WC’s Timely Play, "Death and the Maiden" Examines Journey from Dictator to Democracy

CHESTERTOWN—The Washington College Department of Drama will present Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play Death and the Maiden on February 17, 18, and 19 at 8 p.m. in Tawes Theater, Gibson Center for the Arts. Professor Dale Daigle, assisted by sophomore Ellen Huffman, directs the production starring juniors Louisa Kathleen Muldowney, John Lesser, and Michael Zurawski.

Set in the present and in a country that has recently undergone the transition from dictatorship to democracy, Death and the Maiden examines not only the political fallout from such turmoil, but also the personal cost.

“The [recent] events in Egypt make the issues that the play wrestles with particularly poignant and relevant,” says director Daigle. It also reminds us that issues of torture and abuse of power are always present and imminent, and that we must constantly remind ourselves that whether we participate directly or not, we are all complicit in any torture or abuse of power that we allow.”

Seating in Tawes Theatre is limited; to reserve free tickets call 410-778-7835 or e-mail drama_tickets@washcoll.edu. The Gibson Center for the Arts is on the main campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Kohl Gallery Hosts Multi-Media Installation by Internationally Acclaimed Artist and Washington College Faculty Member Monika Weiss

CHESTERTOWN—On Friday, February 25 the Kohl Gallery will open a one-person show by internationally acclaimed artist and Washington College faculty member Monika Weiss. “Lamentations (Sustenazo): Recent Works by Monika Weiss,” will run through April 15 at the gallery, which is located in the Gibson Center for the Arts on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Weiss is a Polish-American artist who works in drawing, projected video, musical composition, performance and sculpture, often combining these elements in her public installations. The new exhibition, which is being shown for the first time in the U.S., is drawn from a larger exhibition of 2010, “Monika Weiss: Sustenazo,” held at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Weiss completed the work while on junior sabbatical leave from Washington College, where she serves as assistant professor and coordinator of the studio art program in the Department of Art and Art History. The U.S. Embassy in Warsaw provided a major grant for “Sustenazo,” which also received support from the Central Medical Library, Warsaw, the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Historical Museum of Warsaw, Media in Motion, Berlin, and a number of individuals, including a physician. The exhibition later traveled to Berlin.

“Lamentations” is curated by Donald McColl, the Nancy L. Underwood Associate Professor of Art History at Washington College and former Director of Kohl Gallery. The first of several special events planned around the show will be the opening reception, Friday, February 25 at 6 p.m. On Wednesday, March 2, from 4 to 6 p.m., the Kent County Arts Council will host a “Town & Gown” event for the local arts community that will include a talk by the artist, a walk-through of the exhibition and a reception. And on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 30, internationally renowned art historian, critic and curator Dr. Julia P. Herzberg will come to Chestertown for a lecture on Weiss’s work and a conversation with the artist. Each event is free and open to the public; some content may not be suitable for children.

Sustenazo is a Greek word meaning to sigh or to lament inaudibly together. Weiss’s exhibition on this theme was inspired by a specific event that took place at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, when it was a hospital—and actually was installed there, in the cellar, the only portion of the castle to survive. On August 6, 1944, during the onset of the Warsaw Uprising, the German Army forced more than 1,800 patients and medical staff to evacuate the hospital overnight. With that incident as its reference point, Weiss’s art explores visual and musical aspects of the ancient ritual of Lament and its historical connection to feminine expression, especially as contrasted with the notion of the heroic myth within the narrative of war. “An important part of this work is the motif of lament as a form of expression outside language,” she says.

“Lamentatons” speaks to the essence of a hospital as a metaphor for healing, but in the context of the specific horrors of the Nazi evacuation of Ujazdowski Hospital and the general oppression of human rights throughout history. The artist’s original sound composition (Weiss trained for many years at Warsaw’s Conservatory of Music) incorporates the voice of a surviving witness of the hospital’s expulsion along with voices of average Germans reading passages from the second part of Goethe’s classic play “Faust.”

Weiss’s installation also juxtaposes original objects and documents related to the hospital’s exodus—mostly old books and small pieces of medical equipment—with other images, including video. The interplay of all these visual layers in video projection with the mix of voice and music creates a poetic environment in which viewers can form their own assumptions and conclusions. “Much of my art investigates the relationships between memory and history, but I build it from multiple narratives in order to leave the meaning open to interpretation,” says Weiss, who teaches drawing and new genres at Washington College.

London-based art critic Guy Brett has written of Weiss, “Her work is a remarkable, individual counterpoint between technological media (video projection) and the ancient activity of drawing. Sound is also an important element, meticulously composed by the artist. It lifts the silent filmed actions into another emotional register.” The result, he says, “is an alternative experience of space and time, … steady and enduring, establishing and deepening a human presence.”

Curator McColl adds that Washington College is “exceedingly fortunate” to have Monika Weiss on the faculty. “She not only maintains a complex, thoughtful, and highly successful international practice—one based on cutting-edge trends in media and culture, as well as a deep-rooted knowledge of history, literature, language and myth, let alone everything from philosophy to medical theory—but she also holds such deep convictions about teaching and the mentoring of our students,” he says.

Weiss’s past exhibitions include the 2005 “Monika Weiss: Five Rivers,” a comprehensive survey of her work at Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, and a two-person exhibition with the pioneering filmmaker and performance artist Carolee Schneemann at Remy Toledo Gallery, New York, in 2004. She has also exhibited at such venues as the Muzeum Montanelli in Prague, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, the Frauenmuseum in Bonn, and the Kunsthaus Dresden in Dresden; examples of her work are also in the permanent collections of places from Vienna’s Albertina Museum to the Drawing Center, New York.

Weiss’s work is featured in the book on contemporary drawing practices Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art, (I.B. Tauris, London). Her papers have been published in books and journals, including Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (Intellectbooks, Bristol, UK) and Being Syncretic (Springer, Vienna/New York). She co-edits the contemporary drawing magazine Tracey, published by England’s Loughborough University.
Weiss is represented by Galerie Samuel Lallouz (Montréal) and Remy Toledo Projects (New York). A member of the Washington College faculty since 2006, she lives in Chestertown and New York City.

"Lamentations" is sponsored in part by the Chestertown Spy. To learn more about the artist and her work, please visit: http://www.monika-weiss.com and http://art.washcoll.edu/faculty_monikaweiss.php.

Kohl Gallery is open Wednesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m., Fridays noon to 6 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays noon to 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays and Tuesdays).

On exhibit in the William Frank Visual Arts Hallway outside the Kohl Gallery through Sunday, Feb. 27 is the photography exhibit, “Photography Exposed,” curated by Brian Palmer, manager of the Multimedia Production Center at Washington College. Each photograph has an accompanying QR Codes, or “Quick Read” matrix barcode, that can be scanned by any iPhone, Android phone or new generation iPod (those with cameras) to gain access to a video or text message from the photographer.

Related Links

• Learn more at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
• Visit Monika Weiss' faculty profile page
• Youtube: The Chestertown Spy profiles Monika Weiss
• Youtube: Interview with Prof. Weiss on "Sustenazo"
• Visit the Kohl Gallery site
• Review: Monika Weiss – "Sustenazo, Lament II"

Career Counselor Sawyer Receives High Honor

CHESTERTOWN—Vicky Sawyer, Associate Director of the Career Center at Washington College, has received the highest award of professional recognition from the Maryland Career Development Association. Sawyer was presented with the Lifetime Contribution Award at the MCDA’s annual conference in Bowie, MD on February 4 for her commitment and her impact on the career development field.

Jim Allison, the College’s Director of Career Development, says the award is well deserved. “Vicky Sawyer has been a credit to Washington College for more than 20 years. She’s to be admired for her tireless efforts and the dedication she has shown to the innumerable students she has assisted.”

It is this dedication that led to her nomination and eventual win, says MCDA Awards Chair Natalie Kauffman. “Throughout Ms. Sawyer’s professional life she has always incorporated an intensely personal and supportive approach that stretches the limits of her students' and alumni's talents and potential,” said Kauffman, who also noted that Sawyer’s influence reaches beyond Washington College. As an active member of the MCDA, Sawyer has “woven her coaching strength into the very fabric of the association,” helping them to improve the standards of career development services throughout Maryland. “We at MCDA are in her debt!” says Kauffman.

Sawyer, a resident of Worton, holds a degree in secondary education from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and a master’s degree in human development and counseling from Eastern Carolina University. She continued her studies at Loyola College to become specialized in career development and counseling. In addition to serving as Associate Director of the Career Center, she is also the Center’s Internship Coordinator and Master Career Counselor.

Bead by Bead, WC's First Lady Puts Her World's Record to Good Use to Fight Breast Cancer

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Elisabeth Reiss set out to break a world record when she single-handedly strung 40,000 pink beads—each bead representing one of the 40,000 American lives lost each year to breast cancer—into one continuous strand. She finished the project in the fall of 2009 and learned this past November that she had, indeed, earned recognition from the Guinness World Records organization.

Now that she has the world’s attention, the First Lady of Washington College wants to put those 40,000 beads to good use, raising funds for breast cancer research and education. Her goal: to raise at least $40,000 for the Susan G. Komen Foundation by selling sponsorships for every bead. Reiss has created a Web site for the fundraiser, www.buyabead.org, where anyone who donates at least $1 can dedicate a bead to a friend or family member affected by the disease.

Reiss, who became First Lady of the College on July 1, 2010, became motivated to advocate for breast-cancer causes soon after marrying Mitchell Reiss and moving to the United States from her native England. Her mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law are among the many women she would watch battle breast cancer. Reiss has participated in a number of breast-cancer related fundraisers over the years, especially in Williamsburg, where the family lived for 11 years while Mitchell taught law and diplomacy at the College of William & Mary.

But the idea of doing something on her own came while she was volunteering as a tutor in the Rita Walsh Literacy Center in Williamsburg. One day she found herself trying to persuade a young man who was just learning how to read that he could make a big difference in younger students’ lives by, in turn, helping them learn to read. “He was making all these unrealistic, impossible plans for himself, and I was trying to convince him that sometimes doing one very simple thing could make a big difference,” she explains.

Soon afterward, she decided to take her own advice when it came to breast health. “I read in the Guinness Book of World Records about a young girl in England who had set a record by stringing what was then the world’s longest strand of beads. And I thought, now that’s a simple thing that I could do—I could string beads. And I could break the record for beading in a way that called attention to the staggering number of people the disease claims each year.”

The task took approximately 400 hours, during which the Reiss dining room and front parlor became her beading workshop. She refused the many offers of help from family and friends. “I wanted to make sure that I met the Guinness standards by doing all the work myself,” she explains.

The end result, officially unveiled and notarized in October of 2009, stretched 1,048 feet, greater than the length of three football fields. With help from her husband and members of the Phi Mu sorority at William & Mary, Reiss laid out the strand in a continuous pattern on the floor of a meeting room on that campus. “It really had an impact on people when they realized that each of those beads represented a life,” she says.

Now she hopes her fundraising efforts will make a significant difference in the Komen Foundation’s work to eradicate breast cancer. And in the meantime, she’s brainstorming about what to do with that 1,048-foot colossus of pink beads. First, she wants to create an easy way to transport it without tangling or breaking so it can be displayed at events such as Race for the Cure and Relay for Life. She might eventually shape it into a large halter bra, an outsize symbol of the need to get mammograms, to do breast self-exams, to fund research for a cure.

An oversized pink-beaded brassiere? Sounds like another one for the record books.

(To learn more about the Buy a Bead project, visit the Web site (www.buyabead.org) or email your questions to buyabead@yahoo.com. To contribute, send a check, along with the name of the cancer survivor or victim you wish to honor, to Buy A Bead, P.O. Box 771, Chestertown, MD, 21620. )

Photos: Top, Elisabeth with her record-breaking strand of 40,000 beads, representing the lives lost to breast cancer each year in the United States. Middle, Daughter Michael and husband Mitchell were on hand to help Elisabeth Reiss tie off her 1,048 foot-strand the day her feat was officially measured and notarized for submission to the Guinness World Records. Bottom: Friends in Williamsburg helped Elisabeth lay out the immense strand of pink on the floor of a conference room.

Famed Composer Joins Librettist and Actor to Discuss Collaboration on The Scottsboro Boys

Chestertown—Broadway comes to Washington College on Tuesday, February 22, when the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Department of Drama join forces to present “History on Broadway: The Scottsboro Boys.” In this special program, legendary Broadway composer John Kander, librettist David Thompson and actor Forrest McClendon will discuss the creation of The Scottsboro Boys, a new musical based on one of American history’s most infamous racial dramas.

The program will begin at 5:30 p.m., onstage at Decker Theatre in the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts, on the Washington College campus. Associate Professor of Drama Michele Volanksy will moderate.

The Scottsboro Boys, which ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre this fall, is the final collaboration by musical theatre giants John Kander and Fred Ebb, (Chicago, Cabaret,) with a book by David Thompson, who adapted the script for Chicago’s current revival. This daring musical explores a fascinating and dark chapter in American history with arresting originality.

Deliberately adopting the structure of the early 20^th century minstrel shows, a deeply racist form of theatre, the musical tells the story of the notorious 1930’s “Scottsboro” case, in which nine African-American teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 19, were pulled from a box car in Alabama and unjustly accused, tried and convicted of a terrible crime. The case electrified the nation, and the young men languished in jail for years, while the case was tried, and retried, ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.

On stage, the cast of the The Scottsboro Boys, which included Forrest McClendon as Mr. Tambo, subverts the form of the minstrel show to highlight the injustice of the accusations and the hypocrisies of the American criminal justice system. At times shocking and controversial, The Scottsboro Boys is also raucously funny and deeply moving in its portrayal of race and justice in 1930’s America.

Prior to the public conversation, Forrest McClendon will conduct a special master class. This master class, exclusively for current Drama students at Washington College, has been made possible by the Maxcy Family Visiting Artist Endowment.

John Kander is one of the most esteemed and prolific composers in the American theatre. In 1962, he teamed with the late Fred Ebb to forge one of the longest-running and most successful creative partnerships in Broadway history. Together they wrote music and lyrics for some of the late 20^th century’s most popular and provocative musicals, including Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Together, Kander and Ebb have garnered three Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards and two Grammy Awards for their songs, as well as countless other honors including an Academy Award nomination for New York, New York, which has become the official song of New York City. In 1998, Kander and Ebb were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.

David Thompson, a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has collaborated with Kander and Ebb on scripts for the revivals of Flora, the Red Menace and Chicago. He has also written the librettos for And the World Goes ‘Round, Steel Pier, The Scottsboro Boys, Thou Shalt Not (with music by Harry Connick, Jr.,) and The Look of Love, a revue of the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. He is currently working on adaptations of two films, The Blue Angel and Little Miss Marker. He is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was nominated for a Tony award for Steel Pier.

Forrest McClendon made his Broadway debut last fall in The Scottsboro Boys, playing ‘Mr. Tambo’ and several other roles. Prior work includes Off-Broadway’s James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire and Swoony Planet. He has extensive credits in regional theatres from Texas to Connecticut, and has received the Barrymore Award for his work in Avenue X at the 11^th Hour Theatre Company in Philadelphia, a Central Texas Critics Table Award for The America Play at the Zachary Scott Theatre, and an Audelco Award nomination for James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire. He studied music at the University of Connecticut, and has taught musical theatre at Temple University and Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

Michele Volansky is Associate Professor of Drama at Washington College and Associate Artist for the PlayPenn New Play Development Conference. Volansky also served on the artistic staffs at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Philadelphia Theatre Company. She has worked on over 150 new and established plays, including the Broadway productions of Buried Child and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She is the 1999 inaugural recipient of the Elliot Hayes Award for Dramaturgy and is a past President of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She is also a doctoral student at the University of Hull (England), writing about the critics Kenneth Tynan and Frank Rich.

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About the Starr Center

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores our nation’s history – and particularly the legacy of its Founding era – in innovative ways. Through educational programs, scholarship, and public outreach, and especially by supporting and fostering the art of written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between past and present, and between the academic world and the public at large. From its base in the circa-1746 Custom House along Chestertown’s colonial waterfront, the Center also serves as a portal onto a world of opportunities for Washington College students. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu/

About the Department of Drama

Washington College drama students play many different characters and many different roles behind-the-scenes, while learning about the theatrical arts and about themselves. Courses exploring the history of theater, acting, directing, design and dramaturgy prepare students for internships, graduate school and careers in theater. In Fall 2009, the renovated Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts became the centerpiece of the drama department, providing a state-of-the-art environment for performers, technicians and audiences. For more information visit http://drama.washcoll.edu/

About the Maxcy Family Visiting Artist Endowment

Established in 2001 by Edward M. Maxcy, a co-founder of The Washington College Friends of the Arts, the Visiting Artists Endowment provides support for the drama Department to bring to campus a guest actor, director, stage manager, set designer, or other gifted theater professional. The visiting artist will provide instruction and/or performances and will interact with the students and faculty to enhance the quality of the theater program at the College.

Photos: Forrest McClendon (at right) performs in "The Scottsboro Boys" during its fall 2010 run at the Lyceum. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

DuPont Executive’s Talk on Innovation Launches WC’s Celebration of Chemistry

CHESTERTOWN—A senior executive at chemical giant DuPont will deliver the J. C. Jones Seminar in American Business on Friday, February 18 as Washington College opens its year-long celebration of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry. Thomas M. Connelly, Jr., Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer of E. I. duPont de Nemours and Company, will lecture on “Hard Facts and Soft Skills for the Innovator of Tomorrow,” beginning at 5 p.m. in the Decker Theatre of Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Dr. Connelly graduated with highest honors from Princeton University with degrees in chemical engineering and economics. As a Winston Churchill Scholar, he received his doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge.

At DuPont, Connelly has responsibility for Applied BioSciences, Nutrition & Health, Performance Polymers, Packaging & Industrial Polymers businesses, and Science & Technology. He also oversees the company’s business in geographic regions outside the United States and serves in advisory roles to the U.S. Government and the Republic of Singapore.

The International Year of Chemistry (IYC-2011) was proclaimed by the United Nations to increase public appreciation of chemistry and chemical engineering in meeting the world’s needs; to encourage interest in chemistry and chemical engineering among young people; to generate enthusiasm for the creative future of chemistry and chemical engineering; and to celebrate the achievements of Marie Curie and the contributions of women to chemistry and chemical engineering. Washington College IYC-2011 events will focus on the interactions, integration, and involvement of chemistry with business, medicine, energy needs, and the environment. It will conclude with a special ceremony on November 3, 2011 at which 1995 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Mario Molina will receive an honorary doctor of science degree and deliver an address on “The Science and Policy of Climate Change.”

The J. C. Jones Seminar in American Business was established in honor of the late James C. Jones, Jr., a Baltimore businessman and 1947 graduate of Washington College who remained active in alumni affairs and served on the Board of Visitors and Governors of the College.

Admission to the February 18 Jones Seminar, cosponsored by the Departments of Business Management and Chemistry and SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Underwood Gallery.

Jasper String Quartet Performs Saturday, Feb. 19

CHESTERTOWN—The acclaimed artists of the Jasper String Quartet will appear at Washington College on Sat., Feb. 19 as the third installment of the college’s 59^th Concert Series. The “Jaspers,” recently named quartet-in-residence at the Oberlin Conservatory, will perform Beethoven Op. 18, No.3; Conrad Tao’s Quartet No. 2 (a 2010 commission for the Jasper Quartet by the teen-aged composer); and Brahms Op. 51, No. 2. The concert begins at 8 p.m. in the Hotchkiss Recital Hall of the Gibson Center for the Arts.

Quartet members J. Freivogel, Sae Chonabayashi, Sam Quintal, and Rachel Henderson Freivogel formed the group as students at Oberlin College and have since performed worldwide. Called “an impressive young ensemble” by The New York Times, the quartet won the 2009 Horatio Parker Memorial Prize from the Yale School of Music, where they studied under the Tokyo String Quartet. In 2008 it won top prizes at the Plowman Chamber Music Competition, the Coleman Competition, Chamber Music Yellow Springs, and the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. In addition, the four musicians served two years as the Ernst C. Stiefel String Quartet in Residence at the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in Katonah.

Washington College students are admitted to the performance free with a valid ID. Tickets will be sold at the door at $5 for youth ages 18 and under and $15 for others. The Gibson Center for the Arts is located on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Ave., Chestertown.