Trisha Brown Exhibition to Open; Brown to Visit Campus for ‘Dialogue’

Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961-2001 will be on view Feb.1-June 1 at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Interdisciplinary to its core and multimedia in its presentation, Dance and Art in Dialogue achieves the nearly impossible: pinning to a museum wall not only the transient beauty of Brown's dance works but also the collaborative process she shared with the visual artists whose costumes and sets helped shape and clothe her dances.

Brown will be on campus for a public “Dialogue” with exhibition curator Hendel Teicher.
Read more about it.

FIT Curator’s Topic: The Corset

“The Corset: Fashioning the Body,” is the title of a lecture to be given by Valerie Steele, chief curator of the historic costume collection at the Fashion Institute of Technology on Tuesday, Feb. 3.

Sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the talk gets under way at 5:30 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free.

Steele, who received a Ph.D. degree in cultural history at Yale University, is the author of nine books on clothing and fashion, including The Corset: A Cultural History (2001, Yale University Press). In a review of the book, Publisher’s Weekly noted, “For 400 years, women wore corset that controlled their shape and constricted, and sometimes crushed, their ribs and organs….Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the corset became less popular and gradually faded almost completely from use, though recently, it’s come back into fashion as sexy outwear….Valerie Steele challenges the popular view that corset-wearing women were merely the victims of fashion, and delves into the complex gender politics surrounding the corset controversies of the past.” Steele’s other books include 50 Years of Fashion: New Look to Now (1997, 2000, Yale University Press), and Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (1996, Oxford University Press). She also is editor of the quarterly journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.

Campus Bloodmobile Upcoming; Web Scheduling Introduced

The second visit by the Red Cross Bloodmobile of the academic year is scheduled Tuesday, Feb. 4, in the multipurpose room of the Sports and Recreation Center.

Associate Professor of Psychology Holley Hodgins, coordinator of the Bloodmobile, reports, “Thanks to Leo Geoffrion, college webmaster, and Mac Oswalt, professor of psychology, we now have a website where you can view available appointment times and sign up for one of your choice. Despite the wonderful technology, no one has invented a substitute for donated blood. So please consider giving blood by clicking on this address and then showing up at the Sports Center on Feb. 4.”

Fifty people have registered to donate thus far; there is room for 50 more to participate. Schedule (http://cfsrv.skidmre.edu/web/redcross) your appointment.

Eco-Justice Communities to Be Topic

Larry L. Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, will lecture on “Eco-Justice Communities: A Report from the Field.”

Sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain, the free talk begins at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 5, in Emerson Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Rasmussen is a long-time scholar and prolific author whose current work in Christian ethics includes analysis of power, methodological issues in Bible and ethics, technology and ecology.

A member of the Union Theological faculty since 1986, Rasmussen earlier was professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. His most recent books include Earth Habitat: Eco-Injustice and the Church’s Response, co-edited with Dieter Hessel (2001, Fortress); Ethics for a Small Planet, with Daniel Maguire (1998, SUNY Press); Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996, Orbis Books and the World Council of Churches), which won the 1997 Grawemeyer Prize in Religion; Moral Fragments and Moral Community (1993, Fortress); and Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Pubic Life (1991, Fortress; 1989, HarperCollins).

Rasmussen is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics and a past editor of The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics. He was co-moderator of Unit III (Justice, Peace, Creation) of the World Council of Churches from 1991 to 1998 and currently serves on the Justice, Peace, Creation Advisory Committee of the WCC.

A 1961 graduate of St. Olaf College, where he earned a B.A. degree, Rasmussen earned the B.D. from Luther Theological Seminary in 1965 and the Th.D. from Union Theological Seminary in 1970.

Jay Rogoff to Share New Poems in Campus Reading
J
ay Rogoff, lecturer in English and liberal studies at Skidmore, will read from his poetry at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6, in Emerson Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. The reading will feature his new book of poems, How We Came to Stand on That Shore, which will be issued Feb. 15 by River City Publishing.

Rogoff won the 1994 Washington Prize for The Cutoff, his debut book of poetry set in the world of minor league baseball, published by The Word Works in 1995. His chapbook, First Hand, a winner of the Poetry Society of America's John Masefield Award, appeared from Mica Press in 1997.

Of Rogoff’s new book, poet Andrea Hollander Budy has written, “In a series of compelling narrative and lyric poems, How We Came to Stand on That Shore examines not only the lives of Rogoff’s European forebears who emigrated to America, but also the circumstances and depths of his own life—he is both ‘the best thing’ his father has done and nothing . . . going nowhere.” Poet and editor Ronald Wallace says the book “embraces a past that enwraps and enraptures us, a past replete with scatter and leakage that is nonetheless comforting and bright.”

Born in Queens, N.Y., and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Syracuse University, Rogoff taught writing and literature at Syracuse University and LeMoyne College, and for 10 years worked as an administrator and teacher in Skidmore’s Inmate Higher Education Program. His other prizes include an Academy of American Poets Award, the Delmore Schwartz Poetry Prize, and a New York State Council on the Arts grant. A frequent fellow at MacDowell and Yaddo (where he is currently in residence), he was honored as Yaddo's Sloane and Solomon Writer in Residence in 1991.

His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Agni, Crazyhorse, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, The Progressive, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review. His poetry has also been featured on-line by Poetry Daily and on National Public Radio. He has published reviews and critical essays in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

New contemporary dance from Sara Pearson/Patrik Widrig and Company

Sara Pearson/Patrik Widrig and Company, widely acclaimed for an original and energetic style of contemporary dance-theater, will present two performances of their newest work, The Return of Lot’s Wife, Friday and Saturday, Feb. 7 and 8. Both concerts will begin in the college’s Dance Theater at 8 p.m. General admission is $10; $8 for Skidmore community members, senior citizens and students; and $5 for Skidmore students. The box office opens 45 minutes before each performance and seating is first-come, first-served. For more information, call the Dance Theater at 518-580-5392.

The Return of Lot’s Wife premiered in mid-January at the Altogether Different Festival in New York City’s Joyce Theater, where it was described as “an edgy and heartbreakingly funny dance/theater/salt epic [in which] Lot’s wife finally confronts God in a 1950s Brooklyn kitchen as she looks back again and again.” The work also features the recitation of Persian poetry and is performed to original music by Carter Burwell, a composer known for his film scores of movies such as Fargo, Three Kings, and Being John Malkovich.

The Skidmore concerts are the culmination of a dance residency jointly supported by the College and Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. During the residency, the company will teach two classes open to area dancers: intermediate modern dance (3:40-5:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 4) and advanced modern dance (4-5:50 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 5). Both classes will take place in the Skidmore College Dance Center; admission is $10 at the door. For more information, call 518-580-5360.

Over the past 16 years, the New York City-based dance company has gained an international reputation for “American dance theater at its funniest and most compelling” (Neue Zurcher Zeitung). According to Pearson and Widrig, their work “pushes rituals of the familiar toward the mysterious, the subversive, and the intimate.”

Dreaming of Timbuctoo tells of 19th-Century Black Farmers in the Adirondacks

More than a decade before the Civil War, black Americans were offered an unusual opportunity to farm their own land in the Adirondack wilderness. Those who took up the offer and created North Country farms and communities—one named Timbuctoo after the fabled 15th-century West African city—are the subject of an exhibition opening Feb. 7 in the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. On view through March 9, Dreaming of Timbuctoo tells a dramatic story that began in 1846, with New York land speculator and abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Read more about it.

Religious Women, Human Rights Topic of Upcoming Talk

“Religious Women and Human Rights: When the Human Rights Construct May be an Inappropriate Framework for Achieveing Human Rights,” will be discussed by the Rev. Alison L. Boden Wednesday, Feb. 12.

Free and open to the public, the talk begins at 6:30 p.m. in Emerson Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. The lecture is sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office.

Boden, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and senior lecturer in the College and Divinity School at the University of Chicago, teaches the formational issues and practical skills of ministry as well as human rights and religion.

She earned a B.A. degree at Vassar College, a diploma in acting from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York City, an M.Div. degree from Union theological Seminary in New York, and the M.Phil. in peace studies form the University of Bradford in England, where she is completing a dissertation on human rights and gender, with special emphasis on conflicts between rights to religious expression and the human rights of women. In 1994 she was an official observer of the Salvadoran national elections as part of a joint U.S.-U.N. mission.

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