Arts Series Autumn 2021

Faculty members, scholars, and staff from disciplines across the University of Chicago will delve into the transcendent power—as well as the mysteries and challenges—of written texts, performative techniques, material objects, and musical soundscapes.

Location
Online
Related
Open Enrollment

Overview

One especially notable consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the shuttering of institutions that serve as wellsprings of our shared humanity. Movie houses, museums, theaters, and concert halls—places that offer escape, enlightenment, and provocation—no longer operate as they once did, to nurture and inspire, to instigate and confront, as well as to physically bring us together, in cohorts of common interest.

In an effort to reconnect and reconvene with a rich diversity of expressive forms, we invite you to join us at Arts@Graham, a free public online lecture series. Faculty members, scholars, and staff from disciplines across the University of Chicago will delve into the transcendent power—as well as the mysteries and challenges—of written texts, performative techniques, material objects, and musical soundscapes.

The first pair of lectures will focus on the theater, and specifically explore the works of Tom Stoppard and August Wilson. The second pair of presentations will draw on museum objects from the Oriental Institute Museum and the Smart Museum of Art to consider how material forms serve as evidence of human creativity and communication across time and place. The last lecture will focus on music, and on the creation and effects of musical soundscapes.

Please join us for this online lecture series to learn, reflect, and engage. In so doing, you will gather with scholars, experts, and fellow participants in a world of ideas, expressions, and interpretations.

The renowned playwright Tom Stoppard turns to his own roots in his latest play, Leopoldstadt. This drama, whose title refers to the Jewish quarter in Vienna, traces three generations of a Jewish family through Europe’s searing political upheavals in the first half of the twentieth century. The play testifies, at once, to the allure of assimilation, and to its limits, as well as to the persistent, malleable force of antisemitism. While steeped in grand historical processes, Leopoldstadt also explores the intimate and contradictory manifestations of love and loss, and faith and betrayal. The play has only been staged once, at the Wyndham’s Theater in London’s West End, in early 2020.

In this lecture, Professor David Levin will explore the logic and resonances of Stoppard’s sprawling historical drama. While Leopoldstadt refers to specific times and places, it also transcends that specificity in surprising and exciting ways—drawing us into a dialogue with our contemporary moment. The interaction between then and now, there and here, them and us, and specificity and generalizability is a recurring feature of Stoppard’s work: we will explore its operations in this, his latest—and possibly his last—work for the theater. 

Participants will engage in a close reading of an excerpt from the play. The session will conclude with a conversation with Charles Newell, the Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre, who has directed no fewer than seven of Stoppard’s pieces over the course of his career. 

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About the Court Theatre

Court Theatre is the University of Chicago’s professional theater. It is dedicated to innovation, inquiry, intellectual engagement, and community service. Its theatrical productions and audience enrichment and educational programs draw upon, and share, the expertise and insights of practitioners, scholars, and students. Court Theatre was founded in 1955 and took up residence in its current site in 1981. 

The American playwright August Wilson is widely considered one of the most astute and trenchant chroniclers of the twentieth century. His majestic plays illuminate various aspects of the experiences of Black Americans, and vividly render the persistent and ephemeral boundaries that serve to divide and cohere individuals, families, and society at large. Wilson’s corpus of work is rooted by two fundamental commitments, one, to the capacity of theater to serve as a universal truth teller—of theater’s capacity to shed light on the human condition—and two, to the idea that Black artists, and Black people more generally, serve as “the culture custodians of our art, our literature and our lives.”  

In this lecture, Professor Kenneth Warren explores Wilson’s relationship to the theater and to the idea of a shared Black experience. Warren considers the complexities of Wilson’s principles, and their implication for Black theater in particular, and for theater more generally. Warren also explores the predicaments and obligations that Wilson produces for directors, actors, theater companies, and audiences who perform and attend his plays.

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About the Court Theatre

Court Theatre is the University of Chicago’s professional theater. It is dedicated to innovation, inquiry, intellectual engagement, and community service. Its theatrical productions and audience enrichment and educational programs draw upon, and share, the expertise and insights of practitioners, scholars, and students. Court Theatre was founded in 1955 and took up residence in its current site in 1981.

In this lecture, Dr. Foy Scalf draws on objects from the collection of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum to answer the question: who invented the clock and how did people tell time in ancient Egypt, particularly at night?

Around 1500 BC, a man named Amenemhet claims in his tomb biography that he invented a device for measuring the hours of the night, which may have included moving mechanical parts. Five hundred years before Amenemhet’s invention, ancient Egyptian priests were recording the relative positions of groups of stars in large diagonal charts that helped calculate the hour based on their position in the sky relative to each other. Foy will analyze time-keeping devices, including an “astronomical device” of King Tut, to reveal Egyptians’ conception of knowledge formation and scientific discovery. 

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About the Oriental Institute Museum:

The Oriental Institute Museum is a world-renowned showcase for the history, art, and  archaeology of the ancient Middle East. The museum displays objects in permanent galleries devoted to ancient Egypt, Nubia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, and the ancient site of Megiddo, as well as rotating special exhibits.

What are the most fundamental elements of music? Most sources say melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. But to recognize a piece's style, or decode its cultural meaning, requires reliance on another, less explored element: sonority (the intersection of timbre, dynamics, and register).

In this talk, Dr. John Y. Lawrence will explain what sonority is, how it affects your brain as you listen, and how performers manipulate it to make one rendition sound radically different from the next. Using performances of nineteenth-century music, this lecture will explore how sonority shapes the basic features of a musical experience, such as which line is the melody, where sections begin and end, and what images a piece evokes.

Recommended Reading and Listening

Please listen to the duet “Là ci darem la mano” from Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, and also study the translation of the text. Consider the question: How do the colors of the different instrumental background lines reinforce, contradict, or alter the meaning of the words being sung?

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