Assistant Professor of Religion Sohini Pillai will represent Kalamazoo College at 9 a.m. Eastern time Sunday in a YouTube lecture titled “The Multiplicity of the Mahabharata Tradition” that she will present through Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative.
The initiative is an independent, student-led initiative based in India, which aims to revive the love for India’s heritage and history and inspire young minds. Throughout the pandemic, it has organized scholarly online lectures on Indian history, culture, art, literature, film and religion.
The ancient Sanskrit Mahabharata (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) is a massive epic poem 15 times the length of the Bible that focuses on the war over the Bharata kingdom between two sets of paternal cousins in the royal Kuru family, the five Pandavas and the 100 Kauravas. Pillai said the Mahabharata has been presented as poems, dramas, ballads, novels, short stories, comic books, television shows, feature films, children’s fantasy series, podcasts, YouTube videos, social media posts and more.
Pillai’s talk Sunday will illustrate the rich multiplicity of the Mahabharata tradition through the close examination of 12 renderings of a single Mahabharata episode that was created over a span of at least 2,000 years. She will focus on the most disturbing and popular scenes in the Mahabharata tradition, the attempted disrobing of Draupadi, the shared wife of the Pandavas, and the heroine of the epic.
In May 2021, Pillai co-edited a volume with Nell Shapiro Hawley of Harvard University titled Many Mahabharatas, which was published by State University of New York Press. Some of the Mahabharatas she will discuss Sunday will be prominently featured in her current book project which is tentatively titled Krishna at Court: Devotion, Patronage and the Mahabharata in Premodern South Asia.
The Kalamazoo Bach Festival Chorale will perform in two holiday season concerts titled Holidays with the Kalamazoo Bach Festival, including a virtual option, on Sunday, December 5.
UPDATE: All in-person concerts are canceled on December 5. Bach Fest is moving to an all virtual live-stream only concert at 4 p.m. The concert will remain available on our YouTube Channel for 30 days after the initial concert. If you have already purchased in-person tickets, please check your inbox or junk folder for an email with more details about how you can exchange or get a refund for your ticket purchase.
Begin your holiday season with an annual concert featuring nearly 50 musicians including Kalamazoo College alumni, singers from the at-large community, professional musicians, and a great line-up of soloists.
The Kalamazoo Bach Festival Chorale will perform in two concerts titled Holidays with the Kalamazoo Bach Festival, including a virtual option, on Sunday, December 5. The ensemble, led by K Assistant Professor Chris Ludwa, unites people of diverse backgrounds and ages to provide them with the joy of making music, while exploring messages of hope, racial equity and inclusion.
The performances, a more than 50-year tradition, feature holiday music favorites, including carols from over two hundred years of music history, all performed in Stetson Chapel. Local favorites and special community guest artists will join in the two 70-minute shows, one at 2 p.m. and the other at 4 p.m. The 4 p.m. concert will also be available through a live stream.
Tickets are available online at prices from $5 to $29 for the in-person concert. The virtual broadcast will be available through YouTube for $19. For more information, call the Bach Festival ticket office at 269.337.7407.
Anicka Yi’s “Force Majeure,” 2017, is made out of Plexiglas, aluminum, agar, bacteria, refrigeration system, LED lights, glass, epoxy resin, powder-coated stainless steel, light bulbs, digital clocks, silicone and silk flowers. Yi has created art containing olfactory effects.
An Asian American conceptual artist whose work includes a mix of fragrance, cuisine and science along with collaborations with biologists and chemists will be the subject of a Kalamazoo College faculty member’s presentation at noon on December 7 at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Art History Eunice Uhm will discuss Anicka Yi, a Korean American artist, who has created memorable works of art that have famously contained olfactory effects. Uhm’s presentation will analyze how Yi’s work transgresses the boundaries that are established and sustained by the conventions of Western aesthetics to investigate the racialized and gendered politics of space. The presentation considers the deodorization of the museum in the context of a larger cultural and political process of deodorization in the U.S. that simultaneously excludes smell from aesthetic judgments and establishes aromatic phenomena to be “non-Western” or primitive.
Born in 1971 in Seoul, Yi began working as an artist about 15 years ago after a career in fashion. Yi’s work has won her top honors, including the Guggenheim Museum’s $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize in 2016, which included an exhibition there the next year. Yi’s work elicits visceral sensorial responses in the visitor, demonstrating the subversive aesthetic possibilities of smell to underscore and negotiate biopolitics of race and gender.
Uhm, who serves as a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at K and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, specializes in modern and contemporary art, with a transnational focus on the United States and East Asia. Her work examines the conditions of migration and the diasporic aesthetic subjectivities in the works of contemporary Japanese and South Korean art from the 1960s to the present. She has previously taught courses on modern and contemporary art, East Asian art, and Asian American studies at Ohio State University. She has organized panels and presented her work on Asian American art at national conferences.
In-person and virtual tickets to Uhm’s presentation are available at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts’ website.
The International Percussion concert scheduled for November 17 will feature K’s Taiko drummers along with other international percussion groups.
Experience the music of different cultures at Kalamazoo College’s Dalton Theatre on Wednesday, November 17.
The Department of Music’s International Percussion ensemble will perform its fall concert, titled “Collage,” at 7 p.m. as it features a Caribbean steel drumming group with instructor Jean Raabe, a Japanese Taiko drumming group with instructor Carolyn Koebel and a West African drumming group with instructor Nathaniel Waller.
The ensemble unites individuals with varied musical backgrounds from K, nearby institutions and the general community. The concert is free and the public is invited. All attendees must wear masks to comply with the College’s COVID-19 policies.
For more information on this event and others sponsored by the Department of Music, visit music.kzoo.edu/events.
Kalamazoo College’s Jazz Band performs at 8 p.m. Friday in Dalton Theatre in one of two fall concerts this weekend.
Enjoy a return to in-person fall concerts this weekend by swinging and bopping on Friday and taking in a theme of transcendence on Saturday.
The ever-entertaining Kalamazoo College Jazz Band, directed by Professor of Music Thomas Evans, performs at 8 p.m. Friday in Dalton Theatre. Its free fall concert, titled “November Shadows,” will cover jazz styles including swing, bop, blues, hard bop, cool, Latin and fusion. The Jazz Band presents a concert each term and performs for the annual Burgers and Blues in the Quad in the spring. For Friday’s concert, feel free to bring your dancing shoes and boogie in the aisles.
At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Conductor and Music Department Chair Andrew Koehler will lead the Kalamazoo Philharmonia in its fall concert in Dalton Theatre. The performance will include “Fanfare on Amazing Grace” by Adolphus Hailstork, “Heiliger Dankgesang” by Ludwig van Beethoven, “Overture to The Wreckers” by Ethel Smyth and Symphony No. 3, “Sinfonia Espansiva” by Carl Nielsen. Tickets for this concert are available at the door. Adults are $5, students are $2 and K students are admitted free with a College ID.
The Philharmonia unites students, faculty, amateur musicians and professional musicians of a variety of ages to perform symphonic music. Having grown since its inception in 1990, the ensemble has been recognized as an arts organization of importance in greater Kalamazoo.
Attendees are required to wear masks at both performances. For more information on either of the fall concerts and the College’s music ensembles, visit music.kzoo.edu.
“Well-Intentioned White People,” runs Thursday through Sunday at the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse. A live stream will be available Friday night.
Is it possible for people who mean well to do more harm than good when it comes to race relations? Well-Intentioned White People, running Thursday through Sunday, examines this idea. It is the first production in the Festival Playhouse at Kalamazoo College’s 58th season themed “Black is Beautiful: An Ode to Black Life, Love and Strength.” All three plays—including Black+Phats in February and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet in May—will feature Black playwrights telling Black stories.
In this play, college professor Cass wants to forget about experiencing an anti-Black hate crime while simply moving on with her life. Her white roommate and the dean of the university, however, push her to do something about it.
Suddenly, Cass is roped into planning an Equality Day and Unity Week while trying to convince her roommate not to plan a sit-in. Well-Intentioned White People explores how some people attempt to deal with discrimination not directed at them and how “well intentions” can be problematic.
“This play has a lot of heavy themes, wrapped up as a humorous political satire,” said Meaghan Hartman ’23, the play’s dramaturg. “It deals with the constant presence of racism at primarily white institutions and how white people attempt to cover it up, rather than digging into the root of the problems. It also forces its audience to think critically about racism on this college campus and the impact it has on our daily lives. This whole play shows us that meaning well is completely different from doing good.”
Cameo Green ’23 plays Cass in the main role. Addison Peter ’25 portrays Viv, Arman Khan ’24 plays Parker, Brooklyn Moore ’24 presents Dean Baker, and Mickie Wasmer ‘25 fills the role of Mara.
Tickets for Well-Intentioned White People, which will take place at the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse at 129 Thompson St., are available online. The presentations start at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. A virtual live stream will be available with Friday’s show. A recording of the live stream then will be available until Sunday. Adults are $15, seniors are $10 and students are $5. K students and faculty and staff are free when an ID is presented. Audiences should expect mature language and situations within the play.
“We hope to start a larger and critical conversation about race and racism on campus and in the community,” Hartman said. “I hope that after seeing Well-Intentioned White People that the audiences, especially white people, are able to critically examine their own feelings about race.”
The Academy Street Winds will perform in one of two concerts sponsored by the Kalamazoo College Department of Music this weekend.
Don’t just eat candy and trick or treat this weekend—enjoy something sweet for your ears when the Academy Street Winds performs a free fall concert at 8 p.m. Friday in Dalton Theatre.
Audiences are encouraged, but not required, to wear costumes for “Trick or Tweet, a Howl-o-Ween Concert.” The Academy Street Winds is a wind ensemble providing a performance outlet for woodwind, brass and percussion students. Community musicians joined the ensemble in winter 2016 to expand the group’s sound and capabilities.
The group, conducted by Music Professor Thomas Evans, performs one concert each term, playing exciting arrays of challenging band music. The ensemble’s programs are coordinated around diverse themes, which allow for performances of much-loved pieces, both classic and contemporary.
In a bonus free performance, K’s music department will present “Music for Two Trumpets and Piano,” with trumpeters David Bernard and Keith Geiman, and pianist Tina Gorter at 7 p.m. Saturday at Dalton Theatre.
The three formed their double trumpet and piano trio in 2019, and have been entertaining audiences with their diverse repertoire of music from living composers. After more than a year off, the trio has reunited to perform virtuosic trumpet and piano music.
To comply with the College’s rules regarding indoor gatherings, please wear a mask to both concerts. For more information on concerts and other music department events, visit music.kzoo.edu.
“Unzipped,” complete with monologues and Rebecca Chan’s own music, explores the perception of East Asians in the U.S. and her experiences as a queer Chinese American.
Our life stories make great stage plays and Rebecca Chan ’22 has a chance to share her story with us all. Her self-written coming-of-age story, Unzipped, is a part of the Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College’s Senior Performance Series.
The production, complete with monologues and Chan’s own music, explores the perception of East Asians in the United States and her experiences as a queer Chinese American. Unzipped takes aim at a common racial slur used against Asian Americans and refers to Chan’s life of unpacking and discovering her identity.
“I’d say in the past few years there has been a lot more representation of Asian Americans, and like myself, mixed Asian Americans,” Chan said. “But I find a lot of media has characters who maybe have one white parent and one Asian parent like myself, and the racial experience of that existence is brushed over. A lot of my life has been me questioning my racial identity, trying to understand it and what it means, so I wanted to write a show very specifically about that experience.”
Chan, a theatre major, has participated in Festival Playhouse productions and events since her first year on campus. In 2019, she was selected for the week-long Kennedy Center American College Theatre National Festival in Washington, D.C., where she was one of four students from around the country to participate in its Institute for Theatre Journalism Advocacy (ITJA) events; another one of her self-written plays, Record, was featured at Theatre Kalamazoo’s 10th annual New PlayFest in February 2020; and she earned the Theatre Arts First-Year Student Award at Honors Convocation in 2019.
Unzipped, however, represents her senior integrated project. She had a chance to write the play as an independent study during the spring term of her junior year while taking an advanced playwriting class taught by then-Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts “C” Heaps. Since, Chan has been calculating the details of the acting process.
“It’s been tricky because I want to be emotionally invested in the show, but I don’t want to carry so much of the emotions that it weighs me down,” Chan said. “It’s a very careful balance of being in the moment of the show and knowing I’m telling the story how I need to tell it.”
The production’s storytelling process includes projected pictures of Chan’s own childhood and picks up with her in high school.
“I talk about different high school relationships and how I understood myself, and as I get into college, how those experiences changed my perception of who I am,” she said. “There are two big plot points: my relationship with my family, like with my grandmother and my dad and how those evolved over the course of my life, and my relationships in college. There’s a lot of weaving and intersecting of how my perception of my family influences how I interact with my friends, and then how things I realized for my friends influenced how I think about my family.”
Chan wrote the music for Unzipped over two years and has added new songs to fill in the gaps.
“I started writing the music before I even knew I wanted to make the show,” Chan said. “I was always interested in it, but in high school, I felt very nervous about it. I didn’t think I had a good enough voice to sing on my own or had enough knowledge of music to produce something people would want to listen to. But starting my sophomore year, I got back in touch with the piano and started picking up the ukulele. I would just write little songs as I was going through life. It was a coping mechanism that helped me process what I was going through in the big events of my life. Over the summer, I spent a lot of time recording demos of the songs so I could share them with whoever would be playing in my band. Luckily, I was able to find five musicians who were available for the show. Four of which are current students and one a recent alumna.”
Milan Levy ’23 is the director and Angela Mammel ’22 designed the set and projections for their senior integrated projects. Attendees should be aware the play contains racial violence and language. Tickets for the in-person performance of Unzipped, at 129 Thompson St. in the Nelda K. Balch Theatre, and the virtual show are available online. In-person presentations start at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. The virtual broadcast is at 7:30 p.m. Friday.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is to be unapologetic in who I am,” Chan said. “I think I spent a lot of time trying to make my focus educating other people or changing the world around me. While those are important things to strive for and do, I think the core of my existence should be living for myself and not living to change others who might not be willing to change.”
Marianne Chan is the author of “All Heathens,” the book selected for the Class of 2025’s Summer Common Reading.
Kalamazoo College’s first-year students will take an important first step in connecting with each other and with faculty and staff when the 2021 Summer Common Reading author visits campus this week.
Marianne Chan is the author of All Heathens, which was the winner of the 2021 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Poetry and the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She will participate in a book reading and signing with students on Thursday and a student colloquium Friday morning at Stetson Chapel.
In her 2020 book, Chan navigates her Filipino heritage by grappling with notions of diaspora, circumnavigation and discovery by revisiting Magellan’s voyage around the world. The author’s poems have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, West Branch, Rumpus and elsewhere. From 2017 to 2019, she served Split Lip Magazine as its poetry editor.
Chan grew up between Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan, before earning a Bachelor of Arts in English from Michigan State University. She went on to study poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts. She now lives in Cincinnati with her partner, Clancy, and her cat, Bella, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.
Chan’s appearance at K will cap the Class of 2025’s experience with the Summer Common Reading program, which connects the K community in conversations about their book. Frequently, the author returns in four years to speak at the class’s Commencement.
Learn more about K’s Summer Common Reading program at the First-Year Experience website.
Kalamazoo College’s Festival Playhouse will present the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Water by the Spoonful from Thursday, May 20-Sunday, May 23.
A deluge of trouble floods characters in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Water by the Spoonful, coming this week to the Festival Playhouse at Kalamazoo College.
In the play, moderator “Haikumom,” also known as Odessa Ortiz, leads a chat room for recovering drug addicts. From behind their screens, the participants don’t expect to ever meet each other in person yet develop helpful bonds that assist them in recovery.
Off the internet, however, Odessa’s real-life family is suffering through separate issues in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Her biological son, Elliot, has returned from the Iraq War with post-traumatic stress disorder, and her sister is dying of cancer. Alonte Mitchell-Presley ’21 plays Odessa and Trevor Loduem-Jackson ’21 portrays Elliot.
In other roles, Rebecca Chan ’22 plays “Orangutan;” Petra Rodriguez ’21 takes the role of Yazmin Ortiz; Nat Markech ’21 portrays “Fountainhead;” and Arman Khan ’24 plays Elliot’s ghost. Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Bianca Washington will serve as director. The play is the second in a trilogy of plays by Quiara Alegria Hudes. The first was Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue. The third was The Happiest Song Plays Last.
“I really think this a play that can appeal to everyone,” said Meaghan Hartman ’23, who is serving as the play’s dramaturg. “There might be some parts that are more relatable for most of the audience, but it’s such a powerful story about trauma in families. I just think it’s super impactful, really for anyone.”
As the dramaturg, Hartman researched the history behind the play, which is set in 2009. Although the Great Recession was of primary concern then, Hartman needed to know what troops experienced with PTSD during the Iraq War and learn about the implications of crack and opioid addiction. That exploration helped her create a lobby display at the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse that will help audiences better understand the characters in Water by the Spoonful. That lobby display is available in an online format for virtual audiences.
“This can be a very triggering show for some people, and the lobby display will help set the tone,” Hartman said. “There are a lot of facts about how the themes apply to life here in Kalamazoo, especially with crack addiction and opioid overdoses in our own city. It’s been interesting to figure out how to illustrate those feelings and experiences to the audience.”
Playhouse staff have implemented strict Actors Equity Association COVID-19 compliance safety guidelines and protocols that will allow for live audiences in socially-distanced pods in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse, 129 Thompson St. Live productions will be available at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Reserve your tickets through the Playhouse’s Ludus system box office. Adult tickets are $15, seniors are $10 and students are $5 with an ID. Kalamazoo College students, faculty and staff are admitted free with their College IDs. No tickets will be sold at the door because of the limited number of tickets available.
A virtual broadcast will be available with the Friday production. To watch for $5 from the comfort of your home, purchase your access online.
“We’re just excited to start doing live theater again,” Hartman said. “Professor Lanny Potts opens just about every single play meeting with how grateful we are, recognizing that there are actors, theatre technicians and directors who are unable to do it. We’re pleased and thankful.”
