Arts & Culture

Ah, spring. The rains rain, the flowers bloom, and the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences presents its annual Chancellor’s Concert. The performance — which takes place Sunday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center — is among the largest-scaled of the year, featuring well over 100 musicians from the Washington University Symphony Orchestra and the Washington University Choirs.

It is a moment of rising inequality. The widening gap between aristocratic haves and discontented have-nots threatens to replace the social contract with a powder keg. As You Like It is among Shakespeare’s most popular works, but it is more than just a pastoral romance. So says Annamaria Pileggi, senior lecturer in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, who will direct the show April 20-29 in Edison Theatre.

In his latest book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012), sociologist Richard Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. On Wednesday, April 18, Sennett will lecture on “The Architecture of Cooperation” for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

“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.