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Anderson to Keynote Opening
Convocation
Professor of Theater Carolyn Anderson will be the keynote speaker
at Opening Convocation Tuesday, Sept. 3.
The event gets under way at 5:30 p.m. at South Park Green. The traditional
J. Erik Jonsson Day Barbecue on Case Green will follow the ceremony,
which is open to the campus community. In case of rain, convocation
will take place in the Sports Center, with the barbecue following
in the dining halls.
Anderson, who chairs the Department of Theater, will focus her remarks
on Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, the summer
reading assigned to members of the Class of ’06. The book will
be the focus of early Liberal Studies discussions for incoming students.
“I’ll emphasize themes relating to liberal arts learning
- how college transports us from the world that we’re so used
to living in and gives us the tools necessary for continued growth.
I think that it’s important to stress the messages of a liberal
arts education in order to help our newest students prepare for
their academic careers,” she said.
The Class of ’06 will share the spotlight at Opening Convocation,
the formal start to the College’s academic year. Totaling approximately
600 students, the class is 60 percent female and 40 percent male.
Class members come from 30 states and 11 foreign countries. The
average SAT score for the enrolled class is 1,250.
A total of 36 class members will begin their college careers participating
in Skidmore’s London program, which will be under the direction
of Dean of Studies Jon Ramsey. This group of students will return
to campus for the Spring ’03 semester.
A member of the Skidmore faculty since 1979, Anderson last spring
received the second annual Ralph A. Ciancio Award for Excellence
in Teaching, established in 2000 to honor Ciancio, emeritus professor
of English. Anderson said that she was “honored and humbled”
to have been selected and noted, “in the midst of my talented
colleagues, I feel like all of us should be chosen for this.”
This is the second time that Anderson has been recognized at Skidmore.
In 1989 she was chosen by her faculty colleagues to deliver the
Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture.
Anderson has long specialized in the Living Newspaper form of theater
with her collaborator Wilma Hall. Their plays have been performed
at Actor’s Alley Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles, the Arizona
Theater’s Cabaret Theatre, Theater of the First Amendment in
Virginia, the Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, and the Spa Little
Theater in Saratoga Springs.
Faces: A Living Newspaper on AIDS, an early Anderson/Hall
collaborative effort, has been produced by a variety of theaters
and organizations throughout the country and was the subject of
a documentary produced by WMHT-TV and aired nationally. For Bread
and Freedom, a Living Newspaper production about work and labor
in the United States, was staged for George Mason University’s
Labor and Culture Conference and by the Theater of the First Amendment.
Anderson and Hall have recently finished a film script for the National
Park Service about the baths at Saratoga. Their full-length play
Parting Kind (about pioneer women making the overland crossing
in the mid-1800s) has received staged readings by three professional
play development groups.
In 1996 Anderson accepted an invitation to lead a workshop and create
a play using Bread and Puppet Theater puppets. The resulting piece
about the plight of workers in a North Carolina poultry processing
plant - The Sky is Falling - was actually performed by workers
at the strike site. Other Anderson productions include three short
plays on the western landscape: Titans in the Earth, a one-act
concerning the Titan missiles that surrounded Tucson during the
Cold War; Ground Zero, about the Mercury Test Site in Nevada;
and The Last River, a site-specific environmental theater
piece written for the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity.
Anderson has directed a number of plays for Skidmore, including
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Our Town, Spoon River Anthology,
and Under Milk Wood. She is a member of the Capital Repertory
Theatre Board of Trustees as well as the Association for Theatre
in Higher Education and the Arizona Theatre Alliance.
Skidmore
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