The latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, notes an exhibition in Rome, a writing workshop in New Haven, a performance premiere in New York, a documentary streaming at The New Yorker, and new publications and prizes from around the university.
For more, please visit an archive of all arts and humanities coverage at Yale News.
Guggenheim to host Coates’ performance project premiere
Emily Coates, a professor in the practice in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), will present the world premiere next month of “Tell Me Where It Comes From,” a performance project commissioned by Works & Process, a performing arts series hosted by Guggenheim New York.
The performance meditates on the afterlife of George Balanchine, the legendary ballet choreographer. Inspired by his “brief but pivotal touchdown” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut in 1933, said Coates, she began gathering artifacts related to his presence, including unanswered letters, lost ballets, and old photographs, from archives throughout the northeast United States.
“‘Tell Me Where It Comes From’ takes up the marginalia of a choreographer’s legacy,” she said. “All those bits and pieces of the past that get strewn and scatter, in archives and in the muscle memory of hundreds if not thousands of dancers who have encountered the work. I wanted to better understand Balanchine’s earliest impulses and carry those values forward in unexpected new forms — altering who does what, who is featured, who is heard. Afterlife is about translation and substitution, which may or may not resemble the original, but the DNA remains.”
Emily Coates and Derek Lucci (left to right) in the section Mother’s Letter, from “Tell Me Where It Comes From.”
A dancer, choreographer and former member of New York City Ballet, Coates collaborated on this project with director Ain Gordon, performer and co-creator Derek Lucci ’03 M.F.A., violinist and composer Charles Burnham, pianist Melvin Chen (a professor in the practice of piano at the Yale School of Music), lighting designer Krista Smith ’18 M.F.A., costume designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, and dancer Henry Seth.
The performance premieres on Sunday, Nov. 23 at 7 p.m. in the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theater at 1071 Fifth Ave. and will be followed by a reception in the rotunda. Tickets can be purchased here.
Discipline and desire in Rome
The MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome recently showcased the work of nine women performance artists, including two Yale undergrads, in a five-day exhibition inspired by the scholarship of Elise Morrison, an assistant professor of theater, dance and performance studies in FAS.
Entitled “Discipline/Desire/Surveillance,” the exhibition was organized by Morrison and Marta Jovanović, a performance artist and professor at Rome University of Fine Arts (RUFA), and drew its themes from Morrison’s first book, “Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance” (University of Michigan Press, 2016).
The artists selected to participate in the program — including two Yale College students, Alice Kasdan and Abigail Murphy — developed performance and installation art works that explored a range of surveillance technologies and their impacts on political and personal life. The exhibition ran from Oct. 1-5.
“For me, this exhibition was a chance to return to the front lines of feminist surveillance art and performance,” Morrison said. “It was a chance to foster and learn from the next generation of women as they navigate and take ownership of structures of power and resistance in this world we have made.”
Abigail Murphy's “Inside Blue”
New short story collection from English lecturer
Derek Green’s new collection of short stories, “Jackson State” (Carnegie Mellon University Press), is out this month. The stories, set in the American Midwest, illuminate class and racial tensions, according to the book’s publisher, in a land “where wealth and poverty, beauty and decay, hope and despair exist side by side.”
Green is a lecturer in the English department in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and teaches courses in essay writing, screenwriting, and creative writing. His previous collection of short stories, “New World Order,” was published in 2008. He has also published a wide range of nonfiction and has co-created and written television programming at major studios including HBO, AMC, Sony Productions, and Jerry Bruckheimer Television.
Short doc explores an industry born of the AIDS crisis
A new documentary by Matt Nadel, the program manager for Yale’s Investigative Reporting Lab and an independent filmmaker, has qualified for an Academy Award nomination in the Best Short Documentary category.
“Cashing Out” examines an industry offering cash for life insurance policies that sprang up during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a period when the then-deadly virus disproportionately afflicted gay populations. Called viatical settlements, these payments offered desperately ill and jobless AIDS victims an economic lifeline, with a company or investor paying a percentage of the policy’s value to the policy holder in exchange for being named the beneficiary. When the original policy holder passed away, the new beneficiary claimed the payout.
The film is distributed by The New Yorker, and is now available on its website.
Writing the elusive ‘crossover book’
What makes for a successful “crossover book” — a book that is written by scholars, but appeals to both academic and general audiences? According to Jessie Kindig, senior editor for the humanities at Yale University Press, the term “has become a buzzword in academic publishing, though no one seems to really know what makes one successful.”
On Oct. 8, Kindig explored that question with a workshop called “The Elusive Crossover Book: Writing for Broad Audiences and the Changing Ecology of University Publishing,” hosted by the Whitney Humanities Center. The workshop delved into what makes a crossover book, why university presses want them, and why scholars are told to write one — and, said Kindig in an interview, “argued that not every book needs to claim to be one.”
While no sure formula may exist, great crossover books make scholarly work “relevant, accessible, and fascinating” to lay audiences, Kindig said.
Kindig’s workshop was part of the Whitney Publishing Project, a Whitney Humanities Center initiative that helps scholars navigate the humanities publishing process through workshops, editors-in-residence, and grants.
Next, the Whitney Humanities Center will host on Oct. 20 a lecture by author Daniel Mendelsohn on his six-year experience translating Homer’s “Odyssey.” See the full calendar of events.
Benton, Mukhopadhyay receive international book prizes
Lauren Benton and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies awarded this year’s international book prizes to Lauren Benton, the Barton M. Briggs Professor of History in the FAS and Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, assistant professor of English in the FAS.
The prizes were established in 2004 to honor two former directors of the MacMillan Center. Recipients receive a research appointment at the center, along with $5,000 in funding to support their continued scholarship.
Read more about the award, the authors, and their books, plus find a Yale News conversation with Benton from last year.
Lisa Prevost and Jessica Liu contributed to this column.
