Category: Performances

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SUNY Geneseo teams with University of Rochester to celebrate Thoreau and creativity

SUNY Geneseo is partnering with the University of Rochester to sponsor a week’s worth of events celebrating Henry David Thoreau and creativity, April 3-5.

Poster for Thoreau Events

Wednesday, April 3: Concert and Lecture

  • Time: 7:30 p.m.
  • Place: Hatch Recital Hall, Eastman School of Music
  • Admission: Free
  • Sponsor: University of Rochester

Heather O’Donnell (piano) and Laura Lentz (flute) will perform Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860.” Ives biographer Jan Swafford will deliver a lecture contextualizing Ives’ sonata.

Swafford writes regular columns on music and other subjects in Slate, and is heard as a commentator on NPR and the BBC. His writing honors include a 2012 Deems Taylor Award for internet writing and a Mellon Fellowship at Harvard. His Brahms and Ives biographies were end-of-year Critics’ Choices in The New York Times. The Ives biography was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in biography and won the Pen-Winship prize for a book on a New England subject. His biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph in its first week appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.

Thursday, April 4: Lecture

  • Time: 5:00 p.m.
  • Place: Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester Humanities Center, Room D
  • Admission: Free
  • Sponsor: University of Rochester

Laura Dassow Walls, William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver the University of Rochester’s 2019 George Ford Lecture, titled “The Death of Nature and the Life of Thoreau.”

Walls is the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press. The first full-length, comprehensive biography of Thoreau in a generation, Walls’s book draws on extensive new research and the full range of Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings to present Thoreau as vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions — fully embedded in his place and time, yet speaking powerfully to the problems and perils of today.

Friday, April 5: Film, Henry David Thoreau, Surveyor of the Soul

  • Time: 6:00 p.m.
  • Place: The Little Theatre, Rochester
  • Admission: Free
  • Sponsor: SUNY Geneseo

The Little will screen independent director Huey Coleman’s feature-length film, Henry David Thoreau, Surveyor of the Soul. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the filmmaker and Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

For thirty years, Huey has been making films about artists, education, the environment, and Maine. His films have been shown at film festivals throughout the US, on PBS, and on European television. Surveyor of the Soul explores Thoreau’s life and the impact of his writings on environmental issues, civil rights, and individual thinking in our time. It includes appearances by Bill McKibben, Howard Zinn, Robert Bly, Rep. John Lewis, and Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

Note: Huey will be on the SUNY Geneseo campus Friday, April 5 at 1 p.m. in Bailey 204 to talk about Surveyor and about his career as an independent filmmaker.

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Join us at the 2016 Rochester Fringe Festival

Come to the Fringe Festival in Rochester, New York next weekend and see what the English department’s creative writers, filmmakers, and multimedia artists have prepared for your enjoyment! All events are free.

See page 35 of the print Festival Guide for a full listing, including free performances from 11:30 am to midnight on Saturday, September 24. Events include:

  • Guerrilla Art: (a student art collective) have prepared a site-specific installation. At the Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs Sts, Friday 9/23, 5-11 pm, and Saturday 9/24, 12 noon to 11 pm. Faculty sponsor: Lytton Smith.
  • Heirlooms: creative writers reading their work: Sarah Steil, creative non-fiction Oliver Diaz, fiction Evan Goldstein, poetry 3:45 at the Lyric Theatre, 440 Main St at the corner with Prince. Faculty sponsor: Kristen Gentry.
  • Filmmakers: Saturday 9/17, 7:15 pm at Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs Interaction by Wei Ying Ch’ng Run by Michael MacDonald Saturday 9/24, 7:15 pm at Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs She Used to Be Mine by Anna Tailleur Overture by Jason Guisao Arrive early and turn in an ID for headphones. Faculty sponsor: Melanie Blood.

Concessions are available at both the Spiegelgarden and Lyric Theatre. Free parking at Lyric, garage and pay lots near Spiegelgarden.

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John Gallaher on campus September 21

Poet, editor, and musician John Gallaher will read from his work  on Monday, September 21 at 8 p.m. in Welles 111, the Harding Room, on the SUNY Geneseo campus.

According to Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips (Yes! Gallaher gets praise from rock stars!) “Gallaher is not a writer or a poet, he is a psychic using words to trick us.” He’s written collaborative books and produced film poems.

A previous winner of the prestigious Boston Review Poetry Contest (judged by Rae Armantrout) and the author of five books of poetry, Gallaher is a writer no less a person than John Ashbery has called “[a] poet I once influenced who ha[s] moved beyond me.” Gallaher builds on Ashbery’s chatty multidirectionality and associative logic by adding his own philosophical edge, a pondering that’s at once homespun and existential.

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Poet M. NourbeSe Philip to perform here April 28 at 7 p.m.

Afro-Canadian poet, writer, and activist M. NourbeSe Philip will perform from her recent book, Zong!, a radical collection of poetry that tries to come to terms with the 1781 tragedy of the slave-ship Zong, from which ship over 150 African men, women, and children were thrown overboard as part of an insurance claim. Zong colorNo one was ever tried for their murder, and all that survives recording the incident is a two-page legal decision, Gregson v. Gilbert, named for and concerned with the ship’s owners and insurers, not the Africans onboard. It has been described by Juliana Spahr as “exceptional and uniquely moving.”

Philip’s performance will be accompanied by an original musical composition by SUNY Geneseo’s Glenn McClure.

The event, which will be held at Doty Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus, is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase.map

M. NourbeSe Philip is the acclaimed author of four books of poetry, two collections of essays, a play, a novel, several short stories, and other writings; her work features in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The recipient of many illustrious international awards, including the Casa de las Americas prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a McDowell Fellowship, a Chalmers Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency, Philip has read and performed her work internationally, including as writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies and as part of The Scream Literary Festival. She lives and writes in Toronto, where she has previously been the writer-in-residence at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.

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Actors from Ireland’s Curlew Theatre Company to perform J. M. Synge adaptation on April 10

Aran PosterTegolin Knowland and Sean Coyne of the Curlew Theatre, Tullycross, Ireland will perform Eamon Grennan’s adaptation of John Millinton Synge’s The Aran Islands: A Dramatic Recital for Two Voices on Friday, April 10, 2015 at 7 p.m. in the Geneseo Riviera theater. The event, which is free and open to the pubic, is sponsored by the departments of English and History at SUNY Geneseo.

Between May 1898 and October 1901, John Millington Synge, a Dubliner, spent just under four months (accumulated over four separate visits) on Inishmaan, the middle island of the three Aran Islands lying off the West Coast of Ireland. From the diary and notebooks he kept while there, he composed his travel book, The Aran Islands. Eamon Grennan (well known Irish poet) has taken a number of fairly representative moments from The Aran Islands and turned them into a kind of collage to represent as much as possible what the book is like and something of its flavor. It is partly a romantic lyrical evocation of this wild place, partly a series of anecdotes, partly an almost anthropological study of the people’s lives, their habits, their folk-tales and so on. First performed at the Clifden Arts Festival in Western Ireland, this dramatic recital offers American audiences a rare opportunity to experience the fine work of Ireland’s Curlew Theatre Company.