The concept of director Margaret C. Kerr ’13 was inspired by a play she saw at Oxford University her sophomore year of high school. “I always wanted to do an outdoor production of ‘A Midsummmer Night’s Dream,’ but when I got to campus as a freshman I started seeing more potential locations.”
Though the play is still presented chronologically, the interpretation allows the audience to choose their own path from scene to scene. “Creating this air of [mystery, in which] you might see something [or] you might not adds some dimension to the play that you might not otherwise see if you were sitting through it straight through,” says Kerr.
Last-Minute Orchestra
The aptly named Last Minute Orchestra plans to rehearse only once before its Sunday performance in the Lowell House courtyard. To conductor and Lowell House Opera music director Lidiya Yankovskaya, it is this spontaneity that makes the performance exciting.
“Everybody’s put together at the last minute,” Yankovskaya said. “It’s not something that’s organized in the traditional way, and we don’t necessarily know who’s going to [play].”
“Untraditional” seems to be a theme of the Last Minute Orchestra’s annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” The orchestra might be joined by helium balloons from the science departments, the Lowell House Bells, and even kazoo players, according to Yankovskaya. Participation in the performance is open to the public.
Yankovskaya expects the performance to be a hit. “We’ll be outside in the courtyard, and people can sit outside…and just enjoy the music.”
Breaking Boundaries
For the student artists featured in “Breaking Boundaries: Arts, Creativity and the Harvard Curriculum,” liberal arts courses have taken “arts” literally. The exhibit, which runs tomorrow through Saturday at Arts @ 29 Garden, will showcase art made by students for classes ranging from General Education courses to Organismic and Evolutionary Biology 52: “Biology of Plants.” The projects were funded by grants from the Elson Family Arts Initiative.
Some works were created in subjects not traditionally associated with art, while others represent students’ first serious art projects. Alexander K. Delaney ’14, an engineering sciences concentrator whose book of photographs is featured in the exhibit, said he had never taken any art-related courses at Harvard before he took Culture and Belief 30: “Seeing is Believing: A History of Photography.” The course, he said, helped him see the world from an artists’ perspective. “Gaining this better grasp of how to analyze photographs definitely assisted me in determining what I wished to achieve with individual photographs as well as with the project as a whole,” he said.
—Staff writer Noah S. Guiney can be reached at nguiney@college.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Ola Topczewska can be reached at atopczewska@college.harvard.edu.