Author: Liam Otten

The world is getting smaller, but cities are getting bigger. That growth represents a key challenge and a key opportunity for 21st century sustainability. In November, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present URBANISM(S): Sustainable Cities for One Planet, an international symposium exploring the future of global urban design. The two-day event will feature a range of talks on the ecology, infrastructure and social life of cities, as well as keynote address by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne.

Patrick Kennedy is a garrulous alcoholic, drenched in whisky and Shakespeare. His daughters — insecure Judith, acerbic Rose and idealistic Maud — are variations on the theme of spinsterhood. In other words, a typical broken Irish family. Ah, but wait. All is not exactly as it seems, here in County Sligo. In The Night Season, British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz flirts with the tropes of Irish drama, inhabiting and upending in equal measure.

Conductor Steven Jarvi, praised as an “eloquent and decisive” conductor by The Wall Street Journal, will make his public debut with the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra Oct. 27. The Parent and Family Weekend concert, which takes place in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, will feature music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Adam Schoenberg and Edward Elgar.

Elizabeth Roxas, a former principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre — whom The New York Times once described as the “cool, still, lyrical center of the Ailey storm” — leads a master class with dance students in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences earlier this month.

James Siena is a New York-based artist whose complex, rule-based linear abstractions, or “visual algorithms,” result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly colored, freehand geometric patterns. This fall, Siena served as the Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Visiting Artist at Island Press, the nationally known print shop in WUSTL’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

They said it couldn’t be done. Suresh Vedantham, MD, professor of radiology and surgery, was planning a nationwide trial comparing treatments for deep vein thromboses — dangerous blood clots in the legs’ major veins. Prior attempts had failed to meet recruitment goals, but Vedantham was eager to test a new approach. Four years later, recruitment for ATTRACT (Acute Venous Thrombosis: Thrombus Removal with Adjunctive Catheter-Directed Thrombolysis), his NIH-sponsored trial, has crossed the halfway mark.

In The Anchorage, his debut collection, poet Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul, in poems located in New York’s summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin, and along stretches of Cape Cod’s open shoreline. On Thursday, Oct. 25, Wunderlich will read from his work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Cyrano is smart, courageous and noble, a brilliant poet and skilled swordsman. He is utterly besotted with the beautiful Roxanne. But oh, that nose! On Friday, the Aquila Theatre Company — today’s leading producer of touring classical theater — will return to Edison with Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand’s funny, poignant and often heart-wrenching tale of unrequited love. On Saturday, Aquila will retake the stage with Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare’s timeless battle of the sexes.

Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, collects dozens of smart, problem-solving projects from around the globe. On Saturday, Oct. 20, six St. Louis not-for-profits will present their own “Community Design Challenges” as part of the museum’s fall Community Day. The free, all-ages event also will feature art-making, scavenger hunts and other activities.

Aaron Copland and George Gershwin are perhaps the most iconically American of composers. On Oct. 21, three faculty from WUSTL’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will join a string quartet from the St. Louis Symphony for the concluding concert of the 2012 American Arts Experience-St. Louis. The program will highlight works by Copland and Gershwin as well as by Antonín Dvorák, who played a prominent role in encouraging American composers.