, a measured style of Japanese drama that dates back to the 14th century. It’s one of the many literary echoes — some old, some ancient — that she brings to her work. “I…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Picture this, and you will begin to understand

    It has been almost 20 years since photographer Felice Frankel started working with scientists by helping them illustrate the intricate geometries of physical worlds too tiny to see. From the beginning, she was struck by one thing: To explain their ideas, scientists always start by drawing them. That gave Frankel an idea — “Picturing to…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Drawing from history

    History and art are intricately linked in “Wiyohpiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West,” a new exhibit at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology based on a collection of drawings by Native American warriors. “It’s so rich. It’s such a complex, interesting document that has so many stories embedded in it,” said the show’s…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Yu Hua reads work, participates in star-studded panel at Fairbank event

    It’s strange to imagine your dentist as one of the most interesting and controversial novelists of the 21st century. But that’s just what Yu Hua is. Or was — the former dentist who admitted, more frighteningly, that he possessed little formal dental training, recently derided his former profession to a New York Times reporter, saying,…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Looking for Barbies

    In connection with the American Repertory Theatre’s world premiere production of Christine Evans’ play “Trojan Barbie,” The Weekly Dig is sponsoring a Barbie Doll competition and exhibition at the Space 242 Gallery in the South End, Boston.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Group looks for creative ways to understand creativity

    What is creativity? Does it depend on more than that red wheelbarrow that William Carlos Williams saw? Is creativity a creature of neuron bundles, brain size, daydreaming? Is it the capacity for metaphor or divergent thinking?

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Religious diversity explored at local level

    Can a diverse religious community unite and heal after a brutal murder in broad daylight, one possibly motivated by religious hatred? That profound question and others like it, questions of religious diversity and tolerance, are at the heart of the new documentary “Fremont, U.S.A.,” which was developed by Harvard’s Pluralism Project and screened last Thursday…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Night at the museum

    When the Arts Task Force appointed by Harvard President Drew Faust issued its recommendations last December, one of its main suggestions was to incorporate the museums into a more central role in the University and to find innovative ways for arts and non-arts faculty to collaborate.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Arnold Arboretum art exhibition calls for submissions

    The Arnold Arboretum and Jamaica Plain Open Studios will host a juried group art exhibition in the fall devoted to art inspired by the plants, landscape, and collections of the Arnold Arboretum, in conjunction with Open Studios weekend (Sept. 26-27).

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Harvard goes to Broadway

    Ten minutes after pulling out of Cambridge on a bus bound for New York City, Davone Tines ’09 turned to his classmate Jordan Reddout ’10 and said, “I really like the prospect of this group of people going to Broadway to watch a musical.”

    6 minutes