Taking A First Look At The Arts First Weekend

Jones Receives Medal

“Why not? It’s Tommy Lee Jones,” said Jack Megan, director of the Office for the Arts at Harvard, when asked why Academy-Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones ’69 will receive the 2012 Harvard Arts Medal. On Thursday, the Arts First festival will kick off with a ceremony in which University President Drew G. Faust will present Jones with the award. The medal, Megan said, is meant to call attention to an alumnus or alumna who has done extraordinary work in the arts and who inspires Harvard students to imagine a life in the arts. “Tommy Lee Jones hits on all these levels,” Megan said.

Jones will discuss his work in conversation with fellow actor John Lithgow ’67. A former English concentrator and Dunster resident, Jones acted in student theater productions and played for the varsity football team while at Harvard. In past years, he has helped advise the University on its arts policies.

Student Composers’ Works

Some collaborations are more than the sum of their parts. On Friday at the Lowell House Library, seven student composers will present their original compositions that will be played by student musicians.

The Student Composer Concert, presented by the Harvard Composers Association, includes the work of three composers enrolled in the Harvard/New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) Five-Year B.A./M.M Joint Program. “The caliber of the concert is really high,” says Danielle G. Rabinowitz ’14, board member of the Harvard Composers Associaton and student composer whose work will be featured in the concert.

The Harvard Composers Association promotes the presence of 20th- and 21st-century music concerts and supports the work of young composers on campus. “[The event] is a collaboration between artists who are writing and performing, and that is so rare,” says Rabinowitz. “It makes a powerful statement for what we can do on this campus without any outside influence.”

Swords Drawn in Ring of Steel

Amid the usual instrumental music and vocal harmonies, this year’s Arts First festival will also feature the clangs of metal against metal. Ring of Steel, Harvard’s very own theatrical stage-fighting group, will showcase its carefully choreographed drills and fights for all to see. The group is led by Athena E. Eyster, a graduate student in the Deparment of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

“[Ring of Steel] blurs the line between martial arts and acting,” said Jason LaRue ’12, a member of the group. “We’re actually reacting to what our opponent is doing” on stage.

Ring of Steel will perform on Saturday on the Harvard Yard stage and the Science Center lawn. The group will invite audience participation, and LaRue looks forward to seeing spectators try out the art form. “If anybody…wants to participate, we’ll probably have some practice swords lying around they can pick up.”

Harvard’s Music Festival

For those who missed Coachella or can’t wait for the Newport Folk Festival or Outside Lands, the Arts First festival will feature 11 artists in its own BandFest. The festival, held on Sunday outside the Holyoke Center, will include performances by students and affiliated musicians in styles ranging from folk-rock to dubstep.

Leah Reis-Dennis ’13 sings for The Nostalgics, a Motown soul band performing in BandFest, and said she looks forward to increasing her band’s exposure as well as promoting live music on campus. “It is a cool opportunity for a lot of live bands to play for each other, to play not only for the Harvard community but also the Cambridge community,” she said. “You have people who are coming to see you—friends and family—and then you have random people walking by Harvard Square who wonder why there is a random Motown band playing outside Au Bon Pain.”

Il Teatro Comico

Holden Chapel will become an Italian-language theater on Thursday as the students of Italian 40: “Advanced Oral Expression. Ciak... si parla!” present their annual staged performance of Italian literature. This year, the production incorporates texts like Luigi Lupi’s play “Le metamorfosi di Arlecchino” and Carlo Goldoni’s monologue “Il teatro comico” in a meta-theatrical performance.

The class hopes to inspire lower-level students of Italian to continue studying the language, performers said. With this aim, the storyline of their production is especially fitting. “[The play is] about the transition, or metamorphosis, from being struggling actors to becoming blossoming, well-trained Italian performers,” Christian E. Garcia ’13 said.

The performers said they hope to entertain their fellow students in addition to inspiring them to new heights in their studies. “This is a way to get them to recognize that they can understand more than they probably think they can,” Victoriya Levina ’14 said.

Theater and Prejudice

Although we might think that we live in a world free of persecution, the fact is that we never know when prejudice will rear its ugly head again. This idea is, in part, the message of Jean-Claude Grumberg’s play “Dreyfus,” which will be staged at the OBERON on Sunday under the direction of Guila C. Kessous. The play is centered on the notorious Dreyfus Affair that rocked France in the 1890s, a scandal in which a Jewish officer was wrongly accused of treason.

For Kessous—a UNESCO Artist for Peace and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School—this production is not just relevant for Jews. “It is not only about anti-Semites, and it is not only about anti-Semitism,” she said. For her, it is ultimately a play about people taking action after their false sense of security is broken. The show is set in Poland in 1931, where several Jews are putting on a play about the Dreyfus Affair. “The characters are putting on a play that they feel very far from, but actually they are right before World War II,” she says.

The play will be followed by a talk by His Excellency François Zimeray, the French Ambassador for Human Rights.

VES Film Screenings

The Visual and Environmental Studies department will hold its own miniature film festival in the Carpenter Center from Thursday through Saturday. The films, both live action and animation, are the culmination of VES students’ work this year. In addition to screening pieces created by underclassmen, the department will be holding its annual screening of senior thesis films.

Brian A. Paison ’12, whose thesis film “Good Cop, Bad Cop” will be screened, said he appreciates how the festival includes work from across the VES department. He remembers fondly the screenings of his sophomore and junior year pieces at previous years’ festivals. “It brings everyone together. Not only do you have the film screenings through all the VES classes, but you have photography right next door,” he said, referring to the Carpenter Center’s neighboring exhibition of VES visual art theses.

According to participating filmmaker Sheema Golbaba ’14, the screenings offer attendees a look into the department. “It’s always nice to know what a department like VES is up to—what kind of curriculum is being instated and what kind of students and work are being developed,” she said.

Shakespeare Scavenger Hunt

Truly unique interpretations of Shakespeare are few and far between. Yet the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s upcoming production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Saturday is framed as an interactive scavenger hunt, which begins at the West Patio of the Loeb Drama Center. The play is performed in multiple locations of the yard, which participants will have to discover by using clues.

The concept of director Margaret C. Kerr ’13 was inspired by a play she saw at Oxford University her sophomore year of high school. “I always wanted to do an outdoor production of ‘A Midsummmer Night’s Dream,’ but when I got to campus as a freshman I started seeing more potential locations.”

Though the play is still presented chronologically, the interpretation allows the audience to choose their own path from scene to scene. “Creating this air of [mystery, in which] you might see something [or] you might not adds some dimension to the play that you might not otherwise see if you were sitting through it straight through,” says Kerr.

Last-Minute Orchestra

The aptly named Last Minute Orchestra plans to rehearse only once before its Sunday performance in the Lowell House courtyard. To conductor and Lowell House Opera music director Lidiya Yankovskaya, it is this spontaneity that makes the performance exciting.

“Everybody’s put together at the last minute,” Yankovskaya said. “It’s not something that’s organized in the traditional way, and we don’t necessarily know who’s going to [play].”

“Untraditional” seems to be a theme of the Last Minute Orchestra’s annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” The orchestra might be joined by helium balloons from the science departments, the Lowell House Bells, and even kazoo players, according to Yankovskaya. Participation in the performance is open to the public.

Yankovskaya expects the performance to be a hit. “We’ll be outside in the courtyard, and people can sit outside…and just enjoy the music.”

Breaking Boundaries

For the student artists featured in “Breaking Boundaries: Arts, Creativity and the Harvard Curriculum,” liberal arts courses have taken “arts” literally. The exhibit, which runs tomorrow through Saturday at Arts @ 29 Garden, will showcase art made by students for classes ranging from General Education courses to Organismic and Evolutionary Biology 52: “Biology of Plants.” The projects were funded by grants from the Elson Family Arts Initiative.

Some works were created in subjects not traditionally associated with art, while others represent students’ first serious art projects. Alexander K. Delaney ’14, an engineering sciences concentrator whose book of photographs is featured in the exhibit, said he had never taken any art-related courses at Harvard before he took Culture and Belief 30: “Seeing is Believing: A History of Photography.” The course, he said, helped him see the world from an artists’ perspective. “Gaining this better grasp of how to analyze photographs definitely assisted me in determining what I wished to achieve with individual photographs as well as with the project as a whole,” he said.

—Staff writer Noah S. Guiney can be reached at nguiney@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Ola Topczewska can be reached at atopczewska@college.harvard.edu.