Sociology professor Heidi Chirayath wondered what she was doing at an early meeting of a campus group formed to advance the arts at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

All the others attending were faculty and staff involved in teaching and practicing the arts in myriad ways. After they introduced themselves, it was Chirayath’s turn.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m a sociologist with a background in dance and voice and musical theater and violin,'” she recalls. “I was one of those arts kids in college.” That interest led her to join the discussion about the future of the arts at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, but at that first meeting she had to wonder: “What can I do as a sociologist?”

Plenty, as it turned out.

As discussions proceeded from their 2007 beginnings to now, she ultimately spotted a two-birds, one-stone opportunity: Why couldn’t students in her methods class survey the student body about their interests in the arts — a process that would both elicit valuable data and provide valuable field research experience to her own students?

The greater context for Chirayath’s 2009 class project is the current institutional planning initiative that President Elaine Tuttle Hansen announced two years ago (“ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Matters,” Fall 2007), describing the initiative this way: “We’re not proposing the kind of…planning that produces a fine document that sits on a shelf. We are interested in thinking creatively, in the spirit of mutual helpfulness.”

In spring 2009, Hansen’s collaborative effort hit its crescendo as campus teams issued preliminary recommendations in three areas: “Learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½”; “The Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the Liberal Arts”; and “The Arts in the College and in the Community.”

Supporting the arts initiative, Chirayath’s students in Sociology 205, “Research Methods for Sociology,” designed surveys that they administered to 320 students this past winter and spring. They also conducted 31 interviews, observed audiences at 96 campus arts events, and examined arts coverage on 33 collegiate Web sites and in umpteen issues of The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student.

They polled their peers at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for information often assumed but rarely measured: Who attends arts events on campus? How well does ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ publicize its events? What are the dreams of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ arts community?

For students in the class, conceptualizing the project, then gathering and interpreting data from the field helped connect the dots between everyday life and phenomena described in journal articles. “It’s been really eye-opening to see all that goes into drawing those conclusions,” says sociology major Emma Posner ’11. “It definitely helped me understand what goes into a sociological study — and in a way that’s been really relevant for our lives at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.”

The project was eye-opening in more ways than one. Some students in the class were surprised to find that poetry readings or orchestral concerts even occur at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. And students who observed the audience at a classical piano concert by 94-year-old ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ artist-in-residence Frank Glazer were especially surprised, even discomfited, to find themselves amidst an elderly, well-dressed audience.

More comfortable for observers and observed were student a cappella concerts — the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ cultural events most popular with students, according to Chirayath’s survey. Seventy-four percent of respondents claimed to attend them, a likely testament to the power of friendship. The College’s six a cappella groups consist only of students, and supporting the creative work of friends was the primary reason students cited for attending events (see “Go Figures,” page 9, for more survey findings).

Surprisingly to some, the survey found that athletes were neither more nor less likely than non-athletes to participate in campus arts events. Not an earthshaking revelation, but one that did throw a little light on the perception, at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and everywhere, that athletes and artists are like Mars and Venus — with the athletes from the Red Planet getting most of the glory.

“A lot of students reported on how being an athlete is kind of the mainstream cool thing to do,” says Posner, “whereas being an artist involves less of a sense of solidarity and fraternity.”

Still, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ athletics does give the arts community something to aspire to. Consider a notion recorded by Chirayath’s class at a February listening session that drew a full house in Muskie Archives: that athletics “has successfully permeated the culture of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, through its strong student participation, role in admissions, and connections with alumni.”

Chirayath’s students presented their findings in April to the planning group charged with the Arts in the College initiative, which made its preliminary recommendations, including calls for substantial new investment in faculty, staffing, and facilities, to President Hansen in May. The body of work, Hansen says, symbolizes a 21st-century liberal arts college at its best, with “stronger relationships across old lines.”

The unusual prominence of the Arts in the College initiative was typified by a student-organized Art-In last spring. Strongly reminiscent of a 1960s arts festival — it was a happening, man! — the event used Memorial Commons as a venue to showcase ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ performances, arts organization presentations, and participatory artmaking. It was a vivid reminder of the wild energy that students bring to the arts at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. And that was something Chirayath had in mind, too.

“It’s easy for people to think, it’s the arts faculty that is pushing some kind of agenda,” Chirayath says. “And I thought, student voices here are really key.”

By Doug Hubley, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

The Hysterical Alphabet, an acclaimed multimedia performance piece exploring the “female malady” of hysteria, will be performed at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College on May 20.

Terri Kapsalis, who scripted the piece and is one of its performers, will give a lecture on its creation at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, May 21, in Room G65, Pettengill Hall. Sponsored by the Mellon Learning Associates Program at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, both events are open to the public at no cost.

Produced by , of Chicago, The Hysterical Alphabet was created and is performed by sound designer John Corbett and film artist Danny Thompson, as well as Kapsalis.

The notion of hysteria dates back some 4,000 years, noted by the ancient Egyptians and dramatized by the Greeks, reinvented by Freud and other Victorian theorists and inventors, and is still in currency in the works of such pop culture figures as filmmaker John Waters.

Drawn from centuries of primary medical writings, The Hysterical Alphabet treats its condensed history of hysteria with levity, playfulness and critical insight. Using each letter of the alphabet to introduce a different episode, Kapsalis provides a spoken performance accompanied by Thompson’s disquieting film collages and Corbett’s vinyl manipulations.

The three premiered the piece in Chicago in 2007.

Kapsalis is a writer, improvisational musician, health care educator and founding member of Theater Oobleck. Her recent fiction Most Beautiful Experiments was published by Parakeet and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press, 1997), which Kapsalis imagines is the only book ever reviewed by the New England Journal of Medicine, The Village Voice and The Amateur Gynecologist (a medical fetishist website).

Corbett is a writer, sound-artist and curator. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the co-director of the art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey. In 2002, he served as artistic director of JazzFest Berlin, and he co-curated the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music for nine years.

He is the producer of the Unheard Music Series, an archival program dedicated to creative music issues and re-isssues, and he is the author of Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Duke, 1994).

Thompson is a founding member of Theater Oobleck, for which he has written many plays, including The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled ‘Never to be Performed. Never. Ever. Ever. Or I’ll Sue! I’ll Sue from the Grave!!!

The Complete Lost Works received the “Comedy Excellence Award” at the 2000 New York Fringe Festival and “Top Ten of the Fest” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and extensively toured the United Kingdom.

• Wednesday, May 20 at 6:30 p.m.
• Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

From left, Yasin Fairley ’12 and Claire Parker ’11 rehearse “doesn’t fall far from the,” a piece choreographed by Lindsay Reuter ’11, for the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Modern Dance Company ‘s annual spring concert of new works.

From left, Barbara Byers ’10, Kate Taylor ’11, Kaitlin Webber ’11 and Megan Fahey ’11 perform “Routine Facade” choreographed by Claire Parker ’11 for a dance composition course taught by Assistant Professor of Dance Carol Dilley.

Margaret Koerber ’10 tries on one of 80 scarfs for sale draped over chairs in Gannett Theater during the “Scarves and Shawls” Extravaganza, a fundraising hour for the Robinson Players to support the student theater group’s 2009-10 season.

Written in 1997, Closer was made into a 2004 film starring Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen, and directed by Mike Nichols. The film, like the play on which it is based, has been viewed as a modern tragic version of Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte.

• Saturday, Wednesday and Thursday, April 4, 8 and 9 at 7:30 p.m.
• Pettigrew Hall, Gannett Theater, 305 College St.

Students in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ course “Acting and Directing for the Camera” screen their class projects on April 3. The projects are scenes adapted from well-known motion pictures such as Armageddon, 28 Days Later, Juno, Bridget Jones’ Diary and American Beauty.

The screening also includes senior-thesis films by Rachael Garbowski of Brussels, Wis., and Rufat Hasanov of Baku, Azerbaijan, as well as films produced in the “Digital Film Production” course. That course and “Acting and Directing for the Camera” are taught by Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz, a member of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ theater faculty since 1978.

• Friday, April 3, at 4 p.m.
• Pettigrew Hall, Filene Room (Room 301), 305 College St.

With the ultimate aim of teaching contemporary drama in her native Sri Lanka, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College senior has received a 2009 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study performance arts in South Africa and Indonesia. Sulochana Dissanayake of Pita Kotte, Sri Lanka, is one of 40 recipients of the 2009 fellowship, a $28,000 award supporting a year of independent research abroad.

What Dissanayake learns during her Watson year will support her ambition of creating a theatrical practice that brings social and political issues to Sri Lanka’s rich performance traditions. She hopes to “establish an institution that provides the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in theater and the performing arts,” Dissanayake explains.

Martin Andrucki, Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater, directs the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College theater department production of Alcestis, Euripides’ tragedy about a king, doomed to die, who offers up his wife in his place.

First produced in Athens in 438 B.C., Alcestis is the oldest surviving work by the Greek playwright Euripides. The play follows the death of Alcestis, sacrificed by her husband and brought back from the dead by Hercules. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ cast performs a shortened version of the translation-adaptation of the play created by noted British poet Ted Hughes in 1999.

• Friday, March 6 & 13 and Saturday, March 7 & 14, at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, March 8 & 15, at 2 p.m.
• Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.
• Admission is $6 general admission and $3 for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students.