Arts Blog

Renowned medieval music ensemble SEQUENTIA is in residence at Carleton this week.  Five international women singers and director Benjamin Bagby are rehearsing, engaging with History classes, and conducting a vocal masterclass.  The residency culminates Friday, October 6 at 7:30 p.m. in Kracum Performance Hall with the concert Mystical Voices of Medieval Germany:  Hildegard von Bingen.  The concert is free and open to all.

Sequentia is one of the world’s most respected and innovative ensembles for medieval music. It is an international group of singers and instrumentalists – united in Paris under the direction of the legendary performer and teacher Benjamin Bagby – dedicated to the performance and recording of Western European music from the period before 1300. The size and disposition of the ensemble is determined by the repertoire being performed, and ranges between an instrumental/vocal duo to a large vocal ensemble. Based on meticulous and original research, intensive rehearsal and long gestation, Sequentia’s virtuosic performances are compelling, surprising in their immediacy, and strike the listener with a timeless emotional connection to our own past musical cultures.

In this concert, Sequentia presents Hildegard of Bingen’s spiritual songs celebrating the saints, the angels, apostles, martyrs, prophets and patriarchs, but most essentially the Virgin Mary, all originally sung in her abbey church on the River Rhine, the Rupertsberg.

They also perform pieces not ascribed to Hildegard, but which come from her traditions of nearby 12th-century German convents, including a surprising later resonance from a 13th-century Bavarian cloister, where echoes of Hildegard’s musical language can still be heard giving voice to timeless texts of human desire from the Songs of Songs, with its powerful imagery so essential in the spiritual universe of contemplative monastic life.

As a special offering, Sequentia will present the climactic scene from Hildegard’s rarely-heard music-drama, Ordo Virtutum, in which the Devil tries to wrest an errant soul from the protection of the embodied virtues.

You may have suspected as much, but it is indeed true that most of Carleton’s music faculty members are also accomplished musicians in their own right, with regional and national profiles.  This Sunday, join us for a smorgasbord of musical offerings including collaborations in jazz, classical and folk music.

Featured on the program will be Gwen Anderson (french horn), Josh Becker (trombone), Laura Caviani (jazz piano), Julia Ennen (voice), Loren Fishman (piano), Zacc Harris (jazz guitar), Gao Hong (pipa), Martha Jamsa (flute), Merilee Klemp (oboe), Mark Kreitzer (guitar), Matthew McCright (piano), Nikki Melville (piano), Natalia Moiseeva (violin), Briana O’Connell (bassoon), Nina Olsen (clarinet), Travis Schilling (bass), Dave Schmalenberger (drums), Christopher Thomson (saxophone), and Melissa Holm-Johansen (voice).

The concert takes place at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 1st in Kracum Performance Hall, in the Weitz Center for Creativity.  The performance is free and open to all.

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Internationally renowned songwriter (and Carleton alum), Laura Veirs ’97, will perform a set of original songs featuring her voice and fingerstyle nylon guitar. The concert will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, September 29 in Kracum Performance Hall, located in the Weitz Center for Creativity.  She will play a range of material from her catalog of 13 albums.

Veirs was a Geology major at Carleton and also studied Mandarin Chinese.  After a stint in the Carleton all-woman punk band Rair Kx, her taste turned more toward  older country and folk music.  Her wide-ranging tastes have led to collaborations with stellar musicians including Bill Frisell, Bela Fleck, k.d. lang and Neko Case.  She has released numerous studio albums and received acclaim from publications across the country.

This event is free and open to the public. No ticket or reservation is needed to attend.

Carleton’s International Film Forum begins its annual series of contemporary cinema from around the globe on Monday, September 25 at 7:00 p.m. in the Weitz Cinema.  Screenings are open to all and are offered free of charge.

The first screening will be HAVANA:  THE ART OF MAKING RUINS, a 2006 documentary by Florian Borchmeyer about the picturesque ruined buildings of Cuba’s capital city and the difficult realities of the people who live there.  The film is a portrait of the inhabited ruins of. Havana and their strange blend of magic and demolition and captures the final moments of these buildings before they’re renovated – or simply collapse altogether.

Future screenings include:

October 2 Concerned Citizen (2022) by Idan Haguel (Israel)

October 9 The Big Hit (UN TRIOMPHE) (2020) by Emmanual Courcon (France)

October 23 White Snake (2019) by Amp Wong and Ji Zhao (China)

October 30 The Last Shelter (2021) by Ousmane Samassekou (Mali)

November 6 The Cordillera of Dreams (2019) by Patricio Guzman (Chile)

Screenings are introduced by Carleton faculty members and discussion often follows the film.  All showings begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Weitz Cinema.

Carleton’s Perlman Teaching Museum opens the year’s exhibition program with a show devoted to the work of Twin Cities-based artist Brooks Turner.  PEDAGOGY AND PROPAGANDA:  NEW WORK BY BROOKS TURNER opens Thursday, September 21 with a reception at 5:00 p.m. and a talk by the artist at 5:30 p.m.

Artist, writer, and educator Brooks Turner questions narratives which are fixed in the archives of libraries, museums, and textbooks. His research engages histories of Fascism in his home state of Minnesota, often exploring the racial, political, and economic turbulence of these events and their relevance today.

Pedagogy and Propaganda centers on a series of strikes in 1934 which took place in the Minneapolis Warehouse District, then a major distribution center of the Upper Midwest. These fierce clashes pitted General Drivers Local 574 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against the Minneapolis Police Department and the Citizen’s Alliance, then a dominant employer’s organization which was staunchly anti-union. As we approach the 90th anniversary of the strikes, Turner’s new series of large-scale textiles illustrate tactics of anti-fascist resistance through the historical lens of union organizing and labor history. Strikes, picketing and protests are on the rise today; a 2023 study from Cornell University found that strikes were up by 52 percent in 2022 as workers increasingly speak out about workplace dissatisfaction.

The adjacent galler­y brings together a 2020-21 series of silken draperies which blend archival, primary-source content from newspapers with Turner’s original drawings. These works track the rise of Fascist organizations and ideologies in the 1930’s, in particular, the pro-Nazi organization the Silver Legion of America (or Silvershirts). Documents Turner unearthed in the Minnesota Historical Society archives record sympathetic relationships between this hate group, prominent Businessman, and Government Officials of the time, as well as the journalists, Jewish Activists, and Union organizers who opposed them.

The Perlman Teaching Museum is located in the Weitz Center for Creativity.  All events are free and open to the public.

The Fall Theater production will be an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO.  Based on what Jeanette Winterson of The Guardian named as the first transnovel, the play unfolds the journey of Orlando from the Elizabethan Age to the present. Bounding through time and space, Orlando changes genders, finds and loses love, tries to write a poem, and yearns for something more. Joining Orlando on stage are chorus members who transform in and out of characters throughout the play. This lyrical, magical, whimsical play by Sarah Ruhl celebrates life in all its fluidity and multiplicity.

Auditions will be held September 11 and 12; performances will be October 19-22.

This Fall, the Hamlin Creative Space in the Weitz Center features the installation NORTH by composer Mary Ellen Childs in collaboration with Zeitgeist (the Twin Cities’ premier new-music ensemble), painter Linsdy Halleckson and videographers Tamara Ober and Caitlin Hammel.  Based on the stark winter environment of the Arctic, NORTH combines recorded music & sound, abstract paintings in winter hues, projected imagery of northern snowscapes, and sculptural elements to create an immersive environment in which to consider our northernmost lands and their connection to all of us – wherever we live.

NORTH opens Tuesday, September 12.  The Hamlin Creative Space is located in the Weitz Center for Creativity, on the lower level beneath Kracum Performance Hall.  Open hours are Mondays – Wednesdays 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays 11:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

The Ward Lucas Lecture Series in the Arts is a fund established by the family and friends of Ward Lucas. Mr. Lucas, who died in 1961, was a member of the…

Carleton’s International Film Forum this year features a series of French films, the screenings of which are made possible by a generous grant from the Albertine Cinemathique, a program of…

Andrea Mazzariello’s music and video installation NOW, THEN runs in the Hamlin Creative Space through Monday, February 6. Every hour on the hour, the installation re-starts and plays Andrea’s album…