This! But uptown

That was quick! From within the blushing blue Low earlier tonight, PrezBo announced that the recent recipient of the Alexander Hamilton Medal, H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest (LW ’58), has pledged to donate $30 million to a new “multidisciplinary arts venue” in the now ever-growing Manhattanville campus (no wonder he received the award!). The new Lenfest Center for the Arts will feature an art gallery, film screening room, and performance space, all designed by the renowned Italian architect Rezno Piano, One of the master designers behind the Manhattanville campus, Piano also dreamed up the NYTimes skycraper just downtown. PrezBo’s full announcement below.
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Lerner Hall will be presenting a series of free concerts throughout the school year as part of their Live at Lerner concert series. Earlier today, Greg Pattillo, famous beatboxing flautist, performed with his ensemble PROJECT Trio. Bwog sat down with Greg for a brief interview, asking him about how PROJECT Trio got started, his own musical background, and even his stint on iCarly.

Bwog: Beatboxing Flute music is a pretty specific style. Did you start with an interest in flute or in beatboxing? And how did your music evolve into what it is today?

Greg Pattillo: I started music in the 4th grade as part of my public school music program in Seattle, Washington. I quickly found a private flute teacher, and was ushered into the realm of classical music through the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra and local music competitions and adjudications. It wasn’t until I joined my high school jazz band that I started getting into non-classical music. When I enrolled in Conservatory, the curriculum was entirely classical, and all of my non-classical experience was built “after hours” through jam sessions and late night hangs. My non-classical directions were at first jazz, then emulating classic rock guitars, and then bluegrass mandolin idioms. As I tried to enter the professional realm, after graduating with a Masters degree in flute performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, I was forced to seek out more styles so I could find more work!

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Attention freshmen performing artists!

Calling all artsy freshpeople and returning students alike! Bwog wants to take a moment to draw your attention to one of our weekly features, Where Art Thou? Every Wednesday, we post a guide to theater and arts happenings in the Columbia community that week. The “Columbia community” doesn’t mean only Morningside Heights—let us know what kind of super hip stuff you’re up to all over the city! If you would like your event featured in Where Art Thou?, email us at events@bwog.com.

To start things off, below are descriptions of various groups from the CUPAL (Columbia University Performing Arts League) guide to arts groups on campus. See the full guide (PDF) for more information, including audition dates. CUPAL is a great resource for performers and enthusiasts! Visit their website year-round for information about auditions, writing submissions, production and design team interviews, performances, and other CUPAL events. If your group is not part of CUPAL, but you would like your group’s information listed here, please email us at tips@bwog.com.

Description of groups below the jump

In Hungarian, some guy took half an hour in the bathroom—and left behind this list “Sentences on Conceptual Parties.” Sol Lewitt muses on the rationality and irrationality of parties.

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Methinks Fed Bash will look like this.

Bwog’s new Thursday feature, Where Art Thou?, is here to keep you posted on what’s going on in the A&E department in Morningside Heights and beyond. If you’d like your Happy Birthday Dancing Hampster Circus listed, email us as events@bwog.com.

• Composer Portrait of Julia Wolfe, tonight at 8 p.m. at Miller Theatre. $25.
• Jake Snider, Friday at 9 p.m. at The Underground Lounge.
• Gilded Ink, a short story reading and performance of the winners of Selected Shorts‘ competition. Rowan Buchanan, CC ’12 was one of the winners! Friday, 8 p.m. at The Met. Free.
• Neil Smith Quintet, Saturday at 5 p.m. at Miller Theatre. $25.
• KCST’s 6th Annual Egg and Peacock 24 Hour Theatre Festival, Saturday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. at Lerner Black Box. Free.
• Fed Bash, Saturday at 9 p.m. in Lerner Party Space. $5 CUID, $7 without.
• Lunchtime Concert: Music by Charles Ives, Monday at 12:30 p.m. in Philosophy Hall. Free.

Image via Wikimedia

Today is an Every Other Wednesday y’all, which means it’s time to see wtf is up over at the TIC.

Tickets sold for on-campus events this week: 695

On-campus events on sale now:

Ferris Reel Film Society Presents: Iron Man 2 // 9/23 @ 9:00pm // Lerner Hall // 3 bucks // Tickets

Barnard College Department of Theater: The Physicists // 10/21-23 @ 3:00pm and 8:00pm // $10, $5 with CUID // Tickets

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Bwog’s Dane Cook ventured into Riverside Theater to attend last night’s performance of Black Snow.

The intrigue of Black Snow took hold even before the play began. As the audience filed past to take their seats, a young woman cautioned everyone entering the theater, “Don’t forget your package. It’s here waiting for you.” Standing beside a messy table strewn with documents, she gestured toward several metal pails, each filled with small brown envelopes that read, “Keep in your pocket. Keep closed. You’ll know when to open…”

This unexpected introduction sets the tone for the rest of the production, which follows Sergei, an aspiring writer in Soviet Russia, on a dark journey into a confounding world both comically cruel and utterly unusual. Disappointed by unfavorable reactions to his first novel, Sergei pursues the opportunity to become a playwright and sets out to engage the Russian theater scene. While struggling to make ends meet, he confronts marvelously zany characters and scenarios of dreamlike absurdity. And although he battles desperately to hang on, ultimately his fate spirals out of control.

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Bwog’s ESC Correspondent Sean Zimmermann writes from tonight’s meeting:

Chad Miller, the Arts Initiative’s Event and Outreach Coordinator opened ESC’s meeting this week. Miller confirmed that the TIC has been asked to cut 30% of their budget by the Office of the President. The cut was not ordered by the School of the Arts. The Arts Initiative was informed last November that the TIC would be transferred from the Office of the President to the School of the Arts. Miller explained that the cuts will not come out of tickets; the TIC would find other ways to cut costs. He explained that lunch with the Arts Initiative will no longer include lunch; it will be “chat with the Arts Initiative.”

UPDATE: We’ve been informed that it’s actually the Arts Initiative, not the TIC specifically, that is receiving the 30% budget cut. The Arts Initiative includes ArtsLink, Passport to New York, Columbia Alumni Arts League, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Student Arts Support Fund and Lunch with the Arts Initiative. Adjustments to the Lunch with the Arts Initiative are still undetermined.

Expect updates and details in the next few days.

Last night Sarah Camiscoli attended Bat Boy along with a mob of eager Columbia students that filled Lerner Black Box to the rim. Thankfully, several poor souls abandoned their spots on opening night, offering Bwog a spot in the audience to review the sold out show.

“The way of sin is death, sweetheart,” preaches Jill Shackner, as elf-eared and vampire-fanged Bat Boy Ricky Schweitzer springs into her quaint three-bedroom house. With a brilliant production team and the return of the performing talent of last year’s Varsity Show, the “virgin territory”—as coined by director Nina Pedrad—of this student run production was more than a success. Despite what Nina may claim, it seemed apparent that the cast and production team had been around the block as the cast opened the show with a riveting performance of “Hold Me, Bat Boy.” Before reaching the confines of Lerner Black Box, Bat Boy began as the story of a half-boy, half-bat discovered in cave published on the a 1992 cover of Weekly World News. Soon after, there was a book written by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, a musical composed, and thus, the sin of the “Bat Boy” was born.

Set in the farm country of the Deep South that just can’t be “rid of Christian charity,” Bat Boy, cleverly points to the triviality of town elections, the oppressiveness of religious authority, and the overwhelming popularity of cowboy boots. Ricky Schweitzer, Bat Boy or, as Meredith Taylor calls him, “Edgar”, brilliantly unveils the misery of a dysfunctional marriage, the triteness of small town south, and the simplicity of “any twit” receiving a Columbia degree as he evolves from a primitive birdlike creature into a stand up religious man who comes to understand the existential significance of a navel. In the same vein, Remy Zaken, as Bat Boy’s secretly incestuous sister Shelley, enthralled students as she, Jill Shackner, and the live orchestra directed by Evan Johnston revealed the need for a bigger box to accommodate their musical talent in “A Three Bedroom House.”

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Every play ever produced has been showing this weekend and last. Bwog’s Anish Bramhandkar checks out the latest offering from the CU Players, Dirty Hands.

There’s no way around it. Dirty Hands, Jean-Paul Sartre’s post-war political drama, is very long. At the end of the two-and-a-half hour play, you’ve enjoyed yourself but find yourself wishing that translator Lionel Abel had the foresight to write an abbreviated version.

In a fictional country allied with Nazi Germany, Hugo (Sam Johnson, CC ’11), a young Communist, is reluctantly chosen by the party to assassinate a political leader, Hoederer (Arron Seams, CC ’13), whose actions make him a “class traitor.” Hugo and his wife, Jessica (Jenny Vallancourt, BC ’11), move in with Hoederer so that Hugo may work as his secretary and kill him. As an educated man of ideals and principles, Hugo finds it difficult to follow through, though he is egged on by his wife, who treats the entire affair as if it were merely a role-playing game.

Sam Johnson, Jenny Vallancourt, & Arron Seams

And it was this notion of a game that kept the audience’s attention. Jenny Vallancourt’s lively, uninhibited character enraptured the audience from her first appearance. Unlike her fellow actors, Vallancourt’s character was completely at ease in this dark world. Every phrase she uttered resonated with delicious, conflicting layers of meaning. It was the women of this play that held scenes together. Jenny’s delightful fickleness contrasted so beautifully with Olga’s (Madalena Provo, BC ’12) somber concern and Louis’ (Anya Whelan-Smith, BC ’13) swaggering bravado that scenes without either of them floated, unfocused and disconnected.

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Last night after an anxious wait, Bwog finally got itself off the standby list and into what can only be described as a giant gothic living room in the bell tower of Riverside Church. Liz Naiden reports on how the one-night-only “Re-Imagined” completely, er… re-thought Columbia theater as we know it.

The Director’s Note on the inside cover of the program reads “It all started from a photograph of friends dressed up in children’s clothing.” Directors Ameneh Bordi and Amanda Stoffel entered the long process that produced “Re-Imagined” with a photograph and a clear notion that they wanted to play with fairy tales, childhood, and story-telling, but nothing near a script. The notion that the directors and the cast would create an original play organically was the first problem with performing in Columbia space, using Columbia money, or operating within Columbia’s organizations to produce the play – none of the established theater groups wanted to take on such a vague project without a script. But in the end, says cast-member Elizabeth Kipp-Giusti, the decision to move outside of Columbia came mostly from “Amanda and Ameneh wanting to do exactly what they wanted without having to cater to an executive board, the university, or anyone outside of themselves and the cast.”

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To see if he could still feel (and to check out the neighborhood north of 120th Street), Emotional Correspondent Dan Flicker took a walk last night to see Columbia Stages’ production of Phoenician Women. Here is his story.

The Phoenician Women prance into their namesake play as a colorful, if occasionally irritating bunch. Giggling and gossiping, these six young women have been making their merry way to the temple at Delphi, excited by the prospect of a religious life, when they inadvertently pass through the city of Thebes. They expect a warm welcome, a room for the night, and perhaps some directions; instead they find themselves in the midst of a war that threatens city, family, and morality alike.

Such is the premise of Phoenician Women, Euripides’ lesser-known rendition of the Oedipus Cycle. The play is fast and sometimes even fragmented: as Oedipus and Iocasta’s genetically confused sons fight mercilessly over the rightful kingship of Thebes, many different characters find themselves facing undue hardship—including the Phoenician Women themselves, who take the role of the Chorus—and Euripides turns his focus towards each in turn at a blistering pace. Given the difficulty of the work, director Karin Coonrod may very well have embarked on the task of adapting it for the Columbia MFA Class of 2010 with some trepidation. But between the efforts of the production team and the dynamic of the cast, the production is more than merely watchable: it is a masterpiece. Read more…

Bwog newcomer Thomas Pedroza crammed himself into Miller Theatre yesterday for a comedy performance that would make your mother blush.

To those of you who didn’t stop in on Bob Saget’s performance in Miller Theatre last night, you may have just missed more than a Full House joke. The evening started off with a stripper-tastic performance by Chowdah, followed by a visit from James Smith, a friend of Bob’s. He had a few good laughs for the audience, though the mention of Obama’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize seemed to raise a few eyebrows in the house. There were definite high and low points for him, but after several minutes of questionably paced comedy, the audience got some Bob.

Preceded by his own personal theme song, Bob Saget came onstage to applause and immediately got to work. His taste was poor, his timing impeccable. Without missing a beat, Bob managed to make the audience cringe, laugh, or some interesting combination of the two. His interaction with the audience, which included some of Chowdah’s performers and a certain birthday boy was a nuance that could seem a redundant transitional tool at times. However, this usually lent itself well to whatever Bob was saying (or about to say) at the moment, as did the fact that he occasionally hesitated to laugh quickly to himself.

Columbia students laughed both the obscene and the obscure, causing Saget himself to describe the house of Columbians as smart and nice. This held true into the second half of his performance, where Bob and his guitar serenaded the audience with a few songs, the content of which can only be described as unmentionables having something to do with leather, twine, and nursing homes, to name a few. Bob Saget ended his performance with arguably the finest words ever put to a Backstreet Boys song: “Danny Tanner Is Not Gay.”

Bob Saget did what he came to do, and like it or not, he did it well. His brand of comedy is inherently not suited for everyone, but luckily the majority of the audience was prepared and ready for the Saget. Dirty joke after dirty joke, Bob executed each part of his performance with skill- this is undeniable. However, the question of appreciating his style of humor is, naturally, a question of taste.

Photo via the Wikimedia Commons

Your Election Day weekend will probably be stuck in Halloween mode until tonight, but how to fill the next three days? Bwog Weekend Warrior Sarah Camiscoli has five ways you can make a day (or three) of your travels. 

Also, a subway service advisory: through Monday, the downtown 1 is skipping 137th – 103rd Street stops (i.e. go to 96th and come back up), while the uptown 1/2/3 is skipping 50th-86th Streets. More details and other subway adjustments can be found on the MTA’s website.

Reconnect with the Uptown Over-Soul – After a hefty two months spent in Butler Reading Room, don’t you feel like it’s time to get yourself reacquainted with your roots? Well, getting a fresh breath of bonsai is quite simple with a day trip to see “Kiku” in the Japanese Autumn Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, located next to Fordham’s Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx.  But if a two-dollar suggested donation (in addition to Metro) is just too much to spare, Fort Tryon Park is quite splendid, free, and your picnic foods can be purchased on Flex, before taking the one train straight uptown to the 191st stop.  And if well-manicured Mother Nature just doesn’t end up being enough, The Cloisters are conveniently located right inside the park and only suggest a $5.00 donation for their artistic display of the dark ages.

Embrace your home borough - Calling all students who make daily choices between Morton Williams vegan turkey salad and Pinnacle calzones: there’s plenty more right nearby. Hike down to Graffiti Hall of Fame, located on 106th and Park Avenue, to stand in awe in front of a remarkable display of graffiti in Spanish Harlem. Luckily, once you’ve made it that far from Low Steps, only two blocks further south is the New York City Museo del Barrio at 104th and 5th Avenue. The $4 donation is a steal as this museum is a bombshell of cultural history. Read more…

With legendary cineaste Dan Talbot contributing New Yorker Films’s paper archives to Columbia, Butler Library hosted a panel on Talbot and film culture. Bwog Silver Screen Correspondent Kate Hughes reports:

In honor of New Yorker Films’s written archive coming to Columbia, where it will now be housed, a group of cinephiles gathered in Butler 523 to discuss the importance of Dan Talbot to cinema in America and ruminate on film culture. The New Yorker Archive (no relation to the magazine) has been built up by Dan Talbot since 1965, when he began acquiring foreign films and distributing them in the United States. With Talbot often screening films at his New Yorker Theater first, his efforts helped many foreign films achieve recognition in the United States. 

The panel consisted of Hikari Hori, an associate research scholar in the East Asian Studies Department, Tom Kalin, Film School associate professor and director of Savage Grace and Swoon, and film professor/famous critic Andrew Sarris. The moderator was also a Film School professor: Richard Pena, who is also director of the New York Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Dan Talbot and his wife Toby Talbot were also present. All contributed to an wide-ranging discussion of the nature of film culture and provided personal stories of their own cinematic experiences. Read more…