Princeton University

Princeton Weekly Bulletin December 4, 2006, Vol. 96, No. 11 prev next current

People
• University names first dean for research, restructures support for funding efforts
• Spotlight

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Editor: Ruth Stevens
Calendar editor: Carolyn Geller
Staff writers: Jennifer Greenstein Altmann, Eric Quiñones
Contributing writers: Cass Cliatt, Wendell Collins, Hilary Parker
Photographers: Denise Applewhite, John Jameson
Design: Maggie Westergaard
Web edition: Mahlon Lovett

Nassau notes

Companies present work of dance faculty

Princeton NJ — Professional companies from New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will perform recently choreographed work by the University’s dance faculty in concerts at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Dec. 8-9.

Edisa Weeks will perform “She Loves Me” with her New York company Delirious. The dark comedy is set to love songs by Patsy Cline and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Shown here with Weeks is Andrew Vaughn. (photo: Julie Lemberger)

“New Dances: Princeton Faculty in Concert” will be the first faculty dance concert at the Berlind Theatre, which is part of the McCarter Theatre Center and opened in 2003.

It will feature works by Head of Dance Ze’eva Cohen and faculty members Meghan Durham, Dyane Harvey, Rebecca Lazier and Edisa Weeks. The five eclectic dances featured draw on personal stories, images and music to convey powerful statements about the human condition.

Cohen’s “Meditation on a Square,” to be performed by Pittsburgh-based Bodiography Contemporary Ballet, was inspired by sacred architecture, music and folk dances from her recent trip to Barcelona, Spain.

Durham’s company, Philadelphia-based Merge, will perform “Fragment of (Me)mory.” Choreographed to music by Alexander Borodin, the dance draws a metaphor for memory as a physical event by juxtaposing precise physicality with alternative light sources to illuminate and obscure the dancers.

Harvey integrates text and music in her danced portrayal of Sechita’s dreams from Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” representing a woman’s journey to self-acceptance.

Lazier’s Brooklyn-based Terrain will perform the premiere of “Serenade.” Choreographed to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s score of the same name, the dance is the story of being attracted to and repelled by the romantic music and finds five dancers soaring, crashing and embracing stillness as the dance unfolds.

Weeks will perform “She Loves Me” with her New York company Delirious. The work, set to love songs by Patsy Cline and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, is a dark comedy that, in the tradition of “Medea” and “Beloved,” seeks to understand the painful psychology of infanticide.

Tickets are $15 for general admission and $10 for students and seniors, and are available through the McCarter box office at 258-2787 or www.mccarter.org.

Global warming is topic for talk by energy executive

Princeton alumnus David Crane, president and chief executive officer of NRG Energy Inc., will discuss actions to address global warming in a lecture set for 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5, in the Friend Center Convocation Room.

Crane’s lecture is the second in a series on “Leadership in a Technological World,” sponsored by the Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

Crane, a 1981 Princeton graduate, will draw on his extensive experience in the energy sector to offer perspectives and suggestions for how to address the problem of global warming. He will discuss issues raised in “An Inconvenient Truth,” a recent film focused on former Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness about global warming.

Crane has been CEO of NRG Energy, a Princeton-based power generation company, since 2003. He previously was a senior vice president with Lehman Brothers’ Global Power division and served as chief operating officer for London-based International Power PLC.

The lecture series will continue on April 5 with a talk by Anne Mulcahy, chief executive officer of the Xerox Corp.

Scrouge and Tim (photo: Frank Wojciechowski)

Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” at McCarter

The McCarter Theatre Center’s critically acclaimed production of Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale, “A Christmas Carol,” runs through Dec. 24.

New to this year’s production is Broadway, television and film star Paul Benedict in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge (shown here with Isaac Garret Sinclair Newman as Tiny Tim).

For more information and tickets, call the McCarter box office at 258-2787 or visit www.mccarter.org.

Legacy Project founder to speak

The founder and director of the Legacy Project, an initiative to preserve wartime correspondence, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5, in 16 Robertson Hall.

Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy Project in 1998. It is a volunteer effort that encourages Americans to honor those who previously served or currently serve in the military by seeking out and preserving wartime correspondence.

Carroll’s talk is titled “Behind the Lines: Letters Home.” He is the editor of “War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars,” which features some 200 previously unpublished letters from the Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and conflicts in Somalia and Bosnia. He also edited the best-selling “Letters of a Nation” and “In Our Own Words.”

The event is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Woodrow Wilson Political Network.

Symposium explores ‘Décor and Dance’

A symposium titled “Décor and Dance” will be presented from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 9, in 10 East Pyne.

Participants will explore the ways in which décor interacts with art forms that move through time, particularly music and dance.

Daniel Albright, the Ernest Bern-baum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, will deliver a keynote speech titled “Elephants and Swans: The Idea of Space in Dance.” Simon Morrison, associate professor of music at Princeton, will moderate a panel discussion of the role of décor in dance. Panelists include Zack Brown, an award-winning designer of sets and costumes for the American Ballet Theatre, Hamburg Ballet and numerous opera productions; Tomie Hahn and Curtis Bahn, performance artists who have worked with composer Pauline Oliveros and others; and choreographer Rebecca Lazier, lecturer in theater and dance at Princeton. Graduate student presenters will consider historical and contemporary examples of décor and dance in a variety of media.

As a complement to the symposium, several works of Princeton music composition graduate students will be exhibited onsite. These will include video feeds as well as interactive sound installations.

Participants will have the opportunity to attend a dance performance of new works, including one by Lazier, at the Berlind Theatre in the evening (see related story above).

The symposium, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Graduate School, the Department of Music and the Council of the Humanities. For more information, contact Maureen Gupta at maureeng@princeton.edu.

Lecture focuses on liberals, terror war

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for The New Republic, will deliver a lecture titled “The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again” at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 4, in 16 Robertson Hall.

Beinart, who served as The New Republic’s editor for seven years, now writes a weekly column for the magazine that is reprinted in The New York Post and other newspapers. He also writes a monthly column for The Washington Post and is a contributor to Time magazine.

The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Saudi ambassador to give address

Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, will deliver a policy address at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall.

The prince was appointed U.S. ambassador in July 2005 after more than two years as ambassador to the United Kingdom and Ireland. As ambassador to Washington, he has urged the Bush administration to increase its Middle East diplomacy and peacemaking efforts.

Prince Turki headed Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service for 24 years before moving into his role as a diplomat. He replaced former U.S. ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who resigned after 22 years as the kingdom’s Washington envoy.

The event is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

“Unknowns,” by Margaret Kennard Johnson

Handmade paper works by Margaret Kennard Johnson exhibited

“Unknowns,” a work of handmade paper with embedded rusted wire, is on display as part of an exhibition by Margaret Kennard Johnson in the Women and Gender Studies Lounge, 113 Dickinson Hall, through Jan. 3. Johnson’s primary influences have derived from exposure to Japanese culture, study with Josef Albers, formerly of the Bauhaus in Germany, and from continuous exposure to the permanent and changing exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she taught adult classes for 23 years. Hours for the exhibition, titled “Ink, Paper, Rusted Wire and Mesh,” are 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Orchestra to premiere Prokofiev work

The Princeton University Orchestra, under the direction of Michael Pratt, will present the North American premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s Suite from his incidental music to Alexander Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” in concerts Friday and Saturday, Dec. 8-9.

The concerts, which begin at 8 p.m. Friday and 8:30 p.m. Saturday in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall, will feature the work along with several other pieces. Speaking during the performances will be Simon Morrison, associate professor of music at Princeton.

Prokofiev composed this music for a planned Soviet production of the play in 1936 that was to be staged by celebrated director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The production was aborted upon the arrest for treason and subsequent execution of Meyerhold, and for decades the music has been rarely performed. While this will be the North American premiere of the score, the world premiere production of the entire play with the music is planned for April 12-14 at the Berlind Theatre. The project, which involves many students and faculty in the creative and performing arts at Princeton, is directed by Morrison and Caryl Emerson, the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

“Thus in December our audiences can hear a musical preview of this significant event,” Pratt said.

The remainder of the program will be devoted to well-known 20th-century works. Senior Geoff McDonald, the orchestra’s assistant conductor, will conduct Nuages (Clouds) and Fetes (Festivals) from Claude Debussy’s “Nocturnes.” Then the orchestra will perform one of Aaron Copland’s most popular scores, Four Dance Episodes from “Rodeo” (Buckaroo Holiday, Corral Nocturne, Saturday Night Waltz and Hoe-down).

The program will conclude with Igor Stravinsky’s 1911 path-breaking ballet “Petrushka.” For these performances, the orchestra will present the score in its original version. “The original ‘Petrushka’ is for a much larger ensemble than the leaner revision,” Pratt said, “and has a color palette that is subtle, rich and complex. This is one of Stravinsky’s most beloved works.”

Tickets for the concerts, priced at $18 for general admission, $15 for seniors and $5 for students, may be purchased at the Frist Campus Center box office.

Drop off coats at Frist through Dec. 14

The Frist Campus Center will serve as a collection site for the Jersey Cares 11th Annual Coat Drive through Thursday, Dec. 14.

Members of the University community are invited to drop off new or gently used winter coats near the Mazo Family Game Room on the 100 level of Frist between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Coats will be distributed to thousands of New Jersey residents who are in need during this winter season.

This service project is sponsored by Frist and is part of the center’s annual Winter Holiday Festival, a celebration of the season for the campus community that will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 13.

For more information on the coat drive, visit www.jerseycares.org.

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