At Bowdoin, the Museum enjoys many opportunities to collaborate with student groups and faculty members from a variety of academic departments. The programs that involve the performing arts often garner much excitement. This spring, we welcomed the Bowdoin Modern Dance Collective who performed “Let’s Get Lost through Dance” in the joint installation Let’s Get Lost and Listening Glass by Rebecca Bray, James Bigbee Garver, Josh Knowles and linn meyers. We will also host concerts by the inimitable George Lopez, Beckwith Artist-in-Residence, one in February and one upcoming in May. Finally, this month we present “Performing the Bauhaus,” a concert by Frank Mauceri, senior lecturer in music, and Bowdoin students in conjunction with the current exhibition, Modernism for All: The Bauhaus at 100.

Led by the initiative of Kitrea Takata-Glushkoff ’19, the Bowdoin Modern Dance Collective contacted the Museum last fall to express their interest in composing an interactive and collaborative performance within the installation Let’s Get Lost and Listening Glass. As Takata-Glushkoff explained, “through an ongoing experimental process” during the academic year, “the Dance Collective sought to ‘learn the instrument’ of the Let's Get Lost and Listening Glass exhibition.” Together, the students developed original choreography, utilizing their own bodies to play the “instrument” and to compose the soundtrack of their performance. As the dancers noted, they were inspired not only by the innovative combination of visual, auditory, and physical senses in the installation, but also by the “process of collaborative and active art creation” demonstrated by the four artists involved in its creation.

 

The Dance Collective performed four fifteen-minute sets on Saturday, February 23 to a full crowd. While two of the sets utilized the dancers’ pre-composed score, the other two performances invited the audience to use their phones in the installation to create the original music for the performance while the dancers performed improvised movements and gestures. The dancers invited senior visual artist Evelyn Beliveau, to simultaneously draw the movements of the dancers throughout the performance. Designing a participatory and collaborative performance that further established intersections between visual, performance, and sound art, the Dance Collective sought to curate a performance that “embodies the visual art, architecture, and sound of the unique space.” 

In the Bowdoin gallery, surrounded by some of the most recognizable works in the Museum, George Lopez performs piano concerts. Four times each year, he creates a program tailored to a current exhibition, program, or theme. February’s concert was titled “Music and the Environment: The Five Elements and Sounds of Nature,” inspired by the current exhibition Material Resources: Intersections of Art and the Environment. Debussy featured prominently, his pieces so distinctly calling to mind an elemental experience in Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens under the Rain), Le vent dans la plaine (Wind on the Plain), and Feux d’artifice (Fireworks). Lopez will perform again on May 2nd and 3rd. On this occasion he will respond to the inspiration of Let’s Get Lost and Listening Glass. A limited number of tickets will be available at the gift shop for pick-up beginning on April 16. Plan to get there early; they sell out fast.

Finally, the celebration of one hundred years of Bauhaus design, style, and culture continues on April 9th with a concert by Frank Mauceri and students in the Tillotson Room in Gibson Hall entitled “Performing the Bauhaus.” Featured pieces will be Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” a complex work that tells the story of a soldier who trades his violin to the devil, and Paul Hindemith’s song cycle, “The Life of Mary,” which sets to music fifteen poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, among other works associated with the Bauhaus. How electrifying when exhibitions, dynamic as they already are, are further brought to life through music and dance!

 

 

Honor Wilkinson, Curatorial Assistant

Caroline Brown, Assistant to the Directors/Membership & Programs Coordinator