Performing Arts – Save Antioch College

Music for music’s sake: Piano Fest to continue

Pianist Sam Reich will perform Bach’s technically challenging “Goldberg Variations.” (Photo by Matt Minde)

The second concert of the Yellow Springs Piano Fest will be held Sunday, July 24, 7 p.m., in the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College.

Cellist Polly Case-Lohrer and pianist Karen Gardner will present Vivaldi, Schumann and Mendelssohn pieces.

Pianist Sam Reich will perform J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” a piece considered so difficult it is rarely heard performed live.

Donations are encouraged to help repair the Steinway piano in the Foundry Theater, which was damaged by flooding.

Read the original article on the Yellow Springs Piano Fest.

Antioch College presents ‘Softcops’

Antioch College opens the surreal comic-drama “Softcops” by Caryl Churchill this weekend, Dec. 5 and 6, at 8 p.m., at the newly renovated Foundry Theater on Corry Street.

The play was first presented in 1984 at the Barbican Pit in London and concerns itself with the evolution of the Western penal system, from the guillotine to the contemporary practice of surveillance. The play is loosely based on French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” written in 1975.

The Antioch production is directed by Louise Smith, her first since returning to the faculty as associate professor of performance at Antioch this fall. The production features original music and sound design by student Seth Kaplan ’15 and additional music by Meredith Monk. The cast includes students Sean Allen, Alli King, Kaplan, Gaerin Warman-Szvoboda, Cole Gentry, Spencer Glazer, Hannah Priscilla Craig and Alexander Campbell, who is also stage manager.

Amanda Egloff is technical director, and Michael Casselli is the media designer.

Tickets for “Softcops” are $7 for adults and $5 for seniors and students. Reservations can be made by calling 319-0200.

“Trifles” in the Foundry Theater

Hannah Craig and Parker Phelan, two students in Geneva Gano’s “Introduction to Drama” literature class at Antioch College, will be the first to perform a play in the recently renovated Foundry Theater.

The two students worked with Gano, Gabrielle Civil, associate professor of performance, and other theater staff to design a minimal set and to truncate and adapt Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” for a two-person performance. They are both excited and nervous to be a part of the first play put on by students in the theater space since the college’s closure in 2008.

“It’s scary to be the first student performance. We want to make a good first impression,” said Craig. “But it’s also really exciting.”

The one-time-only performance will be held in the experimental theater at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18 and is open to the public.

Artist Linda Stein at Antioch College — Sparking new thinking on gender

When Linda Stein was a girl growing up in the Bronx, her mother and older sister made sure she knew the rules: men always had to win, to be (or at least see themselves as) better than women. So they taught her how to hit into the net when she played tennis, to throw the bowling ball into the alley rather than make a strike.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stein has spent much of her adult life as an artist and activist challenging gender stereotypes.

A sculptor and performance artist, Stein comes to Antioch College on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 8 p.m.to speak on “Salander/Blomkvist: Challenging stereotypes in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — and beyond.” The talk will take place in McGregor Hall Room 113 on the college campus.

Stein’s art and activism “have been passionately engaged toward tearing down all forms of gender stereotypes and prejudices as she increasingly focuses on celebrating the fluidity of gender,” according to a college press release. She’s found the gender-bending in the recent best-selling Stieg Larsson novels, and the Swedish (but not American) film version of the book to be provocative and inspiring, she said in a phone interview last week.

“It’s very exciting that the director and author went out of their way to see the male and female characters express fluidity of gender,” she said. “Lisbeth is very much a symbol of protection and female empowerment.”

Her talk, which includes 17 minutes from the Swedish film, will also include Stein’s reflections on other gender-bending female media role models, including Lady Gaga and Wonder Woman, who she sees as “icons of assertiveness.”

While Stein’s art will not be at Antioch at this time, her exhibit, “The Fluidity of Gender,” is on display at the Burnell R. Roberts Triangle Gallery at Sinclair Community College in Dayton until March 7. The exhibit, which includes 13 sculptures of leather-clad figures that she hopes provoke discussions on what it means to be male or female, will travel to more than 19 museums and universities around the country through 2013.

While Stein has considered herself a feminist for decades, it’s taken a while for her to focus her art work on gender issues, she said in an interview in The Progressive magazine. She ran a successful calligraphy business in New York City, making art on the side, but had her world upended by 9/11, which forced Stein and her co-workers to flee her downtown studio. When after several months she began to make art again, Stein found that her art had changed: once purely abstract, she now was drawn to figurative sculptures. Her first post-9/11 group of sculpures were torsos of female knights, using fiber, leather, metal, bone, rope, paper, stone and wood.

“I realized that I wanted to create women who were symbols of strength and protection,” she said in the Progressive interview, stating her interest in constructng a new kind of female hero, one combining the attributes of the Buddhist goddess of kindness, Kwan Yin, with the physical strength and daring of Wonder Woman.

And after creating the female knights, Stein began making wearable sculpture in the form of armor.

“I’m interested in the transformation that occurs when someone puts a piece of sculpture on,” she said in the Progressive interview. “It began with me fortifying myself after 9/11, but I later wanted to give others the experience.”

Women who have worn her armor — sometimes called body swapping — have reported such changes as being more able to say no to a boyfriend, or feeling safer walking at night, Stein said.

In recent years, Stein began making torsos with more ambiguous gender associations, with the hope of sparking thought and conversation regarding what it means to be male or female.

She wants especially to provoke the thinking of young women and men.

“Gender is a very hot topic on campuses today,” she said last week. “As students feel freer to try on different identities, society still pushes back very hard. And students have conflict as well — they’re open to diversity but also aware that there’s so much bullying going on on campuses.” Young women who dare to take on male behavior or appearance have been targeted by cyberbullies, she said.

Things have changed since feminism’s second wave swept the country in the early 1970s, and in many ways women’s lives are better, such as their having more protection against sexual harassment at work, and making strides toward earning equal pay for equal work. But there is still much to do, Stein believes.

“So much has changed,” Stein said. “But not nearly enough.”

Alum brings innovative theater

The Faux-Real Theatre Company hosts the “Oedipus Rex” theater workshop from Friday, Aug. 13 through Thursday, Aug. 19. Mask by Linda White; Jamie Carrillo and William Runnels (in mask).

As an Antioch student in the mid-1980s, Mark Greenfield staged theater productions on the college golf course, inside the mail room, and during board of trustees’ meetings. Now Greenfield returns to Yellow Springs to teach a workshop on producing theater in non-traditional and outdoor settings and put on Oedipus Rex in the Antioch amphitheater.

Organized in collaboration with Antioch College and Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, the week-long workshop, “Make Theatre Anywhere,” runs from 6 to 8 nightly starting Friday, Aug. 13, and ending Thursday, Aug. 19.

Greenfield and other workshop presenters will teach how to use movement and vocal techniques, mask work, chorus involvement, group improvisation methods and stage choreography in an outdoor setting for $35 for the entire week or $7 for each individual night.

Having directed plays in public parks, abandoned buildings and boats, the New York City director is an expert in putting on shows in unexpected places.

“Part of what I have to offer is to show people how, if you have an idea and you have the people, you can find a place to make [theater] happen — and you don’t need a lot of funding to do it,” Greenfield said of the workshop, which is open to theater artists of all ages and experiences levels. “For people who have a lot of theater experience but they’ve done it in a traditional environment — it can expand their milieu in terms of where theater can happen and what it can be.”

Workshop participants will create their own 15-minute short play, which will be performed in conjunction with the staging of Oedipus Rex by Greenfield’s production company, Faux-Real Theatre, on Aug. 20, Aug. 21 and Aug. 22 at the Antioch amphitheater.

Rehearsals for the all-male production of the Sophocles classic start Aug. 13. Six parts will be cast to local actors, who will join eight New York City-based actors of the Faux-Real Theatre Company.

“We wanted to do a traditional play and apply our untraditional aesthetic,” Greenfield said of his vision for Oedipus Rex, which uses masks, ecstatic dancing and simultaneous action in an outdoor setting. The fantastical, transcendent experience Greenfield aims to create incorporates many elements of traditional Greek theater.

“We say we do it as Sophocles intended,” Greenfield said.

Greenfield came up with the idea when attending an Antioch alumni event in New York City while he was searching for an outdoor amphitheater for his Oedipus Rex production.

“It struck me that it would be nice to have something going on in the Antioch amphitheater in looking to revitalize the college,” he said.

Greenfield decided to offer the workshop as a way to give back to a college and community that helped launch his theater career.

“I wanted to do something that really involved both the town and the college,” Greenfield said. “I was very close with community members. For me, the whole Antioch experience was a Yellow Springs experience.”

He also wanted to provide local actors the opportunity to partake in the production.

“I know there is a very active, artistic community [in Yellow Springs] so I thought it would be great to include them,” he said.

Antioch College Interim President Matthew Derr hailed the cooperative effort, remembering Greenfield, his Antioch classmate, as a “real creative force as a student.”

“It’s an interesting collaboration for the college to sponsor something and work with such an innovative company from out-of-town as well as this great local resource in the village,” Derr said.

Nonstop’s participation in the workshop and production includes assisting with marketing and logistics as well as several of the artistic components of the show.

“We’re interested in working collaboratively with the college in areas we can lend our expertise,” said Michael Casselli, a Nonstop executive collective member and performance artist who will help Greenfield, his former Antioch classmate, with the workshop and the set design for the Oedipus Rex production.

“We can work with each other in mutually supportive ways,” Casselli said of the collaboration between Nonstop and the college. “We don’t want to be in competition with each other, so if we can assist or support relationships between us, it would be beneficial to everyone involved.”

Greenfield has decided that a portion of the production and workshop’s proceeds will go to support Nonstop and to Antioch.

“I got so much in my time at Antioch as a person and everything I’ve done afterward is because of what I learned while I was there,” Greenfield said.

To audition for the production or register for the workshop, contact Greenfield at fauxrealtheatre@aol.com or at 917-687-4998. For general information, contact Jill Becker of Nonstop at jillbecker1@gmail.com or 937-767-2646.

Antioch alum presents theater workshop, Oedipus Rex

Antioch alum Mark Greenfield returns to Yellow Springs to host a workshop on putting on theater productions in outdoor and non-traditional venues and to stage his rendition of “Oedipus Rex” in the Antioch amphitheater.

Director Mark Greenfield posed for an impromtu photo in the New York City subway shoot wearing a mask from his Oedipus Rex production. (Submitted photo by Jeff Wood)

Director Mark Greenfield posed for an impromtu photo in the New York City subway wearing a mask from his Oedipus Rex production. (Submitted photo by Jeff Wood)

Workshop participants will create their own 15-minute short play, which will be performed in conjunction with the staging of “Oedipus Rex” by Greenfield’s production company, Faux-Real Theatre, on Aug. 20, Aug. 21 Aug. 22 at the Antioch amphitheater.

To audition for the all-male production of the Sophocles classic or to register for the workshop, contact Greenfield at fauxrealtheatre@aol.com or at 917-687-4998. For general information, contact Jill Becker of Nonstop at jillbecker1@gmail.com or 937-767-2646.

See the August 12 edition of the News for a full article on Greenfield’s innovative approach to theater.