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Arts & Entertainment

Theater

‘The Threepenny Opera’ is a beggar’s play, modernized

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.

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Student performance groups unite in relief efforts

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.

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Writing

Past, present, future: Jennifer Egan on writing

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.

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History

Mobile museum teaches black history through artifacts

“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.

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Writing

Portrait of an artist: Carly Berlin ’18 on writing

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.

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Performance Art

Bowdoin Slam Poets Society breaks new lyrical ground

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.

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Student work on display in 5th annual Fall Art Show

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.

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Theater

Masque & Gown stages ‘The Laramie Project’

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.

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Activism

Carmen Papalia addresses accessibility through art and activism

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.

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Visual Arts

Artist Tatana Kellner urges political engagement through art

“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.

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A Cappella

Meddiebempsters past and present

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.

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Photography

Workshop focuses on film production

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.

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Frontier: Brunswick’s home for conversation and culture

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.

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OUTtober

Disability and identity: imagining a ‘liberated future’

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.

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OUTtober

Jonathan Katz identifies Warhol’s pop art as queer art

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.

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Live Music

Xenia Rubinos: bold, soul-powered songwriting

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.

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Visual Arts

Bollinger animates with paint

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.

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Summer music festival draws international talent

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.

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Theater

One-day play returns to stage

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.

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The launch of an idea

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.

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Theater

Alumnae wow audiences in off-off broadway play

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.

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Book Club

Presidential endorsement: on the merits of J.D. Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

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.

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Visual Arts

Senior studio exhibition highlights non-traditional mediums

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.

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Book Club

Lore of young brilliance: Audre Lorde and unapologetic feminism

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.

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Beyond the Proscenium presents dynamic musical ‘Spelling Bee’

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.

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Student Life

V-Day debuts original play based on experiences of Bowdoin women

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.”

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Students reimagine ‘Apple Tree,’ challenge antiquated themes

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.

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Office Hours to perform in NYC festival for second year

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.

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Inside Out theater group brings formerly incarcerated youth to Howell

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.

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Delta Sigma Awards Show hopes to embrace diverse art mediums

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.

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Producer of ‘Hamilton’ on democracy

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.

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To the Crossroads

Read my hips: doing our damnedest to dance at Bowdoin

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.

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‘Eurydice’ retells Greek myth with female perspective, video-based set

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.

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‘Beauty in Color’ fosters confidence, community

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.

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