Arts & Culture

Robert Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has analyzed data from the Lewis and Clark expedition and says it shows that the Missouri River today is but a shadow of what it was two hundred years ago, narrower and more prone to serious flooding.A geologist at Washington University in St. Louis and his collaborator at Oxford University have interpreted data that Lewis and Clark collected during their famous expedition and found that the Missouri River has markedly narrowed and its water levels have become more variable over the past two hundred years. This narrowing, or channeling, created by wing dikes and levees constructed mainly in the 20th century, has put the Missouri River at an increased risk of more damaging floods, the authors say. They blame the fact that the river cannot spread out as it did naturally at the turn of the 19th century, thus forcing water levels higher. More…

Four aspiring playwrights will present staged readings of their work Nov. 16 and 17 as part of Washington University’s 2006 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival. Sponsored by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, the festival’s selection process actually began in January, when students from across the university submitted original plays to an adjudication committee made up of faculty and theater professionals. The committee then selected four plays — two full-length works and two shorts — to undergo an intense two-week workshop this fall, culminating in the staged readings.

Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, will speak on “The Great Jazz Schism” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14. A former editor of Down Beat magazine, Morgenstern has won six Grammy awards for best album notes and served as a senior advisor to Ken Burns 10-part PBS series Jazz. Earlier this year he was named a “Jazz Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts — a designation The New York Times calls “the nation’s highest jazz honor.”

The Washington University Wind Ensemble will perform a free concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9, in the University’s Graham Chapel. Dan Presgrave, instrumental music coordinator in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, directs the program, which includes music of Franz Joseph Haydn, Malcolm Arnold, Franz von Suppé and Gordon Jacob.

Mezzo soprano Jade Lin Hornbaker, a master’s candidate in vocal performance in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, will present a graduate voice recital at 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 11, in the auditorium of the Uncas A. Whitaker Hall for Biomedical Engineering. The program includes music of Modest Mussorgsky, Robert Schumann, Francis Poulenc and John Ireland.

Paul VertucioShapiro & Smith DanceAs young dancers in the mid-1980s, Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith frequently spent their evenings with Smith’s sister, the violinist Soozie Tyrell, and her best friend, a young singer-songwriter named Patty Scialfa. In the years since, Shapiro and Smith emerged as internationally renowned choreographers, praised by The New York Times for their “strong, sharp edged dancing and daring theatricality.” Meanwhile, Tyrell and Scialfa would both go on to perform as members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. More recently, the quartet reunited to create Anytown: Stories of America, a dance theater piece based on Springsteen’s songs. In November, the show will make its St. Louis premiere at Washington University’s Edison Theatre.

It’s election season once again, but the political fun continues even after votes are cast. On Thursday, Nov. 9, the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will host “Playwrights and Politics: Two Acts on the National and International Scene.” The symposium will examine the nature of political theatre and the impact of the arts on national and international politics.

bell hooks, the ground-breaking feminist author, teacher, social activist and cultural critic, will give the Black Arts & Sciences Lecture for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m., Wednesday, November 1 in Graham Chapel. The lecture, “Self-Determination: Where Do We Begin?” is free and open to the public.

Set in pre-revolutionary Russia, the play tells the story of Tevye, a hardworking milkman who must find suitable husbands for his three eldest daughters.

Hamilton, one of the most challenging and provocative installation artists working today, is a 1993 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly nicknamed the “genius grant.”