Author: Liam Otten

“As a designer, you want to make your statement,” says Jennifer Ingram, the W. H. Smith Visiting Assistant Professor of Fashion in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. “You want to inspire, you want to motivate, you want to communicate some type of emotion.” Those ambitions and more will be on full display Sunday, April 29, when Leaving a Legacy, the Sam Fox School’s 83rd annual Fashion Design Show, takes to the runway at Plaza Frontenac.

As the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic draws near, Gaylyn Studlar, PhD, director of Film and Media Studies in Arts & Sciences, discusses film adaptations of the event and why James Cameron’s Titanic has become the iconic version of the tragedy, as well as the changing tastes of movie-goers and how they may impact the 3D re-release of Cameron’s film.

At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she’d lost everything. Her mother died of cancer, her family scattered in grief and her marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, Strayed made an impulsive decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone. The story of that journey, from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State, is told in Wild, Strayed’s New York Times bestselling memoir. On April 12, Strayed will read from her work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

From the galleries of New York to the backlots of Hollywood, visual culture in the United States is often defined as coastal and urban. Yet historically, large numbers of artists and designers have emerged from the unique population, landscape and economy of the American Midwest. On April 12 and 13, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will investigate Midwestern cultural production with Inland Symposium: CST, the third annual Inland Visual Studies Center symposium.

In 1990, the Illinois Humanities Council presented a daylong event on the theme “Expressions of Freedom.” So was born the Chicago Humanities Festival, one of the nation’s premiere celebrations of the liberal arts. Now it’s St. Louis’ turn. On April 13 and 14, WUSTL’s Center for the Humanities — with the Missouri Humanities Council, Webster University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis — will present the first annual St. Louis Humanities Festival. One of the speakers is novelist and Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson.

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present its fifth biennial Young Choreographers Showcase Friday through Sunday, April 6-8 in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The concert will feature more than a dozen dancers in ten original works created by student choreographers in the Dance Program in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

Philosophy makes little mention of the theater except to denounce it as a place of illusion and moral decay. Theater tends to respond by steering away from philosophy, driven by the notion that theater consists of actions, not ideas. But in The Drama of Ideas, Harvard scholar Martin Puchner, argues that despite this mutual evasion, the histories of philosophy and theater have in fact been crucially intertwined. On April 5, Puchner will present Washington University’s 10th Helen Clanton Morrin Lecture.

Written in 1956 as a gift for a friend’s wedding, Daniel Pinkham’s Wedding Cantata consists of four movements based on texts from The Song of Songs, the Biblical book most explicitly dedicated to the joys of earthly love. On April 1, the Washington University Concert Choir and the Washington University Chamber Choir will present the Wedding Cantata as the centerpiece of Many Waters, a free concert of songs about love and marriage.

Fracture, fragmentation and juxtaposition. Over the course of the 20th century, such modernist techniques would become defining traits of both popular and avant-garde film, which in turn would profoundly influence the work of the contemporary British artist John Stezaker. Later this month, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present three classic films — all selected by Stezaker himself — as part of its Fringe Figure Film Series.

Inner Horn is a small country. So small, in fact, that only one citizen at a time can fit inside. But when Inner Horn unexpectedly shrinks, it sparks a crisis in neighboring Outer Horn, which falls to a jingoistic dictator. Such is the premise of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), a wickedly funny and wildly original political allegory by George Saunders. On March 27 and 29, Saunders, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing, will deliver a pair of events for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.