Friends and colleagues of the late Ellen Seeling pay tribute to this esteemed member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College theater faculty with an exhibit of her work that opens with a gathering at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, in the college’s Ladd Library.<\/p>\n
Presenters at the gathering will include students, colleagues and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Elaine Tuttle Hansen. In addition to photographs documenting Seeling at work and the spectrum of set and costume designs she did for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, several of her costumes themselves will be displayed. The exhibition runs through the end of the month.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A designer, playwright and director celebrated for an intrepid style and bedrock commitment to teaching theater, the 50-year-old Seeling succumbed to cancer at her home in South Portland on Dec. 29. The exhibition illustrates a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ career embracing seven years, 16 shows and countless students inspired by Seeling’s energy and talent.<\/p>\n
“These are big shoes to be filled,” says one colleague, Katalin Vecsey, a lecturer in the theater department and vocal coach for the college’s theatrical productions.<\/p>\n
Vecsey explains how Seeling made obvious her knack for engaging a room full of people before she was even hired at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. In her presentation to the faculty search committee, Seeling handed out pins, pieces of foam core and other materials, and asked everyone in the room to try building a model set for the play Blood Wedding<\/em>.<\/p>\n Seeling directed a number of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ productions and adapted one, The Sea Wall<\/em>, from a novel by Marguerite Duras. But she was best-known as a designer, and her work \u2014 including the puppets that appeared in The Sea Wall<\/em> and other productions — were distinguished by their edginess, expressiveness and versatility.<\/p>\n “Her sets would have flown on Broadway,” Vecsey says. She adds, “She would never compromise her designs” — but at the same time, Seeling encouraged colleagues and students to embrace their own ideas with the same kind of passion.<\/p>\n Seeling was born in Michigan City, Ind. She received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the Herron School of Art at Indiana University, and her master’s at Brandeis University. After working as a scenic artist and costume designer, Seeling joined the faculty of St. Lawrence University as assistant professor of stage design in 1987.<\/p>\n She came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 1997 and earned tenure in the Department of Theater and Rhetoric in 2003. At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ she taught a variety of design courses, as well as a course on women in film.<\/p>\n Her first production for the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater was Antigone<\/em> and her last, an autumn 2003 production of Hamlet<\/em> that included some 40 costumes. In between she tackled productions as diverse as a futuristic Brave New World<\/em>, a gritty “subUrbia” set in a convenience store parking lot, a puppet-filled Sea Wall<\/em> and the genteel Victorian Lady Windermere’s Fan<\/em>.<\/p>\n Outside ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Seeling did design work for Portland’s Mad Horse Theater and for companies in Boston and California.<\/p>\n Her death was a blow to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and to the region’s theater community. “I was so shocked to hear about Ellen,” wrote Lauren Todd, a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ class of 1999 who studied with Seeling and is now studying landscape design in graduate school. “She was such a wonderful person and really helped me on my way to entering the design world.”<\/p>\n “I’m really sorry for you as well to have lost such a great colleague.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friends and colleagues of the late Ellen Seeling pay tribute to this esteemed member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College theater faculty with an exhibit of her work that opens with a gathering at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, in the college’s Ladd Library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"bates_author_byline_override":"","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"","_header-color":"#000000","_photo-credit":"","_header-effect":"parallax","override_related_with_tag":"","_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,11010,39],"tags":[3220,6135,6889,71,9087],"class_list":["post-33403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-arts","category-event-highlights","tag-ellen-seeling","tag-music-tag","tag-performing-and-visual-arts","tag-theater","tag-visual-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33403"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126176,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403\/revisions\/126176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}