Posts by robin
Author Junot Díaz promotes community activism, fight against oppression in lecture at Stanford
Junot Díaz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, advocated for minority groups to come together and fight against oppression in his speech during the Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts event.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist Junot Díaz encouraged people of color, undocumented immigrants and other minority group members to stick together and help each other during a turbulent political climate as part of his lecture Wednesday evening at Stanford. “We must steal fire because we must transform this world that conserves and hoards fire for…
Read More Good books, like teachers, acknowledge children’s lives, says author Jacqueline Woodson
In Stanford visit, acclaimed writer of young-adult fiction advocates reading “slowly” in order to understand.
In her National Book Award-winning verse autobiography, Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson writes that she was a slow reader, an exasperating student who sometimes missed the point of a teacher’s lesson. Yet by age 7, Woodson knew that she wanted to be a writer. Those two facts seem contradictory but in fact anchor her writing…
Read More Dance faculty member seeks common ground in the rural West
Alex Ketley's film documents his research about the role dance plays in rural life and challenges the "urban/rural prejudice" commonly found in urban environments.
In 2012, Alex Ketley identified a pattern in his work as a dancer and choreographer: he had worked almost exclusively in urban centers and performed for city-based audiences – most of whom were already accustomed to modern dance. “It was almost like preaching to the choir,” Ketley mused. Creating work for like-minded patrons in art-saturated…
Read MoreStanford Taiko testimonials
“Since joining the group as a freshman, I have come to view Stanford Taiko as the defining feature of my Stanford experience. Through Stanford Taiko, I have grown musically, but more importantly, I have grown as a human being. ST is fundamentally based upon respect – respect not only for the drums and the practice…
Read MoreAlternative digs for the 6th Annual Frost Music & Arts Festival
Frost Amphitheater is closed for an upcoming renovation, but the show must go on – elsewhere. This year the annual Frost Music & Arts Festival will take place in the Stanford stadium on May 20 with Grammy award winning electronic dance music master Zedd headlining and special guests BROOD, the synth pop brother-sister duo. The…
Read More Stanford Taiko celebrates 25 years on campus
The performance group that got its start with a research grant celebrates 25 years with a reunion and a performance in Bing Concert Hall.
Stanford Taiko alums descended on the campus earlier this month to socialize, eat, jam and perform with the current crop of drummers in celebration of the ensemble’s 25th anniversary. The capacity crowd at the spring concert in Bing Concert Hall enjoyed an evening of original works for North American taiko performed by current and former…
Read More Gender-swapped play takes on the ‘men’s rights’ movement
Stanford graduate students in classics translate and adapt an ancient Greek play to lampoon a modern political movement.
It’s a summer day in Sonoma Valley’s Bohemian Grove, where the country’s most powerful men gather to cavort, perform mysterious rituals and cement their social and political power. This year, however, they have a different agenda: whether to bar women from comedy and from voting. This is the premise of Men’s Rites: An Alt-Comedy, which…
Read More Faculty and students at Stanford argue for increased study of games and interactive media
Faculty, staff and students are pushing the Stanford community to embrace and pursue the study of games and interactive media, an interdisciplinary, applicable and socially relevant topic.
Three years ago, a group of Stanford faculty and staff came together to discuss the scholarly value of games and interactive media. These discussions resulted in the weekly Interactive Media and Games Seminar Series, which is open to students, the Stanford community and the public. Led by Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, an assistant professor of bioengineering, and…
Read More It’s a Wild Party at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium
This year's Ram's Head musical uses art to explore some of the darker areas of human behavior.
It’s spring, so it must be time for a full-scale Broadway musical in Memorial Auditorium. This year Ram’s Head Theatrical Society presents The Wild Party. The production brings together approximately 70 undergraduate and graduate students in its cast, production team and orchestra. Ram’s Head intends the show to be a rallying place for students from…
Read More Stanford Mohr Visiting Artist Majel Connery reimagines the string quartet
A team of visiting artists teach the theatricality of musical performance.
What happens when you imagine the string quartet as a theatrical genre? How can the inherent showmanship of the four musicians expand to interact with voice, acting and operatic performance? These are the questions Mohr Visiting Artist Majel Connery examined in her winter class, Theatricality and the String Quartet, with help from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer…
Read More Stanford musicologist brings the 15th century to life
Stanford’s Jesse Rodin reanimates musical experiences of the distant past through performance.
Audiences often trust that performers know the history of the music they present, but even for the most dedicated performers there are unanswered questions. How, for instance, were ensemble performances experienced during the Renaissance? Do we experience them similarly today? For Jesse Rodin, associate professor of music, questions like these are central. “We might not…
Read More Stanford’s St. Lawrence String Quartet brings Beethoven to the San Francisco County Jail
The St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence, performed at the San Francisco County Jail, sharing classical music with inmates. One prisoner described the experience as “a drink of water in a desert of concrete.”
Music lives and thrives in all sorts of unexpected places: theaters and living rooms, dingy warehouses and brightly lit stadiums. It blasts through car stereos and provides quiet comfort in moments of solitude. Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence, the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ), brought live music to an unexpected place, far removed from the concert hall. They…
Read More Stanford Live features world-class artists, integrates them into campus life
When the Danish String Quartet visited campus this past October, the members didn’t simply drop in for a public performance of Wallin, Janácek and Beethoven at Bing Concert Hall and head home. They also joined in a chamber music reading session with students and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence. “They all read together…
Read More Alexander Nemerov to deliver Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts
For six weeks this spring, ALEXANDER NEMEROV will be spending Sundays at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he will give the 66th annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The topic of his lectures, The Forest: America in the 1830s, is the first ever in the history of the…
Read More Stanford hosts Rolston String Quartet
Stanford’s Azure Family Concert series and the St. Lawrence String Quartet continue to bring the best emerging quartets to campus.
“Where words fail, music speaks.” This simple adage, attributed to 19th-century Danish author of children’s fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen, still rings true today. His words get to the heart of why we listen to music – for its ability to express what we would otherwise never know how to say. The music of the…
Read More “The Tempest” behind the scenes
Stanford Theater & Performance Studies presents William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a vibrant, out-of-this-world tale of romance, revenge and forgiveness. As Shakespeare’s works go, few are more magical than The Tempest, a fantastical and deeply human play about an exiled sorcerer, his budding daughter, a civilization abandoned and a world reborn. This production is presented in…
Read More
