Harvard Commissions Artists to Promote Arts on Campus

For the 2021-2022 academic year, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts has commissioned six pieces of art to promote the visibility and importance of art within the community. According to the committee, the commissions aim to promote energizing and thought-provoking questions and act as collaborative partnerships between artists and the Harvard community.

“In 2008 the task force on the arts released a report which called for the university to make the arts more central to the cognitive life of the university,” said Robin Kelsey, the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography in an interview with the Harvard Crimson. “It’s very exciting for me.”

The commissioned works span a variety of artistic disciplines, from sculpture to theater to dance. Composer, vocalist, music director, and producer Tariq Al-Sabir, for example, is collaborating on a piece with Claire Chase, Harvard Professor of the Practice of Music, that will premiere on Dec. 2.

Al-Sabir aims to shape his composition around the specific members of Harvard’s New Music Ensemble and their individual styles. “I’m really writing with and in reaction to the ensemble, just learning about who the actual members are, how they place, what they place, and how their creative styles are,” he said in an interview.

Al Sabir also aimed for a highly dynamic creative process while working, providing the students with more of a guide that “leaves lots of room for improv” and teaches them to put something of themselves into the work.

“I do give them a written piece of music, but it’s left pretty open ended in terms of interpretation and what they can do with their own opinions,” he said of the process. “It’s about being present and kind of surrendering to the circumstances to create something beautiful.”

Nailah Randall-Bellinger — a dance educator, scholar, and choreographer who has been teaching for over 35 years — shaped the choreography of and spearheaded “Initiation– In Love Solidarity.” The piece explores the Middle Passage and the fight against “thingification,” to quote Randall-Bellinger. It additionally aims to investigate how the African diaspora connects with their ancestors and takes back their identity.

“What I’m looking at is how we reclaim our identity after being stripped of who we really were, how we were dehumanized, and how we, as the great Aimé Césaire says, became ‘thingificationed,’” said Randall-Bellinger.

“I was interested in how we, as African diasporic people, were able to work through all of that and reclaim our true identity. It’s about transformation. It’s about reclamation of identity. It’s about ownership. It’s about kinship. It’s about forming alliances through joy,” she added.

Like Al-Sabir, Randall-Bellinger’s creative process was heavily based upon the voices of her dancers.

“If you listen to some of the words spoken in the live performance, it’s through the journaling,” Randall-Bellinger revealed. “All of that helped build the skeleton of the work. Through the collaboration of the dancers, we were able to put flesh on the skeleton.”

Moreover, Randall-Bellinger aimed for the dancers to do more than simply execute her choreography or provide inspiration via journaling, pushing them instead to the forefront of the work by using their own panting and breathing as the audio for their dancing. “You get to hear gasping, gasping for air, gasping not to drown.”

Development occurred even up until the final performance. “Last week, we were like, ‘What do you feel about where we are right now? What do you feel about this idea of water? The idea of cowrie shells?’” she said. “The whole process was a continual refining, which correlates to how Africans in the diaspora have had to survive.”

The live dance was immediately followed by a dance film thematically connected to the Middle Passage choreography, featuring spoken word, cowrie shells, and wide shots of the dancers in ethereal white dresses dancing in the water of beaches.

“There’s two parts that echo back and forth,” Randall-Bellinger explained. “My vision was to speak to the ancestors, to bring those sea water spirits to the forefront, to honor them, to talk about what it feels like to have gone through the Middle Passage in memory, even if not in the visceral experience.”

These two commissions, along with the other four, ultimately promote art’s prominence on campus, stresses Kelsey.

“I find the campus is so enlivened by the kinds of art installations that we have been able to commission over the years. I hope our students find these commissions to be thought provoking as well.”