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Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last 5 Years” is an unconventional musical. Centered on a tenuous relationship, it features only two actors whose interactions with each other are limited and whose stories run in chronologically opposite directions.
Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) owns a rap empire at this point. Based out of LA, the label boasts a roster that includes Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, Isaiah Rashad, Ab-Soul and Jay Rock. But then there’s SZA.
Nicole Tjin A Djie ’21: What got you started with music? Daniel Mayer ’21: My dad and my brother were both musicians, so I got started on piano really early. I didn’t really like it so I started playing my dad’s guitar and I picked that up really easily.
This weekend, the Pickard Theater stage will be filled with gangsters, prostitutes and the unusual sounds of Kurt Weill’s music in Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera.” From the plot to casting to music, this rendition of Brecht’s most well-known opera challenges perceptions of gender and class, particularly when viewed in a modern context.
Memorably eccentric and effortlessly endearing, the Tufts-bred band Crumb was an instant hit at Quinby House last Saturday night. The performance, featuring songs from the quartet’s latest EP “Locket,” wrapped up the final installment of WBOR’s fall concert series.
This year, the Bowdoin College Concert Band will reach a new milestone: its director, John Morneau, will have led the group for 30 consecutive years. “It’s just what I like to do. I just haven’t felt the need for time off,” said Morneau.
Student-led performance and music groups from across campus will come together on Saturday night for a relief concert, organized by Karen Chan ’18 and Grace Punzalan ’18, to raise awareness and funds for the recovery from the natural disasters of this fall, including more recent disasters, such as the wildfires in California.
Eight years ago, Jennifer Egan found herself at a reunion for deep-sea diving army veterans, trying on a 200-pound Mark V diving suit. Research, the Pulitzer-prize winning author told a packed crowd in Kresge Auditorium last night, for her latest and fifth novel, “Manhattan Beach.” Before signing books, Egan read the first chapter of the novel and answered questions about her research and writing process.
Currently on display in Larmarche Gallery is an exhibit both by and about six incarcerated men at the Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center, a minimum security facility in Belfast. Curator Charlotte Borden ’19 wanted to bring the men’s voices directly into the exhibit by displaying their art and her portraits of them.
For its last three installments of the semester, The Aux Cord will review three of the best albums of 2017. A lot can change between ages 16 and 20. They’re some of “the formative years,” after all.
“How do you get students in this age to talk about controversial materials and controversial issues?” asked Khalid El-Hakim, the curator of the Black History 101 Mobile Museum. At the heart of the touring museum is this question, which El-Hakim tackles using artifacts in an educational setting.
Kodie Garza: What is the most meaningful piece you’ve written and why? Carly Berlin: Oh, that’s hard. I think the piece that I wrote this past summer was meaningful in a lot of ways. This summer I was mostly only working on this story about Clarkson, GA, which is a resettlement area for refugees for the past three decades.
Madeleine Lemal-Brown ’18, one of three presidents of the Bowdoin Slam Poets Society, was inspired to start writing poetry because of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “For me, that was really the first time I had heard anyone [perform] in a way that wasn’t quite rap, but it was this lyrical poetry type of thing,” she said of the writer and star of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.” Lemal-Brown is president along with sophomores Sabrina Hunte and John-Paul Castells.
This weekend, families and Bowdoin community members will have the chance to experience Ladd House’s transformation from College House to art gallery. Bowdoin Art Society’s fifth annual Fall Art Show gives students, both inside and outside the visual arts department, the opportunity to put their artwork on display.
Yesterday, Masque & Gown premiered “The Laramie Project,” a production choice that continues the group’s break with the more traditional shows that characterized much of its history. “We had three plays in a row during my time here and, I understand, several more before this that were like white, living-room, family dramas where people sat in their kitchen or living rooms and talked about their white people problems for a nice hour and a half,” said Kathleen Johnson ’19, director of the show, in a discussion at Burnett House last week.
Although Carmen Papalia lost the use of his vision, he does not identify as blind. “I feel that word doesn’t serve me,” he said. “I often think of myself as a non-visual learner—someone who just made a choice to shift the value from the visual to the non-visual … I’d rather describe myself in relation to my learning style and my approach to learning than refer to a word that kind of means, ‘lack of preparedness or awareness.’ You just have to [search for] synonyms for the word ‘blind,’ and you get a long list of negative associations.” Papalia, a Vancouver-based “social practice artist and disability activist,” delivered a lecture about his work at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) on October 19.
Filmmaker Raoul Peck now uses cinema as a platform for social activism. On Monday, the award-winning filmmaker and director of the world-renowned documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” came to campus to participate in a Q&A following a screening of his film.
Every rap fan has dreamed it: “What if ______ and ______ made an album together?” But there’s something about the idea of the collab album that just reeks of disappointment. After years of rumors and teases, that Kendrick Lamar/J.
“What happened last October?” Tatana Kellner asked students gathered at the popup show for her printmaking installation “Please Exit, Doors are Closing” on Tuesday in the Edwards Center for Art and Dance. Answer: the 2016 presidential debates, a time during which Kellner was working and reflecting on questions surrounding immigration policy in America.
Last weekend, the Meddiebempsters’ 80th reunion brought together current and former Meddies representing eras of Bowdoin’s history stretching as far back as the 1950s. With such an extensive history on display, cultural shifts over the years were clearly apparent, in everything from the diversity of the group to the music they performed.
Last Saturday, CLIO Award winning producer and director of photography Matt Siegel, along with a few other cinematographers, led an introductory workshop in digital film production for Bowdoin students. Because Bowdoin’s Cinema Studies program focuses heavily on history and theory, the workshop aimed to fill a gap in students’ education about the technical aspects of filmmaking.
Frontier brings more than food to the table. Igniting conversation about the world beyond its rustic walls, Frontier, located in Fort Andross, describes itself as a “food, art and cultural destination.” Here, visitors share intimate conversations and globally inspired meals with views of the churning Androscoggin River below.
David Saul Smith Union’s Lamarche Gallery offers a unique space for student work curated exclusively by students. This Tuesday, the gallery opened an exhibition that gave students the opportunity to display their photography, painting, drawing and poetry from their Kent Island fellowships over the summer.
A “queer disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent” is how Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes herself on her website. An activist and poet, she came to Bowdoin last night to share her work in several events sponsored by various groups from all areas of campus, underscoring the intersecting identities that have influenced her experience and perspective.
In his lecture on Wednesday, Jonathan Katz argued that pop art is an inherently queer form of self-expression, an idea originally censored in a now fully-published interview with Andy Warhol. Katz—founder of the Harvey Milk Institute and director of the visual culture studies doctoral program at the State University of New York at Buffalo—presented his interpretation of Andy Warhol’s pop artwork through a unique lens of queer studies and censorship in his lecture, “The Unknown Queer Warhol.” Flowing from an analysis of a resurrected version of this formerly censored interview with Warhol, Katz argued that Warhol’s pop imagery provided no less commentary on modern homosexuality than his blatantly queer early works.
Jude Marx ’18 is an English and education coordinate major who has worked at Bowdoin and beyond to carry out creative projects, mainly through portraiture and creative writing. Her work focuses on the themes of memory and queer identities, as well as other intersecting marginalized identities.
Jhene Aiko – “Jukai” (September 22) Jhene Aiko seems to finally be hitting her stride as one of R&B’s truly unique artists. The cool, unmistakable radiance of her voice has always been there, but on her latest album, “Trip,” Aiko has the production to back it up.
Xenia Rubinos’ music is refreshingly bold and authentic. An up-and-coming singer and composer, Rubinos recently released her album “Black Terry Cat.” Brought to campus by WBOR, she performed a sampling of her music at Ladd House this past Saturday. Rubinos emphasizes the creative capacity of individual experiences and self-expression. Her work documents an ongoing exchange between her state of mind and the exterior world. She describes her style as soulful, with a lot of energy and love.
When viewed in a modern context, the Soviet propaganda posters in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s (BCMA) newest exhibit provide not only insight into the rise and fall of the Soviet Union but also a framework for understanding the present.
Idriss Jebari, an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in History, understands the power of film to expose new perspectives. Now during his first year at Bowdoin, he has founded a Middle East film series, filled with narrative-driven movies that tell the story of individuals.
From elephants to monkeys to wolves, Deke Weaver ’85 has set out on a lifelong project to create performances for each letter of the alphabet, with each letter representing a different endangered animal or habitat. On Monday, Weaver came to campus to share the four installments of the series at Kresge Auditorium.
For painter and animator Matt Bollinger, art is all about self-expression. Even the pieces that seem outside the realm of possibility are in some way reflective of his experiences. This is especially true of “Apartment 6F,” the animation Bollinger showed at his talk on campus last Monday, which portrays an alternate reality; a neighbor invites the artist to a housewarming party where he is drugged for use as a sacrifice in a satanic ritual.
Earlier this week, Tyler, The Creator tweeted that he originally wrote his single, “See You Again,” for Zayn Malik. At first, it seems odd that the rapper who broke onto the scene talking about having threesomes with a triceratops would be penning lyrics for the former One-D playboy.
Over the summer, over 250 music students fill the College’s dorms for six weeks to learn, practice and play music at a top-tier level. The Bowdoin International Music Festival attracts students from 23 different countries and from the top conservatories in the country, including Juilliard and the Berkeley School of Music.
Most theater productions take weeks, or even months, to rehearse before the curtain rises on opening night. The same is typically true on the Bowdoin stage. But not this Saturday night. At 7 p.m. tomorrow, Masque & Gown actors will perform original plays that were written, directed and rehearsed in only 24 hours.
Sam Kyzivat ’18 is a music major with a concentration in theory and composition who also studies Chinese. He composes and performs his own music and participates in the Meddiebempsters and jazz ensemble. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Delta Sigma/Delta Upsilon practice rooms in Smith Union had been empty prior to last year. They were funded and stocked with equipment in 2009.
For over 200 years, American colleges and universities have maintained a commitment to the public good that has outlasted cultural, economic and technological change, says Chuck Dorn, professor of education and associate dean for student affairs.
On Thursday, Hawthorne-Longfellow Library hosted the first in a series of humanities-focused faculty book launches. Throughout the course of the year, six professors will introduce their newly published works, in a format intended to spark conversations.
Summers on Maine’s Midcoast justify the state’s Vacationland reputation. This year, seniors Julianna Burke and Maya Morduch-Toubman took advantage of Bowdoin’s summer fellowships to engage more deeply with the region’s communities through art, storytelling and photography.
Continuing their success from the summer of 2016, Maggie Seymour ’16 and Olivia Atwood ’17 returned to the stage to perform “15 Villainous Fools” —this time in New York City. Based on William Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors,” “15 Villainous Fools” is a comedy that follows the adventures of two sets of twins.
“Lost in the Dream” is a fitting title for the fourth album released by The War on Drugs. On that album, back in 2014, the Philadelphia-based rock outfit embarked on a blurred journey through shoegaze, alt-country and ambient electronica with lyrics just as hazy to go along.
Death is far from the minds of most college students. With its newest exhibition, “The Ivory Mirror,” the College Museum of Art attempts to show just how relevant questions of mortality are to the lives of Bowdoin students.
Brunswick residents trickled into the Curtis Memorial Library’s Morrell Meeting Room on Tuesday evening, taking their seats in a circle of chairs for a facilitated discussion about racism and bias as part of the library’s “One Book, One Community” program.
This past week I read a book recommended by a person who I know more intimately through social media than through conversation. He’s someone I view with a mixture of admiration, curiosity and deep respect. I was nervous that he would recommend a book that was more statistics or Latin phrases than regular English sentences, but nonetheless eager to read anything that influences the man who so profoundly influences us at Bowdoin.
Comprised of all first-years, student band 20/20 arrived with a bang when they became one of the youngest bands ever to win Battle of the Bands, winning a $500 cash prize and the chance to open for the Smallpools Ivies kick-off concert.
The first image visitors see when they enter the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s newest exhibition, “Why Draw? 500 Years of Drawings and Watercolor,” is a seven-foot-tall portrait of pop culture icon Pharrell Williams, created with techniques that date back to the Renaissance-era drawings that are displayed alongside it.
Pillows and sleep, improvisation, site-specific choreography and being yourself—this year’s annual Spring Dance Concert will showcase a broad range of contemporary styles, themes and techniques from dancers enrolled in student soloists, special guest Rakiya Orange ’11 and Modern classes.
After being captivated by tales of Inuit life in Greenland, Arctic photographer Bryan Alexander received a travel scholarship in 1975 and set out to understand more about northern cultures. Using his camera to capture the indigenous people’s day-to-day lives, Alexander has traveled to dozens of spots around the Arctic each year for over four decades.
The other day I came to the uncomfortable realization that I am not as woke as I had once thought. I’ve always held the belief that music simply reflects the values, circumstances and realities of whatever environment it comes out of.
Senior visual arts majors presented their final exhibitions on Monday evening in an eclectic display of video monitors, sound art, photography and large oil portraits on canvas. In the culmination of their Senior Studio class, many students utilized both traditional and non-traditional mediums to reflect on their personal experiences at Bowdoin and at home.
Inuit artist, educator and designer Becky Qilavvaq uses innovative clothing designs to make traditional Inuit culture accessible to modern audiences. One of her pieces is currently on display in a new exhibit, “Threads of Change: Arctic Clothing and Identity in the North,” in the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum.
My beloved friend Caroline likes writing, Craisins, GSWS Jeopardy and dancing. She dislikes the Chainsmokers, New England ignorance of Midwest geography and the modern commodification of feminism. As the result of more major/minor switches than anyone else I know, she is a proud Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS)/German double major with a math minor—Caroline leaves no stone unturned.
Raised in an immigrant household in North Carolina, George “G” Yamazawa was 17 years old when he decided to become a slam poet. Identifying as both Japanese and American, he often felt simultaneously at home and out of place.
In ways equally endearing and entertaining, student-run theater troupe Beyond the Proscenium (BTP) will present “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” this evening in an unconventional venue for a musical: Sargent Gymnasium. Following six preteens competing in a spelling bee run by three quirky adults, the show hopes to capture the perils of adolescence.
This evening, Bowdoin V-Day, an organization dedicated to fighting sexual violence against women and girls, will end nearly 20 years of performing “The Vagina Monologues” due to debate about the Monologues presenting a one-dimensional, outdated portrayal of womanhood. In its place, V-Day is debuting the student-written show, “RISE: Untold Stories of Bowdoin Women.”
One of Bowdoin’s student-run theater troupes, Curtain Callers, will subvert sexist and racist themes in a minimalistic, modified rendition of the 1966 play “The Apple Tree” by the writers of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The musical, which will open this evening and run all weekend, is divided into three overarching stories of man, woman and temptation, and will feature only seven cast members in an unconventional theater: Drake lobby in Memorial Hall.
I cut my teeth as a musician playing guitar in the worship band at a Southern Baptist church in Indianapolis. My guitar teacher, the wise and venerable Ms. Tracy, was the worship pastor at her church, and when she thought I was ready she invited me to join her in her church band.
Two local poets and friends, Christian Barter and Jeffrey Thomson, will be coming to campus to do a reading as part of a three-event book launch for both of their new books, “Bye-Bye Land” and “The Belfast Notebooks,” respectively.
Office Hours, Bowdoin’s longform improvisation group founded by James Jelin ’16, has been selected for a second time to perform at the Del Close Marathon, a festival hosted by Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (UCB) that brings 72 hours of uninterrupted, nonstop improv to New York City for one weekend in June.
When former Robert K. Beckwith Professor of Music Emeritus Elliott Schwartz hired Director of the Concert Band John Morneau in 1988, he commenced 30 years of friendship and contemporary composition with the Bowdoin College Concert Band.
We come to Bowdoin to learn: about physics or Latin American studies; about what we want to be when we grow up; about the kinds of people we want to be friends with and the kinds of people we want to be.
With poems ranging from “Ode to My Resting Bitch Face” to “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” feminist spoken word poet Olivia Gatwood will confront topics of sexual assault, rape culture and gender inequity tomorrow evening in a performance in culmination of the Alliance of Sexual Assault Prevention’s (ASAP) annual Date Week programming.
This past Tuesday, Howell House hosted Maine Inside Out, a nonprofit group founded in 2007 with the goal of empowering currently and previously incarcerated youth through theater. The members performed compelling acts on topics like police brutality, racism, xenophobia and the school-to-prison pipeline. Phrases like “When schools neglect, the streets accept,” rang throughout the performance, giving the audience a personal perspective from the inside out.
When the College phased out the Greek system in 2000, the Delta Sigma/Delta Upsilon co-ed fraternity—known for fostering creativity in non-formal spaces on Bowdoin’s campus—channelled its funds into a support network for future Bowdoin artists. The fraternity’s funds work to support the arts at Bowdoin today.
The religious Festival of Dionysus in classical Athens transformed the art of storytelling when Thespis turned and spoke to someone else on stage instead of directly to the audience. That 90 degree pivot, said Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater in New York City and producer of Broadway hits “Hamilton” and “Fun Home,” is an important, destabilizing act in the creation of theatrical dialogue.
In the fall of my junior year, one of my recently graduated friends returned to Bowdoin to visit and brought his younger brother, Rogelio. I don’t remember everything about that night, but I distinctly remember finding Rogelio asleep in my bathtub at about two in the morning and that the floor, walls and somehow even the ceiling of my bathroom had a look reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s work, except only painted with little pieces of partly digested food and regurgitated Natural Lite.
In hopes of celebrating and sharing the cultures of African students on campus, Bowdoin Africa Alliance is hosting a Pan-African Fashion Show representing 18 countries tomorrow night. In addition to displaying the traditional clothing of students’ respective African heritage, the show will include performances such as a dance, song and slam poetry.
In conjunction with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s exhibit, “Perspectives from Postwar Hiroshima: Chuzo Tamotzu, Children’s Drawings, and the Art of Resolution,” artists, historians and scholars will explore what it means to grow up in a city devastated by a nuclear weapon at the Museum of Art’s symposium today.
“15 Villainous Fools,” Maggie Seymour ’16 and Olivia Atwood’s ’17 two-woman clowning adaptation of Shakespeare’s play “The Comedy of Errors,” was recently picked up by the People’s Improv Theater (PIT) in New York City. The show will be performed at an off-off-broadway venue for two months this summer starting in July.
I met Harriet on the first day we got back from Pre-Orientation trips; she lived on the second floor of Maine Hall and I lived on the third floor. We were both from Brooklyn, so we talked about that, and I learned that she has a tendency to laugh while she talks, turning her sentences into word-laugh-noise mashups.
In a modern retelling of the classical Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Bowdoin’s Department of Theater and Dance will merge fantasy and innovative visuals this weekend in its production of “Eurydice.” Written by playwright Sarah Ruhl, the play tells the traditional myth from the female perspective of Orpheus’ bride, Eurydice, and explores dimensions of the story that are not present in the original myth.
Tomorrow night, Israeli punk guitarist Yonatan Gat and his band will bring their improvisational, atmospheric and eclectic sound to Ladd House’s living room in what is expected to be an immersive, synergetic performance. The concert is sponsored by WBOR and Bowdoin Hillel.
Comedian and internet superstar Chris Fleming, known for his viral YouTube series “GAYLE,” will perform stand up this Saturday night in Kresge Auditorium. Fleming is expected to poke at notions of gender and liberal arts colleges in his routine.
In an effort to explore the experiences of women of color within Bowdoin’s largely white student body, the Women’s Resource Center (WRC) has curated a photo gallery called “Beauty in Color,” which seeks to foster confidence for women of color and challenge traditionally accepted, white standards of beauty on campus.
