Cornish Magazine May 2015 by Cornish College of the Arts

CENTENNIAL ISSUE

M AY 2 0 1 5

LETTER FROM ALUMNI RELATIONS

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

Dear alumni and friends:

Dear friends:

Welcome to the newly revamped Cornish magazine. As with many things at Cornish College of the Arts, the faculty and staff have seized upon the College’s centennial year as an opportunity to look back, grab hold of what’s best about Cornish, and dive headlong into the challenges and opportunities that await our community in its second century. In the case of the magazine, the decision was made to restyle the publication (formerly InSight) and to increasingly shift its content to be more reflective of our alumni community. We want to tell your stories and successes, wherever they may take you, because that is how we can best tell the story of Cornish

We are halfway through our Centennial year. At this special time, we look back with deep appreciation at our glorious past even as we work to shape our next 100 years. With this reimagining of the Cornish magazine, you’ll find stories about our early iconoclasts, and I know that as you look at their faces and read about their lives, you will feel, as I do, how familiar they seem. Alongside these are recent stories—some which you’ve submitted—about the new ground you and your fellow alumni have broken. So many lives have been touched by the Cornish experience. This magazine is a reminder that we are all taking part in an ongoing journey that is wonderful, uplifting, world-changing, and that has the bold aspiration that is part of Cornish’s DNA.

In short, it has been and continues to be a year of reflection and change—all of which is positive for Cornish’s future. Included with these changes is a renewed commitment to alumni. This is why the College has asked me to work for you. Over the coming year, I hope to: • Keep you better connected with Cornish • Encourage the strengthening of our alumni network • Increase engagement between alumni and current students • Host annual events like the Alumni Bash • Organize social-networking events across the country As the Alumni Relations program grows, the most important thing, above all else, is that you feel honored and engaged. I look forward to hearing from you. The work I do, and really that everyone at Cornish does, can only improve when alumni are involved. If we haven’t yet, I hope we meet soon. Warmly,

Chris Sande Alumni & Parent Relations Manager

From the first moment Nellie Cornish conceived of her school, she intended it to be much more than a place of learning. She designed it as a home for artists, especially its graduates, a place of inspiration whose doors would remain open to receive alumni all through their lives. In our hundredth year, we are rededicating ourselves to this concept, mindful that it is your creative energy and contributions that keep Cornish moving forward. I’m looking forward to learning even more about your activities in the years to come and reading about them here. What a year this has been! From our record-breaking Gala on our foundation day of November 14 to our amazing Alumni Centennial Bash at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center in February, one thing has become clear: our alumni are a fundamental force that makes Cornish truly great. We continue to do remarkable things together, like opening the Cornish Commons this summer, the creation of a new partnership with the Kronos Quartet, the recent opening of the Centennial Exhibition of Imogen Cunningham’s photographs taken at Cornish, and so much more. This College is a place where such an enormous surge of activity is in play that we can never hope to fit it all between the covers of a magazine. I encourage you to drop by our updated website, www. cornish.edu, to learn more about what’s happening right now at Cornish. With best wishes,

csande@cornish.edu | 206.315.5839 Nancy J. Uscher, PhD Please send your events, announcements, and newsletters to alumni@cornish.edu.

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President, Cornish College of the Arts

THE NEXT

C E N T E N N I A L I S S U E - M AY 2 0 1 5

100 YEARS

4 Something Old, Something New:

Foundations Changes Freshman Year

8 Cornish’s First Star

LOUISE SOELBERG

12 Kronos and Cornish Team Up 16 Doolittle Helps Find Connection

Between Bird Song and Human Music

16 Watts Brings International Experience to Dance 17 Tom Baker Strikes New Chord 18 50 Years of Jazz at Cornish

20 Cornish Responds to Ferguson 22 A Stitch in Time : Imogen at Cornish

THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION

24 Cornish Commons 2015 28 Centennial Gala Raises Record Sum 30 A Deep History with Cornish

FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE STODDARD-EVANS-MONSEF FAMILY

33 The Hal Ryder Endowed Fund in Theater 34 The Centennial Alumni Bash 36 Performance Production: Changes Backstage 39 Film+Media Start Up 40 Listen For It: Dance, Dance, Evolution THE LEGACY OF DANCE DEPARTMENT CHAIR KITTY DANIELS

43 Dreams and the Costs of Dreaming THE REMARKABLE CAREER OF DANA SAPIRO

46 Who’s the Artist Now?

by Tonya Lockyer

ON THE COVER Cornish dancers in 2011 site-specific work Beneath Our Own Immensity, directed and choreographed by Alia Swersky.

WELCOME TO THE CORNISH MAGAZINE! Like Cornish College of the Arts, this publication has gone through a number of incarnations and names over the years. But as we discussed our relaunch for Cornish’s second century, we felt drawn to the one name that continues to define us in our local community and around the world. So, welcome to Cornish, wherever you are. We hope you’ll enjoy these stories of Cornish’s past as well as learning more about how we are shaping our academic future.

Photograph by Michele Smith-Lewis.

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SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW:

Foundations Changes Freshman Year at Cornish By Rosemary Jones It says something about a college when a change to its curriculum appears on the front page of a local newspaper.

hile such a subject usually inspires a yawn outside of academic circles, Cornish’s lively discussion of how to handle freshmen year in the visual arts became the subject of various feature articles and eventually landed Moira Scott Payne, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, on Seattle’s list of the 51 most influential people in the city last year. Cornish’s singular position as Seattle’s century-old grand dame of arts education inspired much of the interest. Was the school where Mark Tobey once taught painting abandoning its heritage or embracing it? A close examination of the Foundations year shows a curriculum that founder Nellie Cornish would find intriguing and, indeed, falling right into her intense commitment to a cross-disciplinary approach to arts education. Rather than placing incoming visual arts freshmen into a set track of fine arts or design classes, and making them tick off unrelated humanities and sciences credits on top of that, the newly integrated Art, Design, Film+Media department created a Foundations year that allows students to explore their options, receive a grounding in the basics, and tie their humanities and sciences classes into those studies. Under the direction of Dawn Gavin, program director and chair of Foundations, the curriculum was turned into a series of modules for Spring 2015 that allows maximum crossover and plenty of chance to experiment. The result by the end of the first five weeks was a variety of completed projects that left the students wanting to do more and the faculty also talking about new ways to collaborate, according to Gavin.

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GOING ONLINE HELPS MANAGE ASSIGNMENTS With collaboration being key to a successful Foundations year, both faculty and students jumped on Canvas, a learning management system, to maximize their time outside of the classroom. Through Canvas, they could track the assignments needed, find links to materials that their professors wanted them to study, and even access selected online tutorials for graphics or film software available through Cornish’s library. The Canvas mobile app even made it possible to keep in touch via smartphones or tablets.

ART AND SCIENCE, DESIGN AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, FILM+MEDIA AND HUMANITIES In three separate five-week modules, freshmen experienced art, design, and film+media by rotating as groups through the semester’s schedule. In each module, the study of the visual arts was complemented by their other classes and informed their final projects. In the Art and Science module, called Body + Image, students still studied life drawing—but it became life drawing of a nude model matched to discussions of how much of “image” is created by genetics and how much comes from society’s expectations. Students were asked to look not only at the images that they were creating from observing real life, but also to create art about an alter ego, a process called by their professor “very messy but lovely” as these creations birthed 2D, 3D, and even performance art works. In the Design and Social Science module, Community + Impact, the design faculty met with their social science counterpart and discovered that she had read the “+” in the title as part of an equation. While they had visualized it

functioning as an ampersand, she saw it as call to “solve” the idea proposed by the module’s title. This call to action gave the students a firm jumping off point for their own ideas after they volunteered at a local nonprofit and then returned to their studio to offer up some design “solutions.” In this section, freshman Kevin Bui spent time at the Danny Woo Community Garden cutting down an overgrowth of bamboo. The garden is a mix of privately donated and Seattle park land that provides more than 100 vegetable allotments for the residents of nearby apartment houses. As members of the International District neighborhood stopped to chat with him, Bui thought about his own childhood with a Vietnamese grandmother who loved to cook fresh from the garden and the traditions of the diverse community served by this particular public project. Back in the studio, he began to design ways that a local treasure could be enhanced. Bui’s final creation was a banner that proclaimed the garden’s name in the languages of the four immigrant communities served by it: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Each name was illustrated by a flower important to that culture. Bui even produced a set of flower cards with more information on the back about how each flower was used in a particular Asian culture. His “solution” turned out to be a hit with his class and professors, and became one of several projects presented last spring during a college-wide discussion of the Foundations year.

Foundations concluded the year with their own gallery show. Students K. Krueger, Carrie Gerstenberger, and Alexis Silva worked with Design faculty member Cameron Neat to create this poster.

More connections between family, home, and their pursuit of art were found by the students in the Film+Media and Humanities module, Truth And Fiction. A faculty team led students through the academic work that neatly placed the discussion of literature with how to handle “point of view” in a visual medium like film. The students’ creations following this section ranged from written papers to podcasts to short digital films. Some came down firmly in the documentary side of “truth”—such as examining at color perception or the history of typography—while others created fiction to address the subjects raised in their classes. One student’s paper was “Mother’s Alternate History (if she hadn’t had children)” and was based on the student’s oral interviews of her family.

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CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

DEFINING FOUNDATIONS In technical terms, Foundations has come to be defined as “modulebased, collaborative, and project/research-led” where “modules are fully integrated in the disciplinary domains of the Humanities and Sciences, Critical and Contextual Studies, and Studio Art (Art, Design and Film+Media)” to quote one presentation at Cornish. In practice, the year became a voyage of discovery for the students, and their teachers, that left the freshmen excited about their future and further studies in the areas that piqued their interest. “I knew we had succeeded,” said Gavin, “when students kept coming up to me and saying how they wanted to do more with a module or faculty member and would go back to that particular area next year.” Excitement about exposure to various forms of the visual arts interwoven with studies of humanities and sciences would be something understood and even applauded by Nellie Cornish. Or, as Mark Tobey said about the woman who gave him his first teaching job (and lectured him about getting serious about his art), her belief in the interdependence of all arts in education was “an integral part of her vision.” So Foundations’ cross-disciplinary approach looks to become an integral part of Cornish in the 21st century.

EMPTY WORDS

ALAINA STOCKER

27 OCTOBER

VERY FUN AND DANGEROUS GAMES JACK KENNA

TEA WILL BE SERVED WEEKDAYS FROM 11AM - 1PM 7 NOVEMBER

ALSO FEATURING WORK BY: BUD BLUHM AND ABE POULTRIDGE

THE CLOSET GALLERY

20 JANUARY

30 JANUARY

RECEPTION: JANUARY 20TH 6-8 PM

THE CLOSET GALLERY

2000 Terry St. Seattle, WA. Cornish Centennial Building. The Closet Gallery is a Cornish College of the Arts student run exhibition space. It is for the students, by the students. For questions and submissions please email studentcurators@cornish.edu

THINGS LEFT UNSAID 2000 Terry St. Seattle, WA. Cornish Centennial Building. The Closet Gallery is a Cornish College of the Arts student run exhibition space. It is for the students, by the students. For questions and submissions please email studentcurators@cornish.edu

WHAT INFORMS THE PRESENT ASHLEIGH ROBB

BRYNN FARWELL 10 NOVEMBER

21 NOVEMBER

THE CLOSETFill GALLERY Student Curated Shows THE CLOSET GALLERY Cornish’s Corners 22 NOVEMBER

OPENING NOVEMBER 24TH 7:00-8:30

5 DECEMBER

The Closet Gallery and other spaces around campus filled up with student curated art shows this year. In a tradition that probably stretches back to when Cornish started drawing classes a century ago, the art reflected students’ current concerns and interests, as well as using a wide range of mediums. Alaina Stoker ’15 opened the fall at the Closet Gallery by with a participatory art show that included serving tea on weekdays to the visitors viewing Empty Words. The visitors to her exhibition were “invited to handle and scrutinize pieces of fabric, embroidered with what I consider to be ‘empty words.’ They become ‘cliche inspectors,’ taking a seat and sipping on Earl Grey tea, chosen for my familiarity with it,” wrote Stoker in her artist’s statement. Senior Ashleigh Robb’s solo show Things Left Unsaid translated her intimate and personal experiences through the mediums of Stonehenge fine art paper, muslin fabric, and graph velum.

Foundations freshman Kyle Leitch’s project explores alternate identities.

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Brynn Farwell’s solo show later in November, What Informs the Present, was an exploration of material and familial relationships and how memories can be changed by current events within the artist’s personal life. Farwell ’17 set off her paintings with an installation of “notes to self,” written out voicemails from family, and other relics from her process.

ART DEPARTMENT EMBRACES STRUCTURAL CHANGE In February, a show titled Changing Our Stripes: The New Art Program at Cornish demonstrated how the integration of Art, Design, Film+Media into one department inspired a selection of work by 33 current Cornish sophomores, juniors, and seniors. “We are in our 100th year at Cornish, and the newly launched art program represents the future,” said Art Department Chair Christy Johnson. “Students took this exciting and challenging opportunity to investigate the factors which shape and frame contemporary art today, and the broader world in which they live.” Do It Yourself poster created by Taylor Bednarz and Jayme Aumann (above). Mia Gjerde ‘17 holds her acrylic painting (right). Photo of Gjerde by Jayme Aumann.

Among the shared themes and topics addressed by the students were civil disobedience, consumer culture, systems and process art, postmodernism, and art history. “The selection of work is also meant to represent the variety of mediums, approaches, and genres with which students are encouraged to experiment. Collectively these works get at the core mission of our new program: the idea that creating

January brought Very Fun and Dangerous Games to the Closet Gallery, with works by Jack Kenna ’17, Bud Bluhm ’17, and Abe Poultridge. Using comic book line-art motifs, and an installation in the center of the gallery space, the artists created “a light-hearted reminder that the world is full of unspeakable evil,” said Kenna in his artist’s statement. After the exhibition closed, some of Kenna’s artwork went on display at Chocolati Café in Greenlake.

objects and images is also a form of critical thinking,” said Melissa Feldman, the critical and contextual studies faculty member who served as the guest curator for the show.

The Closet Gallery was curated by Makena Gadient ’16 with assistance from other members of the Cornish Curators student interest group. One of the last student-curated shows of the academic year, the aptly named Do It Yourself, opened on April 17 in the old Cornish Commons building located on 9th Avenue and ran through April 24. Created by sophomores and juniors from ADF+M, the selections came from every possible medium: drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, sculpture, multi-media installation, digital art, video, and more. The exhibiting artists for this show were LaraAnn Sabih, Taylor Hollowell, Taylor Bednarz, Jack Kenna, Jayme Aumann, Brynn Farwell, Mia Gjerde, Evan Johnson, Rachael Larkin, Jacob Miller, Makena Gadient, Christopher House, Venalie Scheck, Natasha Espinoza, Sasha Ferre, Justin Webb, Kat Armstrong, Kendra Boblett, Ana Dueñas, Anton Drachenko, Elizabeth Faragher, Armand Cochran, and Eilena Sharpe.

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LOUISE SOELBERG:

Cornish’s First Star By Maximilian Bocek Anna Louise Soelberg was born in Seattle in 1903, an original Cornish student who forged a career in dance and education. By the time her of her death, she had proved to be the embodiment of the principals that drove the Cornish School in its formative years and of the College’s motto: ARTIST, CITIZEN, INNOVATOR. Louise was not only a star, but a guiding light for Cornish.

N NOVEMBER 14, 1914, NELLIE CORNISH GOT OFF A STEAMER on the Seattle waterfront with single-minded purpose: to create a school for the arts. She made only one stop on her determined march to Capitol Hill to found her school: Nellie had breakfast with the Soelberg family. As she had since arriving in Seattle in 1900, she counted on Axel and Olga Soelberg for support. Nellie had met them and they had hit it off very quickly. Many prominent Seattle families helped the Cornish School in its first years, but without the Soelbergs, it very well might not ever have been founded. One gift the Soelbergs gave the school is beyond estimation, their daughter, Louise, who would go on to become, arguably, the school’s first star. Nellie Cornish lived with the Soelbergs for over a decade leading up to that day of the founding of the Cornish School, helping to raise their children and

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• CORNISH •

ICONOCLAST

instructing them on piano. She recounts that she was there in 1903 for the birth of the Soelberg’s youngest daughter, Anna Louise. The Soelbergs meant everything to Nellie Cornish, whose family life had been fragmentary and who would never marry. “As I had made my home for so long with the Soelbergs,” Nellie wrote in her autobiography, Miss Aunt Nellie, “Louise seemed like my own child. I had more or less planned her educational life, and had taught her music and piano until she entered the School.” It was a young Louise Soelberg who gave Nellie Cornish the title of her autobiography and the nickname she would carry the rest of her life: “Miss Aunt Nellie.” By the time of the founding of the Cornish School of Music, Louise Soelberg had already been a student of Nellie Cornish essentially all her life. Louise entered the school as a music student at the age of 11. But entering the school

Louise’s father, Axel Soelberg, around 1900. A successful banker in Seattle, Axel arranged key loans for Nellie Cornish as she set up her school.

Olga Wickstrom Soelberg with her daughters Anna Louise (left) and Adene, circa 1908. Section of a mural of Louise dancing by Mark Tobey on a wall of her studio at Dartington Hall. The mural, one of the few ever painted by Tobey, was painted over when the US Army requisitioned Dartington during the Second World War. The photo was taken in 1933 by Louise’s future husband, Basil Langton. Our thanks for the many photos provided by Jessica Langton Andrews from their family collection.

(Opposite) Louise dancing in her composition Puritan Motif, reprinted from her monograph on contemporary dance, Modern Dance: What is It?, of 1942. The image is likely earlier than that year; it was taken by noted British photographer Angus McBean.

studying music did not mean a student would have to stick to that path. From the beginning, Nellie’s vision for her school was broad and revolutionary: “the form of the School was to be an elementary school of the arts—all the arts—with music as major subject” [Nellie Cornish’s emphasis]. The school evolved rapidly, quickly outgrowing both its designation as a school of music and as an elementary school. Six years later in 1920, when the name of the school became officially “The Cornish School,” 17-year-old Louise was not only still enrolled, but, due to some family drama, living with Nellie Cornish at the school. “She was majoring in piano and eurhythmics and was active in dance courses,” Nellie remembers. Dance had been added to the Cornish curriculum very early on to support students’ understanding of music, but it quickly grew to be an equal partner after a performance of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in Seattle. Pavlova would later famously say of Cornish, “I visited a school in the West that seemed to me to be the kind of school other schools should follow.” Her visit ignited the dreams of a multitude of girls of being a ballerina, and many of those girls would come to study at Cornish. In 1916, catching the wave, Nellie had convinced Mary Ann Wells, who would become a major dance educator in the region, to teach at Cornish. It is extremely likely that it was Wells who introduced the young Louise Soelberg to dance.

y 1923, Louise seems to have moved dramatically into the study of dance, studying ballet every summer with Adolph Bolm in addition to the regular dance classes she was taking at Cornish. The Russian-born Bolm, who had worked with Pavlova and Vaslav Najinski in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, taught at the school until 1927. Louise graduated from Cornish in piano studies with the class of 1926. That year was, as Nellie wrote, “Louise’s last Christmas under my roof for a couple of years, for I was sending her off to Geneva to study with Dalcroze.” That was Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, developer of “eurhythmics” as the Dalcroze Method, which taught music through rhythmic movement. Eurhythmics was a key program in the Cornish school, the medium through which music and dance students passed freely back and forth, the very heart of what Nellie meant by teaching an art by teaching all the arts. It seems clear that Nellie was preparing a position for Louise on the Cornish faculty, and equally, that Louise was intent on following her “aunt” into the teaching profession.

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Much of what we know of Louise in the late ’20s and early ’30s comes from the biography of Bonnie Bird by Karen Bell-Kanner, Frontiers: The Life and Times of Bonnie Bird. Bird attended Cornish in the late ’20s and went on to dance with Martha Graham, to introduce Merce Cunningham to dance, and to become a major figure in English dance education at the Laban school. In 1928, as she recounted to Bell-Kanner, Nellie brought each dance student into her office separately to tell them that ballet was being de-emphasized at the school in favor of modern dance. An important consideration was the artistic empowerment of the dance students in the new and rapidly expanding art form. To start her dance reforms, Cornish brought Louise back to Seattle to teach at the beginning of the January, 1929, term. Her dance classes combined ballet fundamentals with a broader movement vocabulary and made a bridge from ballet to modern dance for the stubbornly ballet-oriented Bonnie. She was very excited by the new classes in improvisation and composition, with their emphasis on the students making their own artistic decisions and by the stimulating discussions that took place following performances of their own works.

hese were an exciting couple of years for Cornish dance, as another Dalcroze-trained dancer quickly gaining prominence, Michio Ito, came to Cornish to teach for the summer, and soon Martha Graham would arrive for her Cornish debut. Louise, who took Ito’s classes with Bird, followed Ito to San Francisco for two extra weeks of training. A meeting in New York City derailed Louise’s nascent teaching career at Cornish. Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst, née Dorothy Whitney (of the Whitney Museum Whitneys) asked a traveling Nellie Cornish to lunch with her. Heiress to a fortune, Dorothy Elmhirst and her English husband were in the process of rehabilitating a beautiful estate in Devon as a school, Dartington Hall. “I had not met Mrs. Elmhirst, but knew her interest in the Cornish School,” Nellie remembers in her autobiography. “Mrs. Elmhirst asked if there was a Cornish teacher who could go to Dartington for at least six months and help plan the coordination of studies along the lines we used in Seattle.” The teacher they decided on was Louise Soelberg. In late 1929 or early 1930, Louise left for England. Her Cornish classes were taken over on an interim basis by Ronnie Johansson, who was on leave from the Swedish State Theatre Ballet. Martha Graham would arrive in the summer of 1930. With another dancer who spent time at Cornish in 1925 and who studied with Martha Graham, Margaret Barr, Louise began the formation of the School of Dance-Mime at Darlington. In 1930 came a fork in the road that took Louise one direction and Cornish another. Nellie recalls receiving a cable from Louise at Dartington. “I want to marry Richard Elmhirst right now but if you insist will return to fulfill my year’s contract.” Richard was the younger brother of Leonard Elmhirst. Later, early in 1931, the newlyweds visited Seattle and, according to Nellie, Louise’s former pupils convinced her to appear one last time on the stage of the Cornish Theatre, known today as the PONCHO Concert Hall. Also in 1931, Louise had given birth to her first child, Eloise.

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Back in England, though she and Cornish had parted ways, Louise’s involvement with Dartington Hall was just the beginning of a deep involvement between the school and Cornish during which the path from Seattle to Devon was well beaten. Notable among Cornish faculty members to work at Dartington was painter Mark Tobey, who would become a lifelong friend of Louise according to her daughter, Jessica Langton Andrews. Tobey executed a mural—now destroyed—on the wall of Louise’s studio showing her dancing. A photo was taken by Basil Langton, who would later become Louise’s second husband and Jessica’s father. English-born Langton was a scholarship student from Vancouver, BC, with Cornish connections. Dartington was fast becoming what one writer has called “an artistic utopia,” appropriate for the co-founders of New York’s New School for Social Justice and The New Republic, Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and Leonard Elmhirst. On top of Leonard Elmhirst’s development and teaching of visionary farming and manufacturing techniques, the free-thinking school became a magnet for artist all over Europe, especially those fleeing from Nazi Germany. As the sister-inlaw of the Dartington founders—not to speak of being the person charged with developing a dance program and bringing with her what must have been a life-long immersion in the advanced teaching techniques of Nellie Cornish and the Cornish School—Louise was at the center of the action. Many of the greatest minds and talents of the mid-twentieth century passed through Dartington Hall, including Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, Paul Robeson, Walter Gropius, Maholy Nagy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley. Of the dance notables who took up residence at Dartington in the early ’30s, were emigrants Kurt Jooss and Rudolph Laban. According to an unpublished memoir by Basil Langton, when Louise had free time, she was involved with Autographed presentation photo of Louise dancing. Bearing the mark of a Stockholm photographer, it was probably taken during the 1933 Ballets Jooss tour to Scandinavia. It may be of a moment in Kurt Jooss’ classic expressionist ballet The Green Table or from his Prodigal Son, both of which the company performed during this leg of the tour.

into the Second World War. The next year, 1940, Louise married Basil Langton and with him moved to London. He had begun to do quite well in the theater before the war, working most notably with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. As the war heated up, it upset the couple’s plans—as it had the plans of so many others. Louise began to travel with Basil full time entertaining the troops. Living through the Blitz with its daily bombing runs formed a lasting impression on her, and after the war, she returned with her husband to the US. Louise taught dance in a variety of college programs upon her return, finally settling in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and teaching at Antioch College until the late 1950s, when an injury interrupted her teaching career. “I sort of eased out of dancing, rather than quit,” she told the Dayton Journal Herald in 1976. “A ruptured disc had a lot to do with it. I was one of those who couldn’t sit and teach, but had to move.”

Cover of a mid-1930s program for Ballets Jooss’ Ballade. Louise is at right.

Laban in developing what became “Labanotation,” a written language for recording dance movement now taught worldwide. Her work with Jooss was equally important. The School of Dance-Mime gave way to the Jooss Leeder School of Dance. Although Louise had been involved with various performances and recitals at Cornish, she had not, by the age of 28, danced in a company. This was rectified when she joined Ballets Jooss in 1934 as prima ballerina. She danced on tour in many of the most notable works of Kurt Jooss, including Pavane, Ballade, The Big City, and especially his masterpiece, The Green Table.

efore he exclusively turned to the stage, Langton also danced with Ballets Jooss. Somewhere in these years, Louise had fallen in love with him, and her marriage to Richard Elmhirst ended. She also began to drift away from Dartington, not surprisingly, given Richard’s attachment to the estate. In 1937, she left Ballets Jooss and began teaching in London at its eurhythmics school and her own studio. The next year, she, Langton, and another Dartington exile, Leslie Burrowes, formed the Dance Centre in London. During her time at the Dance Centre, she wrote an influential monograph on contemporary dance, Modern Dance: What is It? In 1939, the final thread connecting Louise—and many other graduates to that point—to the Cornish School was snapped; the constant monetary strain that led to Nellie Cornish resigning as head of school. Also, the the UK was drawn

She was 56 years old in 1959, with an amazing life and career behind her and years to go. She found her way by returning to a passion from her girlhood, horses, that she had given up for ballet. That year, she founded the nonprofit Riding Center, affiliated with Antioch College, to improve the lives of Antioch students and the Yellow Springs community. She lived happily in a little cottage on the grounds that didn’t have electricity for the first year. In 1974, she took the program in a new direction. The Riding Center began a rehabilitation program using horseback riding, extending the benefits of riding and the calming presence of horses to physically, mentally, and emotionally challenged children and adults. Her efforts at the center won for her the first Distinguished Senior Citizen award given to a woman.

Detail from the 1934 program for a dance concert by Louise Soelberg and her group from Dartington. The graphic design is by Basil Langton.

Louise passed away in 1994. No one artist better defined Cornish in its Nellie years, its first incarnation, as did Louise Soelberg. She had talent and she had training, but she also had other qualities that have come to characterize Cornish graduates: a willingness to risk, an ability to envision the future of art, and an entrepreneurial, can-do attitude. Then there was a magic to Cornish that made her life in art possible. “Miss Aunt Nellie, as we called her, believed that every artist had to have a base in all the arts,” Louise told the Journal Herald. “We had theory, movement eurhythmics—and waffles every Sunday morning with famous artists who were passing through. It was an extraordinarily rich environment.”

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Cornish Will Work with Kronos To Teach Chamber Music The Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association’s new program, Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, was unveiled on January 28. With a lead partner, Carnegie Hall, Fifty for the Future will provide musicians with the most recent approaches to string quartet, designed expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals. Cornish College of the Arts will be one of the first institutions of higher education to take advantage of this exciting new initiative. “We are delighted and honored to be a partner in Kronos’ Fifty for the Future,” said Cornish President Nancy J. Uscher. “Creating new music and new ways of teaching music is very much a part of Cornish’s pioneering spirit and legacy. Most importantly, this partnership with Kronos exemplifies the type of distinctive collaboration that Cornish will continue to develop in its second century.” Cornish also will be working in collaboration with Kronos’ Fifty for the Future commissioning partner Seattle Theatre Group for local presentations, added Uscher. Beginning in the 2015/16 season, Kronos’ Fifty for the Future will commission a collection of 50 new works—ten per year for five years—devoted to the most recent approaches to the string quartet and suitable for training of students and emerging professionals. The works will be commissioned from an eclectic group of composers—25 men and 25 women—and the collection will represent the truly globe-spanning state of the art of the string quartet in the 21st century.

“Our idea is that as we’re touring and playing these 50 pieces, Kronos will be working with and mentoring younger quartets, and the music will begin to appear in concerts of other groups all over the place; being played in homes, in schools, art galleries, concert halls, wherever music is played and listened to.” Through jointly designed master classes, workshops, and residencies, Kronos will work with Cornish and other Kronos’ Fifty for the Future partners to extend the reach of this educational program. “As Kronos/Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) enters its fifth decade, we are incredibly pleased to be launching the largest artistic and organizational undertaking in our history—Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire,” said Janet Cowperthwaite, managing director of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. “Building on Kronos’ more than 40-year success in working with both a wide range of immensely creative composers and a dedicated, adventurous group of presenters, funders, and other partner organizations, this project exemplifies the curiosity, ingenuity, and diversity that has been the hallmark of Kronos’ vision and artistic output since day one.”

Harrington’s championship of new music began in 1973. Living in Seattle, the then 22-year-old Harrington commissioned his first composer, Ken Benshoof, and paid him with a bag of doughnuts. Kronos’ very first performance included the resulting “Traveling Music” by Benshoof – along with Bartók’s Third Quartet, “Black Angels” by George Crumb, and Webern’s Six Bagatelles—all performed at North Seattle Community College before an audience of friends and family. According to Harrington, they also performed at Cornish College of the Arts during that first year. More recently, Kronos received honorary doctorates from Cornish in 2012 and headlined the 2013 Cornish gala. For more than 40 years, Kronos has premiered literally hundreds of new compositions. “Now Kronos has access to a worldwide community of exceptionally creative people capable of making a multi-faceted introduction for the youngest enthusiasts among us. We’re trying to use all of our experience to create a body of music for future generations,” said Harrington.

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L-R: David Harrington, Sunny Jungin Yang, Hank Dutt, John Sherba

Photo by Jay Blakesberg ©

“I see a need for a thought-out and comprehensive primer created by some of our very best collaborators. This primer is in part inspired by Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, which he wrote for his son as an entry point to piano studies,” said David Harrington, the artistic director and founder of Kronos.

Bill Irwin Returns To Cornish Kronos will premiere each work and create companion materials, including recordings, video, performance notes, and composer interviews. All of Kronos’ Fifty for the Future project materials— including scores and part—will be distributed online and made available at no charge, in perpetuity. In the forward-looking spirit of Kronos’ decades-long history, Fifty for the Future will present string quartet music as a living art form, providing emerging musicians with both an indispensable library of learning, and a blueprint for their own future collaborations with composers.

Kronos’ Fifty for the Future addresses a vital need in the world of chamber music performance. While there are abundant resources for young string players who wish to specialize in the canon of works from Haydn through the great composers of the 20th century, there is no coordinated body of work designed to train students and emerging professionals in the techniques and approaches required to master the 21st century’s string quartet literature. Kronos’ Fifty for the Future commissions will be graded in difficulty, from beginner through professional level, enabling young quartets to develop as players by working their way up through the ascending levels of complexity and technical challenge. Each composition will be five to ten minutes in length and represent a fully realized musical work, to be programmed amid the other repertoire in Kronos’ own touring season. Each of the 50 compositions will be available online in a standalone module, offering the downloadable score and parts along with a variety of materials specific to the work. FIRST TEN COMPOSERS The first ten Fifty for the Future composers, five men and five women, will write pieces for Kronos to premiere during the 2015/16 season. An eclectic group of unique and extraordinary voices, they hail from around the globe: Franghiz Ali-Zadeh – Azerbaijan / Germany Ken Benshoof – USA Fodé Lassana Diabaté – Mali Rhiannon Giddens – USA Yotam Haber – Netherlands / Israel / USA Garth Knox – Ireland / France Tanya Tagaq – Canada Merlijn Twaalfhoven – Netherlands Aleksandra Vrebalov – Serbia / USA Wu Man – China / USA

Photo by Winifred Westergard

RESOURCES FOR EMERGING PLAYERS

In association with the Seattle Beckett Festival and Seattle University, Cornish’s Theater Department brought master actor and clown Bill Irwin back to Seattle for an evening of performance and conversation about the works of dramatist Samuel Beckett. The event became a standing-room-only sensation at Seattle Rep’s Leo K. Theater on October 27. In 2012, Irwin was the featured performer at the Cornish annual gala, An Evening of the Arts. As part of this trip, he gave workshops for Cornish and Seattle University students. “This was an incredible opportunity for our students, and we were thrilled to be part of this event,” said Theater Chair Richard E.T. White. The Seattle Beckett Festival 2014 ran from August through November, featuring play performances and readings of Beckett’s poetry and prose, screenings of his films, master classes on Beckett, pop-up performance events, presentations of the radio plays, and more.

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Cornish would like to thank our Centennial Celebration Year sponsors:

Cornish Residence Hall partners:

Jerick Hoffer ’10 (AKA Jinkx Monsoon as Ms. Kitty Witless) and Richard Andriessen ’10 (AKA Major Scales as Dr. Dan Von Dandy) took their act, The Vaudevillians, on the road, performing on both coasts plus a threemonth tour of Australia and New Zealand as well as a sold-out run at Seattle Rep’s Leo K. Theatre. They also released an album of original songs and covers in their inimitable style, called The Inevitable Album in May 2014, and Richard performed his solo show Major Scales’ Minor Breakdown in New York. Along the way they were nominated and won numerous awards throughout the past year. Alumni Jake Hooker ’00 and Sherrine Azab ’02, co-founders of Detroit-based generative ensemble A Host of People are among the winners of the Detroit Knight’s Art Challenge in response to their work, The Harrowing. Village Theatre’s production of Mary Poppins, a musical based on the stories of P.L. Travers and the Walt Disney film, featured two alumnae, with Mary Jo Dugaw appearing as Miss Andrew and Nicole Beerman ’02 as Mrs. Corry. The members of A Cedar Suede, Jamie Maschler ’11, Harold Belskus ’12, Tommy Whiteside ’12, Joe Eck ’12, Martin Strand ’11, and Amanda Fitch, along with special guests, recorded their first full-length album, The Legend of the Great T.D. Bingo. Their 2015 engagements included the opening the Alumni Bash and playing at the Triple Door.

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ALUMNI NOTES 1960s Dion Zwirner ’68 exhibited work in From the Garden’s Edge at Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle.

Photo by Santiago Felipe

Baroque pop band Tomten, consisting of Brian Noyes-Watkins, Jake Brady ’11, Dillon Sturtevant , and Robert Bennett ’11, released their second fulllength album The Farewell Party on August 14, 2014 at The Crocodile. Former member Lena Simon ’09 played on the album. SuttonBeresCuller (AKA John Sutton ’02, Ben Beres ’00, and Zac Culler ’00) exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, Kelsey Lee Offield’s ’09 GUSFORD gallery in Los Angeles, the Yellowstone Art Museum, and participated in the Jentel Artist Residency. They were recently commissioned by the Seattle to create a free-standing installation activated by solar energy that will serve as a gateway to the new Capitol Hill Arts District. Self-described as operating on the boundary of cohesion and chaos, Newaxeyes released a 12-inch LP, Assange/Church. The band consists of Tyler Coray ’13, Bret Gardín, William Hayes ’13, and Jordan Rundle ’13.

1970s Alumna Colleen Atwood, who has already won three Oscars for her contributions to costuming, was nominated for the 11th time this past season as a result of her work on the major motion picture Into The Woods. In 2014 compositions by Karen Thomas ’79 were performed by Cathedra (Washington National Cathedral), Chicago a capella, Chorus Austin, University of Michigan Mens’ Glee Club, Northwest Girlchoir, Vox Femina, Opus 7, McMaster University, Cornell University, University of South Carolina, Amuse Singers New York, Greenwood Singers Kenya. Karen also released Celtic Christmas, a CD recording with Seattle Pro Musica. Dean Spear ’78 published a new book, All Steps Considered, which is a compilation of his dance reviews, interviews, tributes, and articles.

1980s After six years with Cornish as the College’s chair of the Music Department, alumnus Kent Devereaux ’82 has gone on to become President of the New Hampshire Institute of Art. JW Hanberry ’82 was among the determined songwriters who successfully completed this year’s February Album Writing Month, wherin participating artists are challenged to write 14 songs in 28 days.

Bradley Taylor ’12 and Lauren Iida ’14 teamed up for a collaborative show, The Exhibition on Observations of Eliptical Imaging and Quantum Stratigraphical Content, which appeared at Seattle’s Café Vita and Wheelhouse Coffee in 2014. In March 2015, Amy O’Neal ’99 and long-time collaborator Reggie Watts took to the floor at Velocity Dance Center as guest artists for New Yorkbased The Dance Collective, and threw down their own contributions for this performance/dance party extravaganza.

Kathleen McHugh ’82 had work in Focus Latin America: Art Is Our Last Hope at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Cavellini Festival in 2014. She is also working on are a response to Surviving Deconstruction Authorial Intention Revisited in collaboration with the author; art and literature in response to Migration and Exile in Our Rapidly Changing Global Context in collaboration with Eugenia Toledo; and a global artistic research project to gather feedback from artists about their experiences of artmaking and curating within the framework of cultural citizenship. The still relatively new Bainbridge Island Museum of Art exhibited a retrospective of Gayle Bard’s ’83 work entitled Gayle Bard: A Singular Vision. Actress, singer, and vocal coach Susan Carr ’85, already the author of numerous plays and screenplays, was excited to announce the publication of her first novel, The Ballad of Desiree.

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Doolittle Helps Find Connection Between Bird Song and Human Music Researchers from the Cornish College of the Arts, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, and University of Vienna, Austria, demonstrated that the songs of the hermit thrush follow principles found in much human music. This research is the first to demonstrate note selection from the harmonic series occurs in the “song” of a non-human animal. The study, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (PNAS), is particularly relevant to the ongoing nature/nurture debate about whether musical traits, such pitch relationships, are biologically or culturally driven. “We need to be careful not to just project sound structures we are familiar with on to animal songs,” said Emily Doolittle, an assistant professor of music at Cornish College of the Arts who worked on the study. “But if we avoid looking at pitch relationships entirely, than we are missing out an an important way to understand the songs.” Since the early 20th-century, various scientists have claimed that hermit thrush song follows the same principles found in human musical systems, but these were anecdotal reports which were not supported by rigorous analysis. However, the new study released shows that this North American songbird does use notes that are generally related by simple integer proportions similar to that found in human music. Moreover, the notes used in each song are mostly drawn from the same overtone series, meaning that they are multiples of the same underlying frequency. “A number of my compositions are inspired by bird or other animal songs, in various different ways,” said Doolittle. “I’m fascinated by the fact that bird and other animal songs are created by other living beings that are making choices about what they sing, but with minds so different than our own. Writing music based on animal song is, for me, a way of trying to understand the world from a perspective completely different than my own.”

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WATTS BRINGS INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE TO DANCE

n April, Dr. Victoria Watts was named the new chair of the Dance Department. She will replace Chair of Dance Kathryn “Kitty” Daniels, who is retiring in May after 29 years at Cornish (see page 40 for more on Daniels’ legacy).

“We’re all sad to see Kitty leave,” said Moira Scott Payne, Cornish’s Provost and Vice-President of Academic Affairs. “Her impact on the Dance Department, and on so many professional dancers working in Seattle and around the world, is immeasurable. It took an international search to find an appropriate replacement. During her visit to Cornish earlier this spring, everyone was excited to hear about Vicki’s many research projects and her ideas for building on Cornish’s rich tradition of dance education in the 21st century.” Currently lecturing at University of South Australia, Watts holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, an MFA in Dance (with a concentration in multimedia technology) from The Ohio State University, and a BA (Hons) Dance in Society from the University of Surrey. Her current research includes collaborative work with roboticists at Technologische Universiteit Delft exploring non-verbal communication between humans and machines; an enquiry into the effect of body-based methods and practices of teaching on students’ dispositions towards math; and ongoing exploration of professional learning models for teachers in relation to dance practice with older adults. “This will be an amazing opportunity to work with a highly talented team of faculty,” said Watts. “I hope to maintain and strengthen the spirit of artistic collaboration, innovation, and interdisciplinary practice that were the hallmarks of Nellie Cornish’s founding vision for the school.”

TOM BAKER STRIKES NEW CHORD AS INTERIM CHAIR OF MUSIC

ALUMNI NOTES 1990–1996 Brendan Fraser ’90 stars with Bill Paxton and Ray Liotta in the upcoming miniseries Texas Rising, premiering on the History Channel on Memorial Day. Felcia Oh ’90 came out of competition retirement to compete in and win the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF Master World Championships on November 2, 2014. This last fall, Stephanie Roberts ’90, was granted promotion with tenure at University of Missouri – Kansas City’s Graduate Acting Program. A retrospective of alumnus Dan Webb’s ’91 sculptural works, Fragile Fortress: The Art of Dan Webb was exhibited March through June 2014 at the Bellevue Art Museum.

om Baker, DMA, became the interim chair of the Music Department in January, following the departure of Kent Devereaux ’82. His first three months proved a whirlwind of activities, as he hosted a new Celebration of Song event featuring both music and musical theater students, the return of the Seattle Jazz Experience, and several Cornish Presents concerts. As he noted, this all led up to PONCHO’s busiest time of the year, with a full slate of student recitals scheduled in March and April. Baker had been a faculty member in the department since 2011 teaching composition, music theory, electronic music, and inter-arts at the College. He received his doctorate in composition in 1996 (Doctor of Musical Arts) from the University of Washington. He also holds a master’s degree in classical guitar performance from Arizona State University and a bachelor’s degree from Boise State University. Before coming to Cornish, he taught composition and music theory for 13 years at the University of Washington. “I am very excited to step into this position at what is an exceptional time here at Cornish College of the Arts,” Baker said. “The future seems open to a multitude of possibilities.” Active as a composer, performer, and music producer in the newmusic scene since arriving in Seattle in 1994, Baker also is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), and an advisory board member of the Washington Composers’ Forum. His works have been performed throughout the United States and Canada, and in Europe. His two most recent chamber operas, The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars (2006) and Hunger: The Journey of Tamsen Donner (2008), were both premiered by the Seattle EXperimental Opera and are available on the Present Sounds label. Baker also is active as a performer, specializing in fretless guitar and live electronics. His group, Triptet, released their third album, Figure in the Carpet, on Engine Records in 2012. Devereaux became the president of New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA) in January.

Manager of Store Design at Lululemon Athletica, Julia Brunzell ’92, recently completed the retail concept for the company’s first men’s only store in the Soho neighborhood of New York. Along with his work as a Senior Environmental & 3D Designer, David Kelly ’92 is serving as the editor of “all things vintage” for American Standard Time magazine. Christmastown: A Holiday Noir, a new play by Wayne Rawley ’93, won “Best New Holiday Romp” from The Seattle Times 2014 Footlight Awards. Hyla Willis ’93 was selected as the 2014 “Pittsburgh Artist of the Year” with a solo exhibition, America’s Least Livable City, and Other Works at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Hyla is an associate professor of media arts at Robert Morris University. C.S. Lee ’94 recently appeared on ABC’s much-praised new television comedy, Fresh off the Boat, and is filming the independent film Everything Is Beautiful from Far Away. Inspired by his time living in East Asia, Christopher Tharp ’95 has published his second book, The Worst Motorcycle in Laos: Rough Travels in Asia. The book is a collection of travel essays from his last 10 years abroad. Ron Rains ’96 appeared in Vanity Fair as his delightfully off-kilter character, Peter K. Rosenthal, the Head Film Critic for The Onion’s Film Standard. Ron also returned to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre for his 8th year in their production of A Christmas Carol as the beloved character Bob Cratchit. PAGE 17

YEARS OF JAZZ AT CORNISH

ALUMNI NOTES 1997–1999 The Pornographer’s Daughter, an autobiographical play from Liberty Bradford Mitchell ’97, has received glowing reviews, and could possibly have a TV miniseries adaptation in its future. Corrie Befort’s ’99 evening-length premiere of Salt Horse’s Color Field was presented by the Northwest Film Forum.

rior to leaving for his new position as president of New Hampshire

The multi-media installation, Ripple, a visual and musical piece inspired by the Sammamish River, was unveiled by Rulon Brown ’99 in August 2014.

Institute of Art, Kent Devereaux noted that Cornish’s many anniversaries in 2014/15 included the 50th anniversary of the jazz

On May 8th, 2014, Mia Rose Guilfoyle came into the world, much to the excitement of her father, alumnus Damon Guilfoyle ’99.

program. “On September 19, 1964 Cornish announced a jazz workshop by the Cornish Jazz Quintet consisting of Bob Winn, flute; Chuck Metcalf, bass; Floyd Standifer, trumpet; Bill Kotick, drums, and Jerry Gray, piano under the general direction of Stan Keen, head of the jazz studies division in the Cornish Music department,” wrote Devereaux.

Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki

Over the next two decades, the program continued, first under Stan

The Opposing Forces premiere, Amy O’Neal’s ’99 first piece where she was choreographer only, was met with acclaim and four sold-out houses at Seattle’s On The Boards. The Opposing Forces crew then hit the road, taking the work to Californian audiences. Having just joined the McMenamin’s artistic team, Greta Musland ’99, has been working with the Northwest pub and hotel purveyors on paintings for their new property, The Anderson School, opening Fall 2015 in Bothell, Washington. Lady Rizo (AKA Amelia Zirin-Brown ’99) had another fruitful year with a West Coast and international tours, a featured role at Seattle’s Teatro ZinZanni’s spring review The Hot Spot, as well as managing to capture the elusive “Edinburgh 5-Star”– in the wake of her Britannic tour.

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Keen, then under pianist Danny Lowell, a student of Oscar Peterson’s and George Shearer. By the time that the “Cornish Institute” formerly became Cornish College of the Arts, Knapp had hired Gary Peacock, Julian Priester, Jay Clayton, Art Lande, Jerry Granelli, Carter Jefferson, and Hadley Caliman. These faculty “would be instrumental in building Cornish’s national reputation in jazz,” said Devereaux. While at Cornish, Devereaux launched a festival of jazz workshops, the Seattle Jazz Experience, that offered both high school and college students a chance to work with professional jazz artists as well as attend guest artist concerts and late-night, all-ages jam sessions at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center. Seattle Jazz Experience returned to the Cornish Playhouse this March for a second stellar year, carrying on Cornish’s 50 year tradition of fostering jazz in the Pacific Northwest.

ALUMNI NOTES Photo by Daniel Sheehan

2000–2003 Liz Cortez ’00 hit the road as her burlesque alter ego, Mitzy Sixx. In Seattle, she’s performed at Emerald City Comicon’s Variant Girls Burlesque, Tuesday Tease, Silk Tease and A Burlesque Affair to Remember. For her performance in Alenda Gaedon’s The Word Exchange, Tavia Gilbert ’00 won her 5th Earphones Award from Audiofile Magazine. The 2014 Seattle Times Footlight Awards proclaimed Connor Toms ’01 “Hardest Working Guy in Seattle Theater.” Connor was in Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice at Book-It Rep, The Invisible Hand at ACT Theatre, and The Importance of Being Earnest at Seattle Shakespeare, all in the same year. New work from Fernando Mastrangelo ’02 was exhibited in a solo show NOTHING at Mike Weiss Gallery. Beethovan Oden ’02 made his Luna Stage premiere as Willie in Master Harold…and the Boys. Liz Tran ’02 was busy in 2014 with a couple of shows and installations and a residency at Babayan Culture House in Cappadocia, Turkey. Megan Hilll ’02 won the Spotlight Fellowship with The Claque and is currently Lead Artist for Target Margin Lab in Brooklyn. Mallery Avidon ’03 was one of seven artists invited to take part in the prestigious Sundance Institutes’ Playwrights & Composers Retreat in Sheridan, Wyoming. Two new plays by William Burke ’03, the food was terrible and Comfort Dogs, premiered at the Bushwick Starr and Jack in New York, respectively. Over the past year Joshua Conkel ’03 premiered three new plays, Sprawl in Seattle, The Dum Dums in Baltimore, and Okay, bye in New York and Los Angeles. Benjamin Maestas’ ’03 installation A Meeting In An Unlikely Place explored the intersection of dance and architecture at Seattle’s First Thursday Art Walk.

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis

Greg Ruby ’03 & the Rhythm Runners released their premier full-length album Washington Hall Stomp, a collection of Prohibition-era jazz classics and original works in-the-style by Greg himself. Zachary James Watkin ’03 and Marshall Trammell of Black Spirituals released their new album Of Deconstruction in October 2014. In 2014, Maya Soto ’03 was honored with the Velocity Dance Champion Award for significant contribution to Seattle dance. She was also a recipient of creative residencies at Higher Ground, 10 Degrees, and Exit Space for the creation of a new evening length work in collaboration with multi-media artist Nico Tower.

Tory Franklin ’00 conceived and brought to life Four Seasons, a window installation at 826 Seattle, that proceeeded to tell a series of tales by changing every other week throughout the year. It began in the winter with Peter and the Wolf, followed in spring with The Man Who Made Trees Bloom, then the summer’s tale of The Flying Lion, and concluded in the fall with the Northwest favorite, How Raven Brought Light to the World. Four Seasons was created with help from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and 4Culture.

Alumni Notes continue on page 36. PAGE 19

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GATH

“I feel this is the kind of show that Cornish alums live for.”

e to iate h Danc spond Cornis , Assoc and re n e s o s th a e is r d c d r e o Ha eate ts pr h, us shani they cr Cornis studen r, t is e a tality.” h Iyun A th e u t c r e to le ce b . Tog f Dan y li n o a o o r p w s o t u a s s f as ain Ferg Profes ome o oncert tcry ag nding drew s nal ou ’s fall c t, surrou r o r s ti e e te a n c ie a li n r n e n Th the r co ts o ws sto vembe ity with studen r o nal ne a e N o d ti th li e a o y n th s t db the iered a iece “in s foun ance p h prem r piece ic e h th w o , new d nd iquity ents a ry of In g the statem m Myste o fr hearin e r d o n c a s l . nd attle. usua class its sou d to Se ork as e sed in Y s n r u w c tu e is e hat I in N on r en d ea of w aching and th , Harris id ts te r n r a e e le v rview ry c summ ing e eo inte e a ve v nding id unfold a v e e h p a I s th , r in h d to Afte Cornis the he said espon nity for back to ncert],” unity r tu o e r c e o m ll p o p c fa comm e .” So th en I an o rm at th tionally uld be ally, wh fo r r a o e n e w n p g e is to nin “G t th dents s in the happe though he stu ussion at was c . “But I th is e d g it at they want [t s h in b roug meth ’s we terial th th o a h s t il is m u to n r d b in as are lives. per on Co ir own ents sh iquity w e d go dee In th tu f to s o to e ts y d er her studen l relate r Myst oup w ents materia aphy fo ook gr r b is g e o th c e e stud a r w cho of ho h danc ivate F r n is p o n r ti a o a , C aid om min by the tory,” s classro an exa ing his formed k r e, and a e n li p m n e e o r n found , you a e first o to them was th y o a ls s a t id r Id nce ouse. “ This co h Playh is n r o C at the n. o is r r Ha

Treavor Boykin as Monroe and Marquicia Dominguez as Euphrasie in Seattle Public Theater’s production of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s Slip/Shot. Photo by Paul Bestock

E DANC

Choreographer Iyun Ashani Harrison rehearses his student company for Mystery of Iniquity in the top-floor studio in Kerry Hall. Harrison is an associate professor of dance at Cornish. Photo by Mark Bocek.

PAGE 21

Image by the Vasulkas

4X3 BRINGS ICELANDIC ARTISTS TO SEATTLE AND NOISEFOLD TO CORNISH PLAYHOUSE As part of last fall’s 4x3 exhibition, Steina and Woody Valsulka spent time at Cornish talking to students and the public in a series of lectures held on campus and at the Henry Art Gallery. The Vasulkas, whose work was recently honored by a dedicated “Vasulka Chamber” in the National Gallery of Iceland, began experimenting with sounds and images in the 1970s. Collaborating with engineers like Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, they developed the Scan Processor and various electronic image processing devices. Along with other media artists of the time, they established a new form of expression in art that combined sound and imagery as videoworks. The Valsulka’s visit and the display of their works in Cornish’s Main Gallery and President’s Gallery was organized by Robert Campbell, codirector of The Institute of Emergent Technology + Intermedia (iET+I) at Cornish. As well as showing the Vasulka’s work, Campbell arranged for installations and a performance by NoiseFold, the collaboration of American artists David Stout and Cory Metcalf. Noisefold’s 21st century performances melding video art and music have been called the spiritual offspring of the Valsulkas and their concert proved a joyous conclusion to 4x3 in December at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center. Next up for iET+I will be playing host to BLACK BOX 2.0, which focuses on experimental film, video, new media art, and moving-image-based work. This festival is organized independently by Aktionsart, a new art and technology nonprofit based in the Pacific Northwest. “Cornish, through iET+I, will be the headquarters during the run of the festival in May and also providing them the use of our Main Gallery,” said Campbell. BLACK BOX 2.0 takes place from May 6 to June 7, 2015, during the 41st Seattle International Film Festival. Look for information about Cornish/ iETI events related to this festival on www.cornish.edu in May.

Imogen Cunningham’s photos return for Cornish Centennial Exhibition During last year’s preparations for the Cornish College of the Arts’ centennial celebration, Meg Partridge, granddaughter of famed photographer Imogen Cunningham, revealed that the Imogen Cunningham Trust held numerous negatives of photos taken at the college that had not been seen in public for 80 years. “In 1935, The Cornish School (as it was called then) celebrated 21 years. Nellie Cornish, the school’s founder, asked Imogen to return to Seattle to photograph the college and the students,” said Bridget Nowlin, Cornish’s visual arts librarian. At Patridge’s invitation, Nowlin went through the Cunningham Trust’s negatives. New silver gelatin prints of these photographs form the basis of A Stitch in Time: Imogen at Cornish, an exhibition in the President’s Gallery curated by Nowlin. While Nowlin was unable to pinpoint the exact date when Nellie and Imogen first met, she did find that both women lived within six blocks of each other during Nellie’s early years in Seattle. Given both women’s active roles in the Seattle art scene between 1914 and 1917 (when Imogen moved to San Franciso), it’s not unreasonable to speculate that they crossed paths well before 1935.

A Stitch in Time: Imogen at Cornish THE CORNISH CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION

Now through June 30, 2015 President’s Gallery, Main Campus Center, 7th Floor, 1000 Lenora St, Seattle, WA Framed and mounted estate silver gelatin prints from this exhibition are available for sale. For more information contact Iris Calpo, icalpo@cornish.edu, or Jill Carnine, jcarnine@cornish.edu. Proceeds from the sale of artwork benefit the Cornish Annual Fund and the Imogen Cunningham Trust.

Imogen Cunningham, 1935 PAGE 22

CORN I SH VI SI ON

NEW BUILDINGS Cornish has been in constant motion over the last decade, creating a new campus, building a new residence hall and student center, and continuing to upgrade the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center. But the College has never forgotten that its being is not defined by its real estate.

THREE NEIGHBORHOODS, ONE CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS When the 21st century started, Cornish made one of the biggest moves in its history, purchasing or leasing a number of buildings in Seattle’s South Lake Union as its new main campus. While the area was still low-rise warehouses and several car lots at the time, it wasn’t long before Seattle’s biggest tech firms swarmed into the neighborhood. Now known for being Amazon.com’s main headquarters as well as home to a host of other tech and healthcare giants, South Lake Union has become one of Seattle’s fastest changing and most exciting neighborhoods. Look out of any window of Cornish’s Main Campus Center and you’ll see highrise cranes building new offices and homes. But for all the changes, including the addition of the 20-story Cornish Commons on Terry and Lenora where there used to be a parking lot, the College also has become an important preserver of the architectural heritage of this former

As Nellie Cornish wrote of her school’s first day:

“Only I at that moment could see the school in its complete form. To me it was a living idea and rooms large or small were quite incidental to the whole scheme.” – Nellie Cornish

“garment district” by repurposing older structures. The Volker Building, constructed in the Art Deco style in 1929 and on the National Register of Historic Places, was redesigned as the Main Campus Center. Across Lenora Street, its stylistic bookend, the 1930 Notion Building, is under redevelopment. On the same block is a designated Seattle Landmark, the Raisbeck Performance Hall, built in 1915 as Norway Hall (read more about its Centennial on page 27). Meanwhile, in its original neighborhood of Capitol Hill, Cornish’s Kerry Hall, built in 1921, is undergoing a necessary facelift, with plans for new windows, outside and inside work, and other updates to this neighborhood gem. With the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, the College added a third neighborhood to its campus in 2013. This 1962 premiere performance venue fulfills Nellie Cornish’s original plan to be represented in the city’s theater district and is undergoing its own renovation (see page 26) under Cornish’s loving care. PAGE 23

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SKY DECK

Cornish Commons 2015

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lounge, and an outdoor garden (20th floor).

student facilities including laundry, fitness room,

residences (fourth through 19th floor), and

as well as living spaces (third floor), student

Housing and Residence Life and other offices

floor), new movement studios (second floor),

offices and a “living room” for all students (first

Cornish Commons will house Student Life

1921 topped off in January 2015. The new

Cornish’s first “ground up” new building since

to assume control of the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center. Far from being a revolutionary notion, a Cornish facility in the heart of Seattle’s theater district was Nellie Cornish’s original plan for the school. In 1920, there was no thought of including what is now the PONCHO Concert Hall in the school’s new building. Only when the plan to have a theater in the center of Seattle fell through was the PONCHO added.

Cornish Playhouse Renovation Project HISTORY Cornish College of the Arts finally signed a long-term lease for the historic World’s Fair Playhouse on January 2014. As part of our tenancy, Cornish is dedicated to re-vitalizing the Playhouse and transforming it into a state-of-the-art performance venue. WHO BENEFITS Not only will Cornish students benefit from these updates, so will the over 38 non-profit groups that have used the space since Cornish took over its management. One major development of Cornish Playhouse’s renovation and expansion is the increased use of The Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff Studio Theater (formerly known as the Cornish Playhouse Studio). This space already has hosted fringe theater, dance, and music groups as well as providing an excellent training ground for Cornish students. The renovation is split into four phases: 1 Safety Updates 2 Catwalk Construction 3 Equipment Update 4 Lobby Upgrade As of July 2015, we will have completed two of the four phases. We look forward to serving the community with a refreshed and renovated theater in the years to come. For more information about the Cornish Playhouse or our renovation project, please visit www.cornish.edu/playhouse or call the Office of Institutional Advancement at 206.726.5064

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“We convinced the building committee the new plant must include a theatre. It was first decided that it would be downtown. However, after several months, the committee told me that the idea of a downtown theatre would have to be abandoned.” – Nellie Cornish

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis

THE CORNISH PLAYHOUSE AT SEATTLE CENTER Two years ago, the College began

Photo by Chris Bennion

CORN I SH VI SI ON

CORNISH CORNISH COLLEGE COLLEGE OF OF THE THE ARTS ARTS CELEBRATING CELEBRATING YEARS YEARS

Raisbeck Performance Hall Turns 100 FORMER NORWAY HALL HOME TO NEW THEATER ARTISTS

n 1915, as Nellie Cornish was teaching her first class of students at the brand new Cornish School of Music on Capitol Hill, a wood-frame building was being erected on the corner of Boren and Fairview avenues in Seattle’s Cascade neighborhood. Designed for the Sons of Norway fraternal organization by architect Sonke Engelhart Sonnichsen, Norway Hall was built in traditional style, a wonderful confection of carved ornamentation, turned columns, and sawn balustrades topped with a gabled roof.

1916 Newspaper program of events at the Hall.

One hundred years on, the structure has become Raisbeck Performance Hall, housing the Ned & Kayla Skinner Theater, where students at the Cornish College of the Arts study the arts of theater. Once Cornish’s major performance venue, with the College’s acquisition of the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, Raisbeck has been freed for more intimate productions, often student-initiated. Ironically, although a centerpiece of Cornish’s new campus, Raisbeck is nevertheless the College’s oldest structure. It was built five years before the historic Cornish School building in 1920, now known as Kerry Hall. Before it was purchased by Cornish and after the Sons of Norway moved to a new hall in Ballard, the building was the site of several dance clubs, including the Timberline. Fans of the classic TV drama Twin Peaks know that certain roadhouse scenes were filmed in Raisbeck.

Centennial Lab Reimagined FUTURE HOME FOR PROGRAM INNOVATION AND IMMERSIVE LEARNING

ne of the largest projects being undertaken as part of Cornish’s Master Plan to renovate and expand existing facilities to serve the evolving needs of a growing student body is the Centennial Lab. This addition to the Cornish campus—so-titled for Nellie’s Cornish’s middle name—follows Nellie’s vision of flexible, interlaced learning. As the most physical expression of the Cornish creative vanguard philosophy, Centennial Lab will provide open and flexible studio spaces for immersive student learning, communal art, and spaces for public connection. The workshops will be areas where all manner of materials can be fully utilized and explored. Key to this plan is that Centennial Lab doesn’t just anticipate specific changing needs—rather this part of the campus is designed to evolve as collaborative arts evolve during Cornish’s next century. PAGE 27

Cornish Gala Raises Record Sum MORE THAN $900,000 GIVEN

SOLD-OUT EVENT FEATURED CORNISH GRADUATE MARY LAMBERT Cornish College of the Arts celebrated exactly 100 years of existence on November 14, 2014, with a Centennial Gala held at the Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St. The sold-out event attracted a record number of alumni, past and present trustees, and Seattle notables. Graduate Mary Lambert ’11 headlined the entertainment in the grand gold-and-white theater that originally was built in the silent movie heyday. Overlooking the formally attired crowd, all black tie and ball gowns in normally laidback Seattle, Lambert remarked, “You look so beautiful out there. Like the Titanic. But we’re going to be OK.” From her new record, Heart On My Sleeve, Lambert and her band sang an expanded version of the hook she wrote for Macklemore’s “Same Love” called “She Keeps Me Warm,” followed by “Body Love,” and “Red Lipstick.” After graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Music from Cornish, Lambert was nominated for a Grammy and signed to Capitol Records. Other performances included Cornish theater students singing “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the Tony-award winning musical Hairspray which originated at the 5th Avenue Theater (the theater’s artistic director and executive producer David Armstrong was one of the many theater luminaries in the audience). Cornish dance students performed an exerpt from Absinthe Extatique by local choreographer and Cornish faculty member Wade Madsen. A specially

PAGE 28

prepared video created with the help of ADF+M students and faculty not only celebrated the College’s past but heralded its next century. In honor of Cornish’s 100th anniversary, long-time supporters James and Sherry Raisbeck, joined by Carl and Renée Behnke, started the “Raise the Paddle” portion of the evening with each couple pledging $100,000. Additional donations, including sponsorships and matching funds, brought the final evening total to more than $900,000 to benefit Cornish’s student scholarship funds. “Throughout its history, Cornish has been defined by innovation, risk-taking, and creativity,” Cornish College of the Arts President Nancy J. Uscher told the assembled guests. “What is profoundly exciting in 2014 is that Cornish is expanding the thinking about the role of the artist in contemporary society. And we are leading the arts higher education community in this transformative work.” Before and during a supper catered by Tom Douglas Catering, guests also were entertained by animation performance artist Miwa Matreyek, and several student performances. Actor and Cornish faculty member Timothy McCuen Piggee acted as the host for the evening. A special surprise guest, Seattle’s Mayor Ed Murray, proclaimed November 14, 2014, as Cornish College of the Arts Day in Seattle. A similar announcement was sent to the Gala by Governor Jay Inslee in recognition of Cornish’s contributions to Washington State. Letters of congratulations were received from Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and King County Executive Dow Constantine.

Cornish dance students perform an excerpt from “Absinthe Extatique” (choreographer Wade Madsen, costumes by Cornish graduate Kylie Hopkins ’14), a jazzy number that would have delighted college founder Nellie Cornish. Photo: Vivian Hsu, Team Photogenic

COLLEGE COLLEGE OF OF THE THE ARTS ARTS CELEBRATING CELEBRATING YEARS YEARS

Cornish students sing “You Can’t Stop the Beat” (Hairspray) for fans of the Northwest’s oldest visual and performing arts college. Photo: Heather Curbow, Team Photogenic

SURPRISE GUEST

Mayor Ed Murray wishes Cornish College of the Arts a very happy 100th birthday and proclaims November 14, 2014 to be “Cornish College of the Arts Day!” Photo: Vivian Hsu, Team Photogenic

Cornish graduate Mary Lambert ’11 performs for her alma mater’s 100th birthday. Photo: Vivian Hsu, Team Photogenic

A capacity crowd raises the paddle to support scholarships at Cornish College of the Arts. Photo: Heather Curbow, Team Photogenic

Cornish supporters Renée Behnke, Carl Behnke, James Raisbeck, and Sherry Raisbeck. Photo: Duell Fisher, Team Photogenic

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A Deep History with Cornish FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE STODDARD-EVANS-MONSEF FAMILY AT CORNISH

By Maximilian Bocek Cornish has been part of many lives and many families in its century of existence; it’s hard to find one with a richer involvement than the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Mary Meyer Stoddard.

any families have been involved with Cornish the many periods of the school’s existence, and a few of their children went on to become stars. Perhaps there are families who have been going to Cornish from the very beginning, generation after generation, perhaps a number of them. The College only knows of one for sure: the StoddardEvans-Monsef family. Paula Evans Monsef wrote recently that her family has a “deep history with Cornish. … Our connections have spanned generations.” Not only have they been with Cornish all the way, but the latest member, Paula’s son Ramiz Monsef ’02, has been making a name for himself in the theater. In the first years of the twentieth century, a piano in the family parlor was the television of its age. Everyone wanted to have one, and learning to play was seen as an important garland to an education. Mary Meyer Stoddard was a mother determined, it seems, to provide a musical education for her children. She found a way to pay for lessons by setting up shop in the new Cornish School building at Harvard and Roy. “My grandmother opened a lunch concession in the basement of the original building, probably in the 1920s,” Paula Monsef relates, “where she sold sandwiches made, no doubt, with her homemade bread, to pay for piano lessons for my uncle and my mother.”

Back row, far left, “Mamie” (Mary) Stoddard; back row, far right, Mildred “Betti” Evans; next to her is William Evans and next to him, his mother, Flora Evans. Front row, far left, David; far right, Judi and Paula; the other two people are friends.

Her uncle, Orren James Stoddard—Jimmie—didn’t just study piano at Cornish, he studied with the man whose ideas and educational theories inspired Nellie Cornish as she set up the school, Calvin Brainerd Cady. Before his death in 1928, Cady was in a sense Nellie’s guru, and with her, set the school’s agenda. Cady taught for many years at Cornish, but mostly teacher-training classes. The family remembers that Jimmie was something special on the piano, and if he garnered the interest of Cady enough to have private lessons with him, he must have been. Cady was important enough that he had at least six students who traveled from California to study with him. As it happened, these students boarded with the Stoddards, who called them “the California girls.” Several of them remained close family friends. Paula’s aunt, Marya Marcus, née Mary Stoddard, took one of the most intriguing classes ever offered at Cornish, puppetry. Under Nellie Cornish,

PAGE 30

the school was never shy about experimenting with education. Classes in puppetry were the brainchild of Theater Department co-founder Ellen Van Volkenburg in 1917. Marya took the class sometime in the mid’30s when she was eight or ten years old. It’s easy to see how a class in marionettes would be useful in theater. The students were assigned a play to make into a puppet show, and then they assigned one of the characters. The children designed and built their own puppets of their assigned character. “We had to make them from scratch,” says Marya. “The puppet I created was Popsy, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The class performed the piece at the end of class. “We had to learn lines,” Marya remembers.

Mary Stoddard with Mildred (L) and Orren James (Jimmie, R)

Marya’s sister and Paula’s mother, Mildred Stoddard Evans, was the first member of the family we can be sure earned a degree from Cornish. “My mother completed a post-graduate piano pedagogy program there about 1969,” says Paula. Mildred Evans passed away only last year. Paula and her sister, Judi Evans Dunham, took classes here. “My sister and I both had ballet classes at Cornish,” says Paula. “I still remember my recital at age four wearing a pink tutu—my last. Nine or ten years later I began ’cello lessons with Don Bushell.” Bushell was for many years the conductor of the Seattle Philharmonic.

Jimmie Stoddard, sitting on the steps of his parents’ home on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, a few blocks east of Cornish.

There was a very “family” feeling to ballet recitals at the school. “As I recall, our mothers sewed the costumes for most of us, from fabric purchased by Cornish,” remembers Judi. “I remember my mother wrestling with yards and yards of yellow tulle at her old treadle sewing machine.” Ramiz found a home in the theater quite early on, as he remembered in a feature on him in Cornish’s Insight magazine in 2012, but music was all around him. Paula and Mike Monsef lived in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Paula, with her background in music, worked for Bread and Roses, a progressive music organization, and as a boy, Ramiz was often with her. “I grew up around Chris Isaacs, Wavy Gravy, Ken Kesey, John Lee Hooker, and

Judi (back) and Paula (front) Evans, ages 8 and 2. Judi was taking ballet classes at Cornish. Paula was still too young.

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The Doctor (Ramiz Monsef) diagnoses Koko (Cristofer Jean) with the plague and he is sent to die, as the Rooks and band members (Ensemble) look on in The Unfortunates. Photo by Jenny Graham. Courtesy Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Unfortunates poster image with Ramiz Monsef. Courtesy Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Bonnie Raitt,” remembered Ramiz. “I didn’t understand who they were when I was hanging out with them.” When it came time for son, Ramiz, to choose a college, the family put their heads together. “When seeking a great ensemble theatre program for Ramiz,” recalls Paula, “mention of Cornish in a college booklet caught my eye. It said there Cornish ‘is a jewel of a school.’” Mildred was certain which school Ramiz should choose. “My mother kept telling me, ‘Ramiz should go to Cornish!’” Later, Ramiz finally came to the same conclusion. “The decision to go there was kind of an impulsive one, but there was something telling me it was the right one.” “I think you know he believes it was a great decision,” says Paula. “I know the lessons there have imbued him with confidence, courage, and a willingness to take on new challenges with integrity and spirit.” Once at Cornish, Ramiz threw himself into his theater classes, which he continues to value for their emphasis on collaboration. His energies at Cornish were absorbed by his acting classes, but in his spare time, he found collaborators to make music as well. When he graduated in 2013, he headed to New York getting work on a number of projects and forming a rap group, 3 Blind Mice. When Ramiz was hired for the company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he pitched the development of a new theater piece for himself and the other two blind mice, a dark rap/blues fantasy musical about a group of soldiers awaiting execution, called The Unfortunates. OSF liked the idea and the play was workshopped into existence, receiving, at last, a full staging. Now it’s time for the next step, the all-important second production. It’s slated for the American Conservatory Theater’s 2015-16 season in its new venue, The Strand Theater. Getting the play he co-wrote and performed into a production at a national leader such as A.C.T. is a big, big deal. After four generations of life with Cornish, the Stoddard/Evans/Monsef family continues to grow as artists. PAGE 32

Establishing the Hal Ryder Endowed Fund in Theater years ago this September, Professor Hal Ryder began his teaching career at Cornish College of the Arts. During that time “Hal” has had an extraordinary influence on the lives of students, faculty, and the theatrical field as a whole. Ryder has, first of all, established himself as a teacher of classical acting throroughly grounded in historical knowledge and best practices in the field. He engages students’ imaginations in the work, empowers them to make sustained and embodied choices in heightened text, and is respected for the standards he holds them to in his classes. His international experience as a teacher and director have proved to be an invaluable resource for his students and fellow faculty members, providing valuable perspective about the state of the art form and the education of artists. His experience as an administrator has been an asset to the Theater Department and the College in a variety of capacities, ranging from time chairing the department to his leadership in committee work. Ryder has always been a strong supporter of the Theater Department’s philosophy of educating the “whole person”— not just artistic skill sets. He has been an advocate for support services for the physical and mental health of our students, and a source of wisdom and guidance in our deliberations about the personal issues which can sometimes swamp a college student’s ability to learn.

Brendan Fraser ’90 visits Hal Ryder’s Restoration class.

Ryder exemplifies the Cornish idea of “artist-citizen-innovator” in his own career, as someone who has done socially relevant work with under-served populations and successfully run his own entrepreneurial businesses while teaching here. The ultimate value of our faculty is that they are both gifted educators as well as working artists, who provide our students not only with a first-class educational experience but also with a professional networking opportunity. Many of our graduates have gone on to work with Ryder in the field. As Ryder prepares to retire, Cornish College of the Arts is preparing a campaign to raise $100,000 to honor Ryder and his influence on hundreds of theater artists, establishing the Hal Ryder Endowed Fund in Theater. Proceeds from this endowment will be used at the discretion of the Theater Department Chair to support guest directors and guest lecturers in perpetuity. To discuss how you can help establish the Hal Ryder Endowed Fund in Theater, please contact Chris Stollery, Major Gift Officer, at 206.726.5052 or by email: cstollery@cornish.edu.

In Pakistan with members of Young Tribal Voices

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FEBRUARY 13, 2015

A CEDAR SUEDE

Photos by Winifred Westergard

PAGE 34

CORNISH CORNISH COLLEGE COLLEGE OF OF THE THE ARTS ARTS CELEBRATING CELEBRATING YEARS YEARS

Photobooth images courtesy of Phototainment

OPAL PEACHEY

At the ALUMNI CENTENNIAL BASH on the mainstage of the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, alumni and the Centennial Class of 2015 donned their speakeasy-inspired garb and danced the evening away. Alumni acts A Cedar Suede, Maiah Manser, and host Opal Peachey ’04 provided the entertainment and reminded the recordbreaking crowd to “party like it’s 1914!” Thanks to everyone who came out and helped make the evening something special. See you at next year’s Alumni Bash on Friday, February 12, 2016.

MAIAH MANSER

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ALUMNI NOTES 2004–2005 Bianca Cabrera’s ’04 company Blind Tiger Society premiered at The Garage in San Francisco. The company has been awarded the Fleishhacker Opportunity Fund and premiered a dance at the ODC Dance Commons. At the end of September 2014, Leah Cloney-Matthes ’04 packed up and moved back to the United States, where she can now be found working at New York’s Public Theater. This last fall, Rachael Ferguson ’04 and her bandmates announced that “locomotive punk” group NighTraiN would be going on an indefinite hiatus. Their last show was played on October 25, 2014 at the LoFi Performance Gallery in Seattle. Back in March 2014, Adam Grano ’04 was hired as the art director and lead designer for San Francisco based Zest Books. Among her more recent activities, Opal Peachey ’04 has appeared in productions at Café Nordo, starred in the cabaret Seattle Vice, and hosted the Alumni Centennial Bash at the Cornish Playhouse (see page 34). Elisheba Johnson ’04 was elected to the Emerging Leaders Network advisory council of Americans for the Arts, the leading organization for advancing the arts and arts education in America. Field Visits for Chelsea Manning, a new film by Lance Wakeling ’04, premiered at the Brookyln Art Museum. Kate Walker ’04 is completing her MA in Psychology with a focus in dance psychology while continuing to teach at the Booker T. Washington Arts High School in Dallas.

MULTIPLE CHANGES BACKSTAGE AT PERFORMANCE PRODUCTION

he 2014/15 academic year truly became the changing of the guard at Performance Production. Longtime chair Dave

Tosti-Lane, who shepherded the department since 1992,

stepped down in December.

In January, founding Performance Production faculty member Ron

Erickson, who had taught for more than 30 years at Cornish, and associate professor Greg Carter took over as interim co-chairs while the college completed a national search for a worthy successor to Tosti-Lane. Following on-campus presentations from the candidates to Performance Production staff, faculty, and students, Denise Martel was named Chair of Performance Production in March. Martel most recently worked as associate production manager of Seattle Children’s Theatre. She also was a festival producer and associate producer at Village Theatre in Issaquah, Washington. “I am delighted to have Denise take this position,” said Provost and

Noah Bell-Cruz ’04 welcomed the arrival of twin boys in November 2013, rebranded Seattle’s iconic Pike Place Market in 2014, was published in Rockport’s Logo Lounge 8 for the Rival Fitness and The Lookout Resort logos, and was featured in How magazine’s 2014 trend report for the Hive logo.

Vice President for Academic Affairs Moira Scott Payne following

Three of Dave Edgar’s ’04 paintings from the HMMWV Landscape Series entered into the permanent collection at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. More of his worked appeared in Tinman: The Heart of Painting, at the Gretchen Schuette Gallery of Art in Salem.

Martel holds an MFA in Theatre Technology from the University

Timothy Lynch ’05 performed an evening of dance at Seattle’s Broadway Performance Hall and presented his final season with Seattle Dance Project, before moving to Ohio to become Director of the BalletMet School. Josh Rawlings ’05 along with his bandmates in Industrial Revelation won the 2014 Stranger Genius Award in Music. Additionally, Josh and the rest of The Teaching earned a 2014 Grammy Award nomination for their collaboration on BomBom, part of rapper Macklemore and producer Ryan Lewis’ award-winning album, The Heist. PAGE 36

the announcement. “She brings Cornish a wealth of real world and academic experience, something that has always been important to our Performance Production department.”

of Illinois and a BA in Fine Arts/Drama from St Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont. She was a senior lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, a faculty technical director at Stanford University, and a faculty technical director at San Francisco State University. While in Austin, she served as the resident stage manager for the American Repertory Ensemble, a contemporary ballet company. “Greg and Ron have made this a seamless transition,” said Scott Payne, “and all the Performance Production faculty, staff, and students gave us great feedback during the search about how they wanted to see this department develop under Denise’s leadership in the coming years.”

ALUMNI NOTES 2006–2008 Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle has acquired the pioneering LxWxH Gallery from alumna Sharon Arnold ’06 and brought her on as a partner and director. Roq La Rue is looking forward to how Sharon can expand and enrich its curatorial scope. Casey Curran ’06 was selected as the winner of the 2014 City Arts Fall Art Walk Awards for his piece Pale Shadow. In 2014 Michael Owcharuk ’06 was the pianist for The Billy Strayhorn Project, Music Director, Composer, and musician for Book-It’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Composer and Sound Designer for James Lapan’s 25,000 Posts. Don Darryl Rivera ’06 continues to delight audiences as the villainous henchman Iago in Disney’s Aladdin on Broadway. Pilar Villanueva ’06 lives in Madrid, Spain and is currently choreographing a new work translating in to movement what people write to her through socials networks. She is also touring a dance based on Bach´s Variations. Seb Barnett ’06 showed work in group and solo shows in 2014 ranging geographically from Vancouver, BC, to Seattle to Port Townsend, Washington.

Both Erickson and Peter Guiles will retire this semester. Along with his work at Cornish, Erickson is well-known in Seattle for his work as a costume design area head and designer for numerous productions. Guiles was instructor for the Production For Actors’ class, TD of numerous opera and theater productions, and instructor for the video production class.

Carl Brondsen ’92 is collecting a “Cornish Book of Memories” from alumni to present to Erickson and Guiles. “You can email items directly to me at the Costume Shop email, PPcost@cornish.edu,” said Bronsden, who is Costume Shop Supervisor for Cornish. “Please put ‘Cornish Memories’ in the subject line. Additionally, we would love any memories of our other recently retired faculty member, Karen Gjelsteen, and chair Dave Tosti-Lane that you’d like to share.” Performance Production will be toasting graduating seniors and retiring members of the department during their senior portfolio review and traditional “Mothers’ Tea” on April 29 at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.

Ezra Dickinson ’07 appeared in the first season of the campy web series Capitol Hill. He also participated in the 2014 City Art’s Genre Bender with collaborator Shaun Scott. Congratulations to Elizabeth Guerrero ’07 on her promotion to Design Studio Manager at San Francisco-based interior design firm, Studio O+A. Last May, Tai Shan ’07 released her second full-length album Living Fiction, a collection of songs inspired by some of her favorite books. IMPulse Circus Collective boast among its founding members Chinese Pole climber Reed Nakayama ’07. IMPulse was recently seen at Seattle’s Moisture Festival as well as other venues throughout the NorthWest. Work by Redd Walitzki ’07 was exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Miami. Diana Huey ’08 received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Leading Actress for her performance in the title role of Miss Saigon at the Signature Theatre in Washington, DC. On November 24, 2014, the final show at Sierra Stinson’s ’08 Vignette’s, the improvised apartment gallery at El Capitan in Seattle, took place. After earning a great deal of attention for her work with Vignettes, Sierra looks forward to its next iteration as the Vignettes Collection, which will focus on exhibiting and selling art online, accompanied by artist interviews and studio visits in and outside of the Pacific Northwest. PAGE 37

ALUMNI NOTES 2009–2011 Teaming up with conceptual artist C. David Ingram, alumna Hanna Benn

’09 presented new collaborative work at the 2015 City Art’s Genre Bender, along with other area artists. Maiden, Mother, Child & Crone, a solo exhibition of Aleah Chapin’s ’09 paintings, made a real splash at Flowers Gallery in London. She also participated in the group show Artist’s Gaze: Seeing Women in the 21st Century at Sirona Fine Art in Florida. Anna Conner ’09 conducted a creative residency with her company Anna Conner + Co. at Seattle’s Velocity Dance Center, choreographing for the Bridge Project and performing in Chop Shop: Bodies of Work. The company participated in the 2014 OTB Northwest New Works and The Garage in Greece, and was featured in Kaltblut magazine. Anna was chosen for a residency at Ponderosa Dance in Germany. She premiered he new work LUNA at Velocity Dance Center in March 2014. Photo: April Staso

It’s been a big year for Katie Kate (AKA Kate Finn ’09) with the release of her second album, Nation, as well as interviews and reviews in numerous publications such as Boxx, Stereogum, New Noise, and City Arts magazines. Complex Candy, a solo exhibition by Dorielle Caimi ’10 appeared at GUSFORD gallery in Los Angeles. Her work was also shown at a group exhibition in London and at Sirona Fine Art in Florida. Julia Camp ’10 was recently hired as an Animator at REI, Inc. Among those few who received a Great Performance commendation from the 2014 Seattle Times Footlight Awards was Cornish’s own Samie Detzer ’10. Dance magazine named two Cornish alumnae among their “25 to Watch” – two years in a row! Danielle Hammer ’11 was selected in 2014, and Kate Wallich ’10 made the list in January 2015.

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Kelly McDonald ’10 was the Costume Designer for the Seattle premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish at ArtsWest. Big Trees Stir Memories. Live Water Heals Them., an audio-visual installation created by Tim Smith-Stewart ’10, captured the ritual of grieving for friends lost and alive at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival. Kate Wallich ’10 premiered a new evening-length work, SuperEagle as part of Velocity Dance Center’s 2014 Made in Seattle with her company The YC. The company attended Springboard Danse Montreal, conducted a residency at MANA Contemporary through Karole Armitage in New York, and performed at the Rauschenberg Project Space. Kate was a Seattle magazine Spotlight Award Winner, performed at The Stranger Genius Awards, and much more. Markeith Wiley performed the beginnings of his solo work, Self Titled Mixtape at Seattle International Dance Festival. At the end of each night, the audience voted for the artist they would most like to see more work from, and, combined with votes from an expert panel, one of the artists received a $500 grant. Markeith was one of the Crystal White Gaer, G. Kusnick and J. Steward Artistic Development Awards winners. Mary Lambert ’11 was nominated for a Grammy (Song of the Year), sang with Madonna, released her first full-length album, Heart on my Sleeve, toured tirelessly, and performed at the Cornish Centennial Gala. Brandon Morris ’11 is happy to annouce that as his professional life chugs along, so too does his personal–you see, Brandon and his wife Katie are expecting a baby in early May. In addition to releasing the self-titled Kairos EP, named “Album of the Month” by Seattle Met and City Arts, Lena Simon ’11, herself was pointed to by The Seattle Weekly as a musician “that will shape Seattle in 2014.” She continues to tour internationally with La Luz. A year into her relocation to New Orleans, Mia Reade Baylor ’11 has found herself in a job that she loves. She’s the Sous Chef and photographer for a new start-up company, where she gets to do all of the things she loves while being surrounded by great people and amazing food. See some of her work at miareadebaylor.com.

ALUMNI NOTES 2012–2014 Congratulations to Stanko Milov ’12 for completing his MA in Management & Leadership with honors from Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. Chloe Allred ’13 exhibited work from her project To Be Brave: Ending Body Shame at the Hillman City Collaboratory. In 2014 Syd Bee ’13 exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and Seattle. (left) Miles Away from Home Collin Breit ’14, in addition to working as a freelancer, recently began work at Microsoft as a motion designer.

FILM+MEDIA STARTS UP AT CORNISH

ward-winning documentary filmmaker Sandy Cioffi was hired by Cornish in 2014 to develop the Film+Media section of the newly revamped department called Art, Design, Film+Media (ADFM). Like other ADFM students starting in 2014 and beyond, students spend their first year in the Foundations program, working in a variety of disciplines before deciding how they will specialize their studies. As Cioffi sees it, Film+Media is a natural landing space for the performing arts within the visual arts—and as one of the few independent art colleges offering both visual and performing arts, Cornish is in the perfect position to offer film. Seattle also is beginning to see a new surge in film production. In 2014, more than 150 productions filmed in the downtown area, including two feature films, a major studio TV pilot, and over 80 commercial/corporate productions as well as documentaries, web series, reality television, and more, according to the Seattle Office of Film and Media. Currently, Film+Media students can follow three different interests: fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works or work in emergent technologies. Designed to be intensive, experimental, and integrative, Film+Media classes during sophomore, junior, and senior years are intended to be relatively small and to cater to a student’s individual needs. Cioffi expects students taking this track to finish with a portfolio of work that will position them for graduate studies or work in a variety of industries (entertainment, broadcasting, journalism, art, arts management) as writers, directors, producers, editors, and more.

Richard Peacock ’12 in A Chorus Line (2014) at 5th Avenue Theatre, Seattle, Washington. Photo by Mark Kitaoka, courtesy of 5th Avenue

Students and faculty work on a Centennial video outside Notions. Photo: Mark Bocek

Miles Toland ’13, currently working in Goa, India as Vaaya Vision Collective’s Curator, Artist Manager, and Artist Marketing Representative, had a solo show, Driftwood, at Vaayu Vision Collective, Goa, India, as well as a few group shows Lightning in a Paintcan in Los Angeles, at Metagnosis Gallery in Tidewater, Oregon, the Summer Solstice Sadhana Celebration in New Mexico, and F.A.M. Jam in Mumbai, India.

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Listen For It: Dance, Dance, Evolution THE LEGACY OF DANCE DEPARTMENT CHAIR KITTY DANIELS

By Rosie Gaynor

e take it for granted that Cornish dance students and alums are everywhere— dancing in companies, forming collectives, performing independently, teaching, studying, coaching, choreographing, and collaborating all around Seattle and beyond.

But that was not the case when Cornish hired Kitty Daniels 29 years ago to chair the Dance Department. Daniels hadn’t seen Cornish students in the dance classes she taught around town. So, one of the first things she did as Chair was to open the doors. “There’s a big world out there that they could be learning from,” says Daniels. “We’re always pushing students out the door.” A happy byproduct of this outside exploration is that by the time they graduate, most Cornish students have created their own authentic connections in the professional dance community. The department already had a tradition of asking the outside world in, and Daniels pushed that particular door open even wider. Nowadays, Cornish invites 15 to 25 guests to give master classes each year. Choreographers come to work with the students. And the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation supports an annual two-week residency that allows for intensive engagement with outside artists. In 2013, that meant Cornish students learned a technique not available in Seattle (Gaga) and danced Ohad Naharin’s exciting Echad Mi Yodea, an experience that established for Cornish students a commonality with the likes of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, who have also performed it. It seems a small thing, just opening the doors. But it evolved into something much bigger, with huge repercussions for Cornish students and for the Seattle dance landscape. Nowadays, as Daniels says, the fact that Seattle is a vibrant dance community both feeds Cornish and is because of Cornish.

Cornish dance students. Photo: John Lambert

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One couldn’t have planned it better. But Daniels didn’t start with some grand vision. In fact, she rejects the label “visionary” entirely, explaining that this

Breathing Room, choreography by Molly Scott, from Cornish Dance Theater’s Spring 2013 concert Photo by Chris Bennion, Design by John Engerman

change and other changes in the department during her tenure have occurred through a more organic “evolution,” a process of looking and listening for the next logical step. In retrospect, the department’s success seems inevitable, and Daniels was the obvious choice to lead the way. She is active in dance education/ medicine associations, she publishes research, she teaches master classes internationally. The Daniels we know now is, in Gail Heilbron’s words “so wellrespected nationwide for all her talents and expertise…truly an inspiration!” But keep in mind: Daniels was only in her thirties when Cornish hired her as Chair. She was a freelance performer and a dance teacher, and although she had taught in higher education for 14 years, she had never held a full-time position in academia. What she did have, however, was first-hand experience of the professional dance world she would be preparing students for, the willingness to question that world’s foundational thinking, and the ability to put aside ego as she looked for answers that could help her students. DANIELS REFUSED TO IGNORE, FOR EXAMPLE, that most dancers do more than perform. They also teach, choreograph, write, produce shows, market shows, seek funding, and, in smaller companies, function like business owners. Like most schools at the time, Cornish emphasized performance. Daniels worked to expand the curriculum to cover what she calls the “patchwork quilt” of a dancer’s life. You can feel the results when

you walk onto the third floor of Kerry Hall. There’s realism, hope, and lack of desperation in the student-centered curriculum she and the faculty have created. Yes, dance entails financial risk and hard work. But here are thriving role models; here are ideas and skills to navigate those risks. This shift, too, comes with happy repercussions: when you devote time and knowledgeable faculty to these “extra” activities, people see them not just as back-up survival plans, but as interesting, important ways of engaging with dance. Dance broadens. Students broaden. And, ironically, the entire experience can strengthen a dancer’s performance, too. Daniels had an uncommon qualification on her resume when Cornish hired her: an MA in dance kinesiology. Her interest in dance science flared up when, at 21, she switched from ballet to modern dance. “I had been a very strong professional ballet dancer and I could do a triple turn on pointe,” she recalls, “but I could not stand on one leg, put my other leg out to the side, and curve my body without falling over… Shouldn’t,” she wondered, “the technique in one form be good technique in the other?” Back then, dance culture encouraged blind obedience to a teacher’s strictures rather than listening to your own body, but Daniels listened…thought…and experimented. Years later, getting her MA, she found that classes and clinical work bore out what her own body had already told her. In clinical work with

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kinesiologist Karen Clippinger, Daniels saw clear correlations between injuries and (1) ways of dancing, and (2) areas that required strengthening. “To me that was a moment of immense empowerment,” says Daniels, “because essentially what she was saying was that you can control whether you get injured or not.” To exercise even some control over injuries is to release dancers from a host of physical, emotional, and financial hardships. Daniels has worked to empower students artistically, too—to listen to their hearts as well as to their bodies. In the senior seminar she teaches, she sees the results of the faculty’s continual push toward individuality and authenticity, and of the curriculum’s gradual progression from structure to freedom. “There are 20 people in the room going in 20 different directions,” she says. “And that is when I smile inside. Because that is what we wanted. We wanted them to figure out what speaks to them in the world of dance and to go out there and create their own pathway.” Daniels might not approve this article’s subtitle—she would point out that it’s not just her legacy. “This is a group effort,” she says when asked about the department’s achievements. “This is not mine.” Which is a beautiful thought, because it means that although Daniels retires in May 2015, the department can continue to listen, to evolve logically and organically, even without her. What better legacy is there than that?

“THERE ARE 20 PEOPLE IN THE ROOM going in 20 different directions,” she says. “And that is when I smile inside. Because that is what we wanted. We wanted them to figure out what speaks to them in the world of dance and to go out there and create their own pathway.”

Associate Professor Michele Miller coaches students on form. Photo by Colleen Dishy

Subway Stories: Dancing on the ‘A’, choreography by Iyun Ashani Harrison, from Cornish Dance Theater’s Spring 2012 concert Photo by Chris Bennion

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Kitty Daniels at Kerry Hall studio in 2006. Photo by Rick Dahms

Dreams and the Costs of Dreaming THE REMARKABLE CAREER OF DANA SAPIRO

It was the kind of career young dancers dream of. What little ballerina doesn’t dream of a major figure in dance like Robert Joffrey swooping into Seattle and whisking her off to New York to train and dance with the Joffrey Ballet? And then to dance with Alvin Ailey and Pina Bausch? This was no dream, this was the real life experience of Cornish alumna Dana Sapiro. But her skyrocket of a career came at a physical cost, which she continues to pay.

By Maximilian Bocek

• CORNISH •

ICONOCLAST

tepping off the elevator on the top floor of Cornish’s Main Campus Center with Dance Chair Kitty Daniels by her side, Dana Sapiro moves just as you’d think a dancer would, light, seemingly without effort. She is graceful and smiling, utterly charming—still possessing those qualities that made her a star. But though she doesn’t show it, a life in dance has taken its toll, left her with a lot of pain to the point of being unable even to teach. Sapiro is a model of everything a dancer can aspire to and yet her career is an object lesson in the need for safe techniques, such as those taught at Cornish. Sapiro entered the school in the 1960s to study ballet. The dance program at Cornish was at that time under the direction of Karen Irvin, an alumna of the school herself. Irvin had, it seems, come to the school with Bonnie Bird as students of ballet teacher Caird Leslie in 1927. She almost certainly lived through Nellie Cornish’s strong veer toward modern dance the following year. Unlike Bird, who made her peace with the change and went on to dance with Martha Graham, Karen Irvin seems to have stuck to ballet. When she was given the dance program to head in 1952, Cornish once again exclusively taught ballet. Sapiro’s extraordinary talent as a ballerina stood out from the start. The flavor of it can be seen in her photos from her first recital; she was heart-breakingly young, petite, lithe, graceful, and loose-limbed. She was what you would call a “natural,” and quickly shot through the class levels at Cornish. In quick succession, Sapiro moved through Ballet 1 to Ballet 2, “… and the next week I was in Ballet 3,” she recalls. “I ended up taking Ballet 4 and 5 together.” Another element of ballet she was rushed into was going up on pointe. She remembers that she was just 12-and-a-half—young enough to be figuring her age in half-years. It was not uncommon at that time for girls to begin work with pointe shoes at that age and even earlier. There was not the understanding of the dangers to the body that pointe and some other dance techniques pose. In the days before Cornish became a college, what is now called as “Prep Dance” was the entire program. All the young students at Cornish went to regular schools as well, Sapiro to John Marshal Junior High and, later, Lincoln High School. Sapiro remembers that she had ballet every day till noon, and

Dana Sapiro and Dermot Burke perform in Gerald Arpino’s Sea Shadow for the City Center Joffrey Ballet, 1971.

Dance Chair Kitty Daniels, Dana Sapiro, and President Nancy Uscher during a visit to Cornish. Photo by Mark Bocek

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then she would run off to school. The dance program included, under Irvin, a ballet company, the Cornish Ballet. In the days before the Pacific Northwest Ballet was founded in 1972, the company was ballet in Seattle. By the next year after acing Ballet 4 and 5, Sapiro was dancing with the Cornish Ballet. It was a scholarship to a summer dance program at Pacific Lutheran University that offered a new direction to Sapiro. It was there that she met Robert Joffrey, director of the City Center Joffrey Ballet and a Seattle native. Sapiro was just 17 in 1969 when Joffrey asked her to come to New York with him to enter his school. Sapiro was a native New Yorker, but her family had moved to Seattle years ago, and it was home to her. It was hard to be in the big city alone. “I was chronically homesick,” she admits. She made the other dancers a substitute family, which she says is a fairly normal thing to do when leaving home at an early age, as many dancers do. “In dance, everyone knows one another,” she says, “the world is one network.” Kitty Daniels, who was herself a young dancer in New York at the time, remembers seeing Sapiro for the first time, and even among the kind of talent gathered by Joffrey, she stood out. “I remember thinking, ‘That is one beautiful dancer,’” Daniels recalls. Given her meteoric rise through Cornish, it should come as no surprise that before long Sapiro became a company member of the Joffrey, dancing with the company till 1971. She danced in such works as Trinity, Time Cycle, Joffrey’s revival of Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table, and Gerald Arpino’s Sea Shadow. “Sapiro gives the … impression of overwhelming delicacy and fragility,” wrote the Columbia Daily Spectator of her performance in Sea Shadow. “Poised at one of the silver poles in a magnificent extension, her

uplifted arms appearing to beckon her whole body upward, Saprio creates about herself an aura of spectral beauty and utterly direct and innocent sensuality.” As wonderful as she was in the Joffrey, it wasn’t quite working for Sapiro. “My dreams of dancing with the City Center Joffrey Ballet didn’t match my own physical, artistic, and personal desires,” she recalls. “I wanted to explore other dance forms and techniques. Also, I had been plagued with injuries from the start of my career there, full-time pointe work being too hard for me.” Also, she had a destination. Alvin Ailey had worked with Joffrey, and liked what he saw in her. She moved from Joffrey to the Alvin Ailey Company. She was, as she recalls, known as “the little white ballerina” in the company. But all witticisms aside, given the mission of the company to celebrate “the uniqueness of the African-American experience,” it must have been a signal honor for her to be asked to dance with Ailey. BUT SAPIRO WAS STILL LOOKING FOR SOMETHING SHE WASN’T GETTING, and so she moved on. “My reasons for leaving were… that I hadn’t yet found the right place for myself. I had a fantastic time in Alvin’s company learning about and dancing many kinds of modern dance as well as learning more about the black experience in the US. “From Alvin’s company I went to the First Chamber Dance Company which had a fantastic and varied repertoire of both modern and classical pieces,” Sapiro says, “and a tremendously creative charismatic founder in Charles Bennett. And they were leaving New York—also a wish of mine—and moving to Seattle.”

Left, Sapiro readying for her first recital at Cornish, 1965; center, audition photo, 1967; right, her first professional job, in Seattle Opera’s Aida, 1968.

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Sapiro and what she fondly calls “her crocodiles” in Pina Bausch’s Keuschheitslegende (Legend of Chastity) for the German company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

Once in Seattle, she didn’t resettle in the city she grew up in. “I met and fell in love with a Frenchman who … First Chamber had hired to teach modern dance at their newly founded Seattle school,” she remembers. “The two of us decided to depart for Paris to create our own group. Together with three other French dancers, we created the group La Main.” Her future was in Europe, and with this group of dancers, but she was not finished exploring.

when I danced in The Green Table while in Joffrey,” Sapiro continues. “I felt that I had come full circle, and was home.” It was no accident that Bausch’s vocabulary was similar. The Green Table is the anti-war masterpiece of Kurt Jooss, and at age 15 Bausch had begun her studies with Jooss at his Folkwangschule. (By remarkable coincidence, another Cornish dancer had been in The Green Table before Sapiro, Louise Soelberg, see page 8.)

In 1980, her path led her back to the States one last time, to San Francisco. There she developed a wide variety of interests. “I worked in two places,” she says, “the San Francisco Opera—for different seasons as dancer, choreographer, or ballet mistress—and the Wallflower Order Dance Collective. Very different employers indeed! I loved the opera work because I love opera: its music, flamboyance, grandeur. And Wallflower attracted me because it was a socially and politically active group whose performances were created for fund raising purposes for different causes and which I wanted to be a part of.”

It was with Bausch’s company that the physical problems from a lifetime of dance caught up with Sapiro. “I was with Pina twice from 1977-1979, and later 1987-1990,” she says. “It was during my second time with Pina that the back pain I had been having was finally diagnosed as a herniated disc.” The pain is enough that it does not allow her to teach.

The best part of Sapiro’s career was about to begin, an opportunity to rejoin dancers she’d worked with in Paris at La Main. They had been working off an on for some time with the legendary Pina Bausch of the Wuppertal Tanztheater. Sapiro saw a work of Bausch’s that guided her to Germany. “It was love at first sight when I saw her Ipheginia auf Taurus,” she says. “And Pina’s vocabulary was similar to that which I had danced and loved

Sapiro has found she can still enjoy some kinds of dance. “I am very happily ensconced with my partner, Michel Klarenbeek, in The Netherlands,” she says. “We dance the tango. I have to be very careful not to overdo it with ambitious ideas of flamboyant Argentinian figures because my injuries bother me tremendously. But Michel and I love the movement, music and pleasure of dancing together so, step by step, we proceed.” And there are other important pleasures in life for Sapiro. “Right now I’m in Wuppertal helping my daughter who still lives here, and who has just become a mother, giving me my first grandchild!” PAGE 45

Who’s the Artist Now? By Tonya Lockyer

ur image of artists has changed radically throughout history. Today they’re often considered “creative entrepreneurs”—a model some people worry heralds the end of the artist entirely. It doesn’t.

Bach considered himself an artisan, not an artist but a master craftsman. He was a problem-solver, famously commissioned by a count to compose variations to help him fall asleep. The age of the artisan was the age of the patron, with artists as sort of feudal dependents of the wealthy. But in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Western values elevated individualism, rebellion and originality. Romanticism arrived, along with Blake and Beethoven, and the artist as isolated genius entered the Western cultural imagination. This image of the solitary artist, living on a higher plane, possessed by mysterious gifts, perhaps above the decency we expect of mere mortals, is such a powerful cultural force it still informs how we think about artists today. Throughout the last century, America built an arts infrastructure to harbor these geniuses: symphonies, opera houses, ballet companies. MFA programs sprang up to produce credentialed “professionals.” Artists competed for secure tenured professorships. In the heat of the Cold War, the National Endowment of the Arts was founded. What better way to spread the word about America as a pillar of free expression than to fund radical individualism? While we were investing in this formal infrastructure, another independent system also emerged. Artists began to create their own organizations and collectives, often focused on sharing resources, mutual advancement and community. They were de-bunking the idea of the artist as solitary and separate from society.

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MERCE CUNNINGHAM dances in Skinny Structures at the Cornish School in 1938, choreography by Cunningham, Syvilla Fort, and Dorothy Herrmann.

A MORE COLLECTIVE IDEA OF THE ARTIST began to take root in the early

20th century. Around 1913, Duchamp fixed a bicycle wheel to a stool to illuminate how the context of an object, its institutional frame, determined if it was art or not. He later said, “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone.” Just as Einstein’s theory of relativity validated the importance of the subjective experience of the observer in science, artists began to validate the importance of the subjective experience of the audience in art. In 1952, Merce Cunningham took self-expression out of the equation altogether, rolling dice or tossing coins to determine a dance’s content and structure, and the pianist in John Cage’s infamous 4'33" opened the lid and sat listening for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, inviting the audience to listen to the music of silence. Artists were becoming less interested in how things, sounds, movements, objects represent other things – and more interested in how they act in the world. They wanted to acknowledge and invite the audience into the creative process. And increasingly, they wanted to create real social change. By the time the 1990s rolled around, Rick Lowe’s “social sculpture” Project Row Houses transformed a long-neglected Houston neighborhood into a visionary public art project. A lasting arts venue and community support center, PRH activates the creativity of communities through constant collaboration with artists, local residents, architects, and urban planners. Lowe sees his art as “symbolic and poetic but it also has a practical application.” PRH is both an art project and a nonprofit organization. Seeing communities and social contexts like PRH as forms of art can be challenging for people. Artists like Lowe blur our distinctions between artist, curator, producer and entrepreneur. For some, the entrepreneurial artist signals the final triumph of market-values, a death-blow to protection and mediation for artists, a trick to get artists to fix failed social policies. But artists

John Cage’s manuscript for 4'33"

WHEN ARTISTS BRING THEIR SKILLS, PERCEPTIONS, TRAINING AND IMAGINATIONS INTO COMMUNITIES, THEY ANIMATE THE ASSETS OF A PLACE. THEY REMIND US OF WHO WE ARE, AND WHAT MATTERS TO US. J.S. Bach’s monogram

MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968) with a reproduction of the lost Bicycle Wheel of 1913.

helped manifest this world and it is part of a decades-long movement to more meaningfully integrate the arts into the fabric of life. IN 2015, THRIVING ARTISTS ARE MORE LIKE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS.

They’re not only creators of commodities and generators of experience; they’re increasingly providing value in the new economy of ideas, public life, social and community design, and the creative and cultural health of our communities. In business, entrepreneurs minimize risk to maximize reward. Artists dare to maximize risk, to create value. When artists bring their skills, perceptions, training and imaginations into communities, they animate the assets of a place. They remind us of who we are, and what matters to us. They create platforms for us to come together, and learn from each other. They inspire us to see new possibilities, imagine new futures and build things in new ways, creating a public good in which we all have a stake. I was raised in a professional ballet school, studied with Merce Cunningham, worked as an “independent” dance artist for 20 years, acquired an MFA and thought I’d become a tenured professor. Instead, I’m leading one of Seattle’s many artistfounded, artist-led cultural hubs and incubators, Velocity. I am an embodiment of how this history lives in our cultural DNA.

TONYA LOCKYER is the artistic director of Velocity, an affiliated faculty member of Cornish College of the Arts, and an award-winning dance artist working at the intersections of performance, embodiment, and social practice. She serves on the Capitol Hill Arts District advisory board and is a partner of the National Dance Project.

Just as artists in the last century questioned the hierarchy of art above life, we have an opportunity to dismantle hierarchies that can make the arts seem inaccessible and elitist, that segregate the arts by class, race and gender and create a top-down dynamic between organizations and the artists they were created to serve. We have an opportunity to bring together our artistic and entrepreneurial imaginations to more meaningfully weave the arts into the fabric of our city.

Publisher: Rosemary Jones Editor: M. Mark Bocek Art Director: John Engerman Contributing Editor: Chris Sande Contributors: Rosie Gaynor, Tonya Lockyer

This article originally appeared in City Arts and is reprinted with permission.

THEN AND NOW Mariah Davis ’15 (back) and Sage Miller ’15 “perform” with an unknown dancer costumed as a butterfly in a composite of a modern photo by Winifred Westergard and an iconic Cornish photo from the 1920s. Concept by Mark Bocek, photoshop compositing by John Engerman