Volume 49 - Issue 5

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 49 / ISS 5 / APR 2017

THE NEW JOURNAL

T N E S N O C IN THE T H G I L T O SP

The Yale Sc the perfo hool of Drama na rmance of sexua vigates l assault  1 THE NEW JOUR NAL

editors-in-chief Eliza Fawcett Natalie Yang managing editor Victorio Cabrera executive editor Rubly Bilger senior editors Elena Saavedra Buckley Jacob Sweet Oriana Tang Victor Wang associate editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Mark Rosenberg Annie Rosenthal Robert Scaramuccia Arya Sundaram copy editors Philippe Chlenski Lillian Moore-Eissenberg Meghana Mysore Marina Tinone Amy Xu

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

design editors Stephanie Barker Julia Hedges Catherine Peng photo editor Elinor Hills web developer Philippe Chlenski

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 49 issue 5 APR 2017

SINCE 1967 30

cover CONSENT IN THE SPOTLIGHT The Yale School of Drama navigates the performance of sexual assault Sarah Holder

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feature DE RE METALLICA A Connecticut Blacksmith in King Arthur’s Court Spencer Bokat-Lindell

www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

standards 4

points of departure EYES ON THE PIES — Charlie Bardey CRAFTING A PUBLIC SQUARE — Chris Hays THE BASEMENT CURATOR — Felicia Chang

12 profile

FLIGHT PATHS — Skyler Inman

Home is where the pigeons are 17 snapshot

EXPECTING AN EDUCATION — Vivan Wang

A school closing changes the landscape of teen pregnancy in New Haven 28 poems

ROOTING DOWN

SNOW ON THE AIRPLANE WINDOW — Rachel Kaufman 37 endnote

THE SCIENCE OF GETTING PAID — Marc Shkurovich

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

Dear read ers: Earlier th Journal’s is month, nearly o e gathered ditors and writers ne hundred of Th e New at the Yale , both pa the mag azine’s fi Club of New York st and present, ftieth an City to ce about ou niv r le journalism history, spoke ab ersary. We rem brate inisced o u to t day, and the challe project fo discussed ng r years to how to s es facing come. ustain ou r We also h a d the oppo Bennett II rtunit I Andy Cou ’84, who passed y to remember E rt ’83 reco away earl dward Bennett served as unted in his remark ier this year. As But just s, as a fre the publis b s h injured his efore the start o er of The New J hman f ournal. h s is p inal cord s o p h him in a w o m ore yea in an a of rehabili heelchair for the re ccident that would r, he tation, he st of his the reviv life. After leave returned al a publicatio of The New Jo to Yale and spearh year u n eaded quadriple during his absen rnal, which had ceased gic to gra ce. He b d of Benne e tt’s resilie uate from Yale, a came the first nd it is b nce, tena Journal th ec cit a him and a t this magazine co y, and love of Th ause e New ntinues to ll the work name will th h ri e ve. To h has do appear in perpetuit ne for the magazin onor y on our m e asthead. , his

We h a v versary c e so many people e to man ’69, lebration: Dan Yerg thank for our a nniand David in financial Slifka ’01 ’68, Howard New support; fo r th Andy Cou eir genero ’58 for co rt o u rial Fund, rdinating the Edw ‘83 and Anson Be s a a w Journal in hich will be used rd Bennett III Mem rd to v of directo estigative reportin support future N oew rs, who g projects h their tim e and su ave been ever g ; our board enerous pport; an dra-Buckle wit d dell, for d y, Isabelle Taft, a finally, Elena Saa h nd Spenc reaming u v er Bokat- ea reality. p the reu L nion and turning it ininto This ann sider how iversary has given u yet how m much can change s opportunity to c o committe uch can stay the s in half a century nand ame. Tod d as ever ay, about Yale to doing meaningfu we are as editorial s and New Haven.

As we we l journalism taff with th lc to the ne xt fifty ye is issue, we’re lo ome a new oking forw ars of The ard New Jou rnal.

Sincerely , Eliza Faw c Editors-in ett & Natalie Yang -Chief

P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

EYES ON THE PIES A former personal trainer brings her cuisine into the mainstream Charlie Bardey illustration stephanie barker

This past December, Mubarakah Ibrahim had a craving.

It was sudden, as cravings tend to be, but this one nagged at her for months: she desperately wanted a bean pie. But there was a problem: bean pies—a black Muslim specialty made from navy beans, the favorite food of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad—are not available in New Haven. Ibrahim, a Black, Orthodox Sunni business owner in the city, lived two hours away from New York City and the nearest bean pies. She was tempted to make the trek, but knew there had to be a better way. “I can bake,” Ibrahim thought to herself. “I can figure this out.”

Ibrahim got to work. Nine different recipes and countless family taste-tests led to a product and a custom label: a cartoon version of herself, wearing a pastel pink hijab and a magenta apron, smiling and holding a bean pie in each hand, with the business’ name, “MmmPies,” hang 4

ing overhead. Leveraging a wide network of personal connections (including a few state representatives) accrued from almost two decades of living and working in New Haven, she quickly obtained all the necessary food vending licenses.

This is how it tends to go with Ibrahim. Within weeks, whims become sustainable business ventures. MmmPies is just the latest notch in Ibrahim’s professional belt, one that has made her something of a New Haven celebrity.

She is at once a serial entrepreneur, a community leader, a fitness expert who opened Balance Fitness, New Haven’s first all women’s fitness studio, a radio show host, a motivational speaker, a business consultant, an Oprah alum (her appearance helped her gain an audience of 276,000 on social media), and a mother of four.

MmmPies, however, represents a departure for IbraTHE NEW JOUR NAL

him. In some ways, her baking business seems at odds with her previous career as a fitness expert, but she views MmmPies, like her fitness practice, as part of a larger project to help Muslim women and make Muslim identities more visible in the New Haven community. But with MmmPies, she is trying a new tactic. Instead of relying on her charismatic presence to connect with her customers in person, she is making her pies and releasing them into the world, where they will land on the tables of people she may never meet.

– In the back room of Katalina’s, a local bakery on Whitney Avenue, I watch as Ibrahim pours Tupperware after Tupperware of slippery navy beans into a massive silver mixing bowl. She rents the midsized commercial kitchen every Tuesday to bake for MmmPies. The kitchen is modest—a central metal table, baking equipment cluttered on a single shelf—and her operation is as simple as her recipe: boxes of frozen pie crusts, containers of beans, a crate of eggs, sugar. She is wearing a royal blue, floral-patterned hijab with a matching long-sleeved shirt, and she only stops chatting when she senses that the blender is drowning out her laugh.

Ibrahim grew up in a large family, the fifth of six children in a Black Muslim household in Senoia, a small town in Georgia. She tells people that her birth happened like a country song. “I was born in a house that my parents built by hand, at sunset, by the lights of a car,” she tells me, anticipating my incredulity with her laughter. “Cause it was getting dark, and they didn’t have electricity, so somebody literally drove their car to the window and shined the headlights in the room so my mother could give birth to me.”

As Ibrahim pours the beige batter into the empty crusts, she narrates her past number by number. Her pregnancy weight gain? Eighty-three pounds. Her post-pregnancy weight loss? Down from 198 pounds in February to 120 pounds by June 27. The date she opened Balance Fitness? March 14, 2007. The night a producer from Oprah called to have her on the show? Thursday, September 13, 2007. The length of the segment? Ten minutes, twenty-nine seconds.

Complementing Ibrahim’s entrepreneurial tenacity is a keen awareness of her own brand, including all its specific details.

When she gained a substantial amount of weight during her first pregnancy due to complications from a separated pelvic bone, she was determined to avoid the history of diabetes that runs in her family. After constructing an intense personal fitness regimen for 5

herself, Ibrahim caught the attention of women in her mosque for whom exercise had never felt accessible. She explained to me that a lot of Muslim women don’t exercise, “especially Muslim women who are more devout.” Within a year, at the age of twenty, Ibrahim had clients. Ten years later in 2007, she transformed that informal project into Balance Fitness. By the end of that year, she had appeared on Oprah to talk about how an Orthodox Sunni woman could be a personal trainer. As we spoke in the kitchen, she used a line I later realized came directly from her appearance on the show: “No matter where you choose to worship,” she said, “every woman wants to know how you get rid of cellulite.”

Ten years after that appearance, Ibrahim still sees clients, but she has since sold her fitness studio, pouring her energy into MmmPies. Whatever her current focus, though, she’s still known around New Haven for her entrepreneurial reflex. “I look at her and I think, ‘I’m capable, why don’t I do that,’” Celeste Valencia, one of Ibrahim’s personal training clients, told me. “I don’t know what it is, the entrepreneur gene. She’ll come upon challenges and say ‘today I learned this, and I didn’t know that before!’”

Back in the Katalina’s kitchen, I help Ibrahim unwrap around a hundred frozen pie crusts. (They are made locally, since making them herself would be financially and logistically impossible.) She fills each with batter. The pies are destined for coffee shops and supermarkets around Connecticut and Massachusetts—Edge of the Woods, Willoughby’s, Kevin’s Seafood—as well as for shipment across the country.

In recent weeks, Ibrahim has shipped pies as far as California and Texas.

MmmPies is a small company, but there’s already evidence that others share Ibrahim’s craving. A review on MmmPies’s Facebook page from Yasmeen Abdur-Rahman reads: “These bean pies remind me of The Nation of Islam and my father! I plan to order again, really soon!” But while Ibrahim wants to make bean pies accessible to Black Muslims who, like her, remember them from their childhoods, she also hopes to elevate bean pies to a place in the American culinary cultural pantheon. “I want the bean pie to have a place at the table next to the pumpkin pie and the sweet potato pie,” she says. And she wants to be the one to do it.

– Charlie Bardey is a senior in Silliman College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

CRAFTING A PUBLIC SQUARE Can art bridge New Haven’s divides?

Chris Hays

illustration stephanie barker

In an alleyway off Chapel Street, across from the New Haven Green, a massive red shape seems to float in midair. From most angles, it looks like a collection of disjointed forms painted at random across the walls of the side street and a distant, spiraling parking garage. But from one privileged perspective, at the entrance of the alley, the abstract streaks coalesce into a single form: a square poised on a vertex, with four circles cut away from its interior.

The shape isn’t just a random apparition, but rather the culmination of years of planning. In 2004, after putting together a successful light show on the Green, a group of friends and art enthusiasts formed Site Projects, a non-profit arts organization, to encourage and fund public art across New Haven. Square with Four Circles, which the organization commissioned in 2010, has become one of their most recognizable pieces: a quirky, amusing surprise for those who stumble across it. For the Site Projects team, also their work also advances a far more profound mission: bridging disparate New Haven communities through the shared experience of urban art. But can public installations, whether made out of paint or light, really deliver on that vision?

Every two weeks, Site Projects’s six-person, part-time staff meets in an ivy-covered repurposed iron foundry on Whitney Avenue to discuss their new projects. With its collaborative workspaces and open plan, their office has the atmosphere of a tech startup. A rolling whiteboard features a jumble of budgeting figures and buzzwords like “community engagement” and “outreach.” Books with snappy graphics and vague titles like Rainbows line the shelves. In keeping with their entrepreneurial workspace, the team’s vision—art as a unifying force of society—matches the grandiosity of a startup’s mission statement.

“That’s my story. Getting people together,” says Laura Clarke, Site Projects’ founder and executive director.

Clarke explains that she is motivated by the way public art 6

can transform physical spaces, making them more engaging or welcoming to passersby. More accessible and place-specific than artwork in museums or galleries, public art has the potential to engage with a broader audience and influence the lived experience of an environment.

Felice Varini, the artist behind Square with Four Circles, believes public art can augment a viewer’s perception of a physical space and the meanings ascribed to it. Flat geometric forms superimposed on a three-dimensional space can startle and captivate people who might not otherwise stop to notice the space. For Square with Four Circles, Varini says, “I wanted to create a rapport between the high walls on either side and the parking garage canvas at the center of the frame.” The abstract red fragments on the walls tie the surfaces of the alleyway together, creating a gathering place and cultural landmark where previously there existed only a drab passageway.

Site Projects has commissioned murals, light shows, and a multitude of other installations, from a laser rainbow projected from the top of East Rock to abstract sea creatures made out of balloons for the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The group’s permanent installations are almost all concentrated downtown, although there are also two murals in Westville. Occasionally, the organization hosts events like “The Science of Perceiving Color” and “Activism in Art” which bring New Haven artists and residents together for evening discussions about the aesthetics of public space.

“I think it’s particularly important for democratic societies to have these conversations across communities,” William Barnett, the president of Site Projects, said, referring to the city’s racially and socioeconomically segregated neighborhoods. “The content of the conversation is in some ways less important than the fact that the conversation exists.”

Site Projects’ goal of fostering cross-community conversations can seem vague, and staff members acknowledge that THE NEW JOUR NAL

their success can be difficult to measure. But for some, even small moments are enough to affirm the organization’s aims.

Bennett remembered hearing two strangers debate the role of art in activism on the bus ride home after a Site Projects event they had both attended. Clarke recalled seeing groups of teenagers converge on the huge lightshow they produced on the Green. “Kids on bikes would come through, eight, ten, twelve at a time,” she said. “They would stop and say, ‘What is this?’ and we would say, ‘This is art.’ They would say, ‘What is it for?’ and we would say ‘To look at.’”

With its next installation, Site Projects hopes to combat New Haven’s neighborhood divisions by transforming the pedestrian walkway under the Route 34 overpass near Union Station. The site is a lingering reminder of New Haven’s 1950s-era urban renewal programs, which cleared so-called “slum” areas in the name of modernization and highway expansion. The construction of Route 34 razed the thriving immigrant communities of the Oak Street neighborhood and displaced the area’s predominantly Italian, Jewish, and African-American inhabitants. Those residents moved to new neighborhoods that became increasingly segregated by race. Today, the underpass is strewn with litter, the concrete stained with runoff water.

Robert Greenberg, a New Haven historian and preservationist, knows the detrimental effects of urban renewal firsthand. His grandfather, a Russian immigrant, lost his business properties in the demolition of Oak Street. “Not only did they knock down buildings, they knocked out the entire community,” he said. “Urban renewal created a huge scar on the city.”

Site Projects wants to make the busy pedestrian walkway—which connects the train station and the Church Street South housing projects to the downtown area—more welcoming and navigable. The new installation, Lighting Your Way, will be an interactive light sculpture along the segment of the walkway under the industrial overpass. Site Projects plans to widen the sidewalk and install six spotlights that will create pools of light on the concrete. Motion-activated LEDs along a low wall will light up sequentially as pedestrians walk by, and notecard-sized art pieces about the history of the site, created by local high school students, will hang on the wall.

Slated for completion in March 2018, Lighting Your Way is the brainchild of Sheila de Bretteville ART ’64, a public artist, Yale School of Art professor, and self-described “citizen-pedestrian.” She first imagined the project after many walks under the Route 34 underpass, reflecting on the space’s unfriendly atmosphere and the fraught political history.

Professor de Bretteville submitted her proposal to the city, and Site Projects approached her, offering to help fund and plan the projects. “People shouldn’t have to walk through neglected areas,” Professor de Bretteville said. “It shows that the city doesn’t care.”

Of course, it’s not always simple for Site Projects to exe 7

cute its vision. Even as the organization attempts to bridge New Haven’s stratified communities, its own membership is mostly white and affluent—unlike most of the people who engage with its pieces on the street. Many of the Site Projects board members don’t live in the communities where the group’s public art is being installed, or even in New Haven at all. “We would love to get people on our board that are more representative of the ethnic makeup of New Haven,” Clarke said. “But we are much more worried about getting people who are excited about New Haven art.”

And even if Site Projects’ pieces do help make New Haven a thriving cultural destination, the group’s success is inextricably tied to gentrification––Professor de Bretteville readily acknowledged that the city only gave Site Projects permission to complete the Route 34 installation after a developer made plans to build a large-scale luxury housing complex in the area.

But as he continues to investigate the lost Oak Street neighborhood, Greenberg is optimistic that art can help New Haven return to the lively pedestrian city that it once was.

“Everything that got knocked down is getting built back,” he said. “The rainforest is growing back again.”

– Chris Hays is a freshman in Hopper College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

THE BASEMENT CURATOR A step into Yale’s underground art scene Felicia Chang

illustration stephanie barker

Benji Fleischacker, a senior at Yale, draws his bow across the cello’s strings and begins to play the opening note of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. Under dim, red-tinted light, a crowd of students gathers around him.

Some watch him with their mouths agape, but junior Brian Orozco stands with his eyes closed and head bowed, as if in prayer. Fleischacker stops mid-song and softly taps Orozco with his bow: he needs Orozco to turn to the next page of sheet music. It takes Orozco a few seconds to realize, open his eyes, and fumble to the right section.

The crowd is gathered at “The Holy Holy Chapel,” a week-long art show curated by Orozco featuring the works of fifteen Yale undergraduates. The “Chapel” is the basement of Orozco’s house on Edgewood Avenue. An intertwining network of air ducts wrapped in silver insulation hangs from the low ceiling. The walls are whitewashed, jagged bricks showing through in spots where paint has flaked off. Every available space is covered with artwork: a mix of silkscreened curtains, photos, paintings, and sculptures.

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While planning his show, Orozco was aware of the “barriers to entry” inherent to an off-campus exhibition.

However, having the art show in his building, he said, gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted with the space and curate the show from scratch. But he knew that the idea of visiting a stranger’s dingy basement off-campus could dissuade some people from showing up. “I don’t trust Yalies to come more than two blocks,” Orozco’s roommate, Ryan Mera Evans, joked a few days before the opening.

Yet around seven on a Friday night in late March, the Chapel begins to fill with people. Orozco, dressed in a lilac button-down draped over a black shirt, waits by the stairs and greets each newcomer enthusiastically. Most visitors gather into small groups that squeeze together for lack of space, chatting and sipping on Franzia or fruit punch from plastic cups as the sound of the cello floats in the background. Some slowly weave through the room, spending a brief moment in front of each piece of artwork. Others linger at just one piece, staring intently.

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Although Orozco came to Yale with the intention of majoring in Art, he felt that the academic demands of college drew him away from making genuine work and exploring issues of race and heritage. “I find myself in art classes doing assignments just for the sake of doing them, just for the sake of getting a grade,” he said. “I can’t spend four years doing that.” The limitations of the academic environment precipitated his decision to switch out of the major. His show—liberated from Yale spaces— reflects his new sense of freedom.

Orozco spent the afternoon before the show arranging and rearranging the artwork, searching for a certain “visceral reaction” that would come only from a precise presentation of the pieces. He began by creating triangular bowling pin–like formations of small plaster apples in opposite corners of the basement, as requested by the artist, junior Annie Jones. He used the only two photographs in the show as central works, arranging the other pieces around them. One, by junior Michelle Kemei, is a side profile of a black man’s face, his pink flower earring in vivid focus. The other, by senior Anna Wane, captures a foot dangling over the side of a bed. “I knew for a fact that I wanted a lot of the energy to revolve around [the photographs],” Orozco said. “I moved the image to one place and everything else followed like Tetris.”

After hanging up every piece, Orozco realized that all the artwork “to some extent explicitly dealt with race and bodies of people of color.” The two photographs both feature black bodies. A large painting depicts a black woman in repose, lips parted, surrounded by a sea of color as a metallic hand reaches towards her. Other pieces address issues of race and identity in more indirect ways. For Orozco, even the performance of Suite No. 1 in G served as a meditation on “what white music looks like and what kind of European tradition has been ingrained in my upbringing.”

Though none of his own pieces were in the show, the 9

show’s racial focus reflects Orozco’s own recent artistic path. His latest works have largely involved an exploration of his Mexican heritage: last semester, he created a photo-book that explored both his and his parents’ identity through scenes captured on his first visit to Mexico during spring break last year. “Through self- discovery and courses I took at Yale, I realized that I should look back to my own history and identity,” he said.

While Orozco sees race as the predominant theme of the show, senior He Li, whose paintings were on display, views the “The Holy Holy Chapel” in a more spiritual way. One of his paintings depicts two men walking along the sidewalk against a backdrop of clouds illuminated by bright moonlight. “Not only can [art] function as the same way as religion, but it can also lead people to spirit, to God,” he said. “The beauty of creation, the beauty of the world can lead us to what is out of the world, what is beyond the material.”

“The Holy Holy Chapel” offered its viewers a spiritual enclave and an opportunity to confront issues of race and identity. But Orozco said he had a more modest aim, too: in one, transient moment, to bring people together through art.

As Fleischacker finishes playing, the crowd claps and cheers. The audience, once silently focused on the music, disbands and reverts to chatter. Orozco ducks under a curtain in a corner of the basement. Suddenly, the opening notes of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major fill the basement again, reverberating through speakers.

The piece plays for the entire night.

– Felicia Chang is a freshman in Morse College.

THE HALAL

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FLIGHT PATHS Home is where the pigeons are

Skyler Inman

illustration catherine peng

Most mornings, Jayson Peña wakes up early and loads the back of his Chevy Suburban with pigeons.

Using his bare hands, he pulls the birds out of a white-shingled loft in the backyard of his home in Avon, Connecticut. He grabs each grey body around its midsection, his thick brown fingers wrapping easily around the bird’s stomach and tail, holding its feet in place. The air around the coop is warm and acrid with guano—pigeon droppings—but the musk isn’t quite so bad in the morning. The birds get settled in their boxes, fleshy pink feet poking in and out, feather tips flaring upwards as they adjust their wings, getting caught momentarily between the bars. Dozens of pairs of red eyes blink up at Peña as he closes the crate door. One on top of the other, the boxes go into the trunk.

THEN COMES A RUSTLE, A THRASH, AND A COMMUNAL UNFURLING: A BATTERY OF WINGS, BODIES AND TWIG-THIN LEGS BURST FORTH. Peña backs down the driveway and drives through his neighborhood before merging onto Highway 4. Today, he pulls off of the road at the Bed Bath & Beyond in Farmington, though he could just as easily stop at the cemetery off of Huckleberry Hill Road, or the grassy patch along the wide curve of Highway 177, or in the parking lot of a strip mall.

With his car engine stopped, Peña pops the trunk. He loosens the metal clasps of the bottom crate first, letting the leather flap door fall open, and for a moment, there is

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no movement at all.

And then comes a rustle, a thrash, and a communal unfurling: a battery of wings, bodies, and twig-thin legs bursts forth. When that crate is empty, Peña loosens the ties on the second, and the process repeats.

A flock of mottled grey creatures takes to the sky, circles the lot, and is gone.

Peña is in no rush. Today is a training day for the young birds, and since they’re only flying ten miles—a fraction of the length of their next race—there’s no way he can beat them back home. These are thoroughbred racing pigeons, after all: on a clear day, they can clock in an average speed of around 90 miles per hour.

Peña is a member of the Connecticut Classic Pigeon Racing Club, a loose confederation of middle-aged men living in Avon, Hartford, New Haven, and other small Connecticut hamlets. They share a love of birds and a passion for breeding them. Each man’s goal is to create, after many generations of pigeons, a bloodline whose birds are faster and stronger and smarter than the birds that came before them. They want to create champions.

But only so much can be predicted by a bird’s genealogy. Weather patterns, predatory hawks, power lines, fatigue, confusion, and other factors all alter a bird’s ability to return home. And, all else equal, much of a bird’s success relies on its training.

Pigeon races, unlike similar competitions for grounded species, have no set path. Birds from multiple lofts across a region are brought to one starting point, usually a hundred or more miles from the pigeons’ homes, and released.

From there, each bird

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charts his own way back.

Ornithologists estimate there are about 400 million pigeons worldwide, of which more than 60 million—or about 15 percent—are domesticated racing pigeons.

And rearing these 60 million are somewhere around 1.2 million breeders (or, as Peña and his cohort prefer to be called, “pigeon fanciers”). Once they are released, the pigeons’ keeper simply waits for their return. The rest is up to the birds.

Birds have fascinated Peña since his childhood. He grew up in the rural Quezon province of the Philippines during a period of martial law that began in 1972. His town was overrun with semi-domesticated free-range chickens. “Shake a can, and two or three hundred would come running out of the bushes expecting food from you,” Peña says. At night, the chickens roosted in the trees to avoid ground predators. The guttural, clucking murmur in the dark Quezon night became the white noise of Peña’s childhood. When he was seven, he asked his family for birds of his own. Their neighbors had a loft of pigeons, he mentioned to his father. Couldn’t they get some, too? Peña’s parents spoke with the neighbors, who were more than happy to share two brooding pigeons from their overpopulated coop.

But four years later, Peña’s family moved to an apartment in the crowded capital city of Manila—no more chicken trees, no more Quezon fields, and no more room for a pigeon loft.

Shortly after high school, he moved again to Guam for the island’s “party lifestyle,” where he saw the newspaper advertisement that would reroute his life entirely: Athena Healthcare, a Farmington, Connecticut-based elder care company, was looking for applicants to fill positions as Certified Nursing Assistants.

“Why not?” Peña remembers thinking to himself as he held the Sunday paper. He had never been to the mainland. Within a week, Peña told his friends he was leaving the island. No one believed him, but the next morning—carrying only his backpack, which held one change of clothes and his passport—Peña boarded a Greyhound bus that took him, along with dozens of other Filipino and Guamanian passengers, to the Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport in Guam.

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JAYSON PEÑA AND ONE OF HIS PIGEONS (PHOTO COURTSEY OF JAYSON PENA)

“But what is it that makes a racing pigeon such an object of interest to such vast sections of the population in so many parts of the world?” ponders Anthony F. Sciabarassi in the January 2015 issue of Pigeon Racing Digest. “It is my sincere belief that the answer lies very largely in the character of the bird itself. First and foremost is the bird’s own love of home.”

Kenneth Kuester, a materials assistant with Yale University’s Ecology department and a pigeon fancier himself, tells me that this homeward drive is one of the most baffling aspects of the pigeon. He’s been racing birds out of his home in East Haven since the 1970s, and says that even after almost fifty years of breeding, raising, and training them, he hasn’t figured out what it is that makes them so intent on getting home. Their desire to get back to their roost is so strong, Kuester says, that the birds will literally THE NEW JOUR NAL

lose limbs, break bones, and still return to the coop.

“Each year, I lose about 25 percent of my young birds, mostly to Cooper’s hawks and power lines,” he says.

“Sometimes they’ll return and you can see that their keel,” he motions towards his sternum, “right here, is just split in half from hitting a utility wire.” In those cases, Kuester says, the bird usually dies not long after his return. But unless the power line kills him on impact, or unless the hawk snatches him in mid-air, the bird will usually keep going, full-speed, until, exhausted, he finds his home.

Peña attests to this seemingly supernatural drive towards home, recalling that some of his pigeons have returned to the coop more than two years after leaving for a race (he identifies each bird using an ID band on their leg). Each time this happens, he is surprised: “You still remember me after two years not in my coop?” Usually, pigeon fanciers assume that the birds’ homeward pull comes from a sort of imprinting process—like a baby duck who assumes the first animal he sees is his mother. But Peña said that in one case, a bird he purchased as an adult found its way to the loft after an entire year away. Sometimes, even late in life, the birds choose a new home.

Peña didn’t intend to stay in Connecticut. When he arrived in 2000, Athena Healthcare moved him, along with the other new immigrants in his program, into an eight-bedroom home in Torrington. Peña’s English was poor, which made the job and the transition challenging, but for the first six months of his stay in America, Athena provided rent, a transport van, and $300 per week in wages. After the six months were up, Peña was told to find a place of his own.

Despite the abrupt eviction from the home, and the difficulty of saving up enough money to acquire a car and an apartment on only $300 a week, Peña felt exhilarated by the opportunities he saw in Connecticut. He applied for his green card to stay.

Not long after arriving, Peña met Kristina Guanzon, a nurse from the Philippines who had arrived in the United States a few years before, and who had made her way to Connecticut via Chicago. Like Peña, she had a round face, olive skin, black hair, and an easy smile. They fell in love.

“I traveled halfway around the world to meet you,” he remembers telling her.

In 2004, they returned to Peña’s home in the Philippines, on the island of Zebu, so that Peña could ask her 12

parents for her hand in marriage. As is customary in Filipino tradition, they were married near her childhood home. At the ceremony, Kristina and Peña released two white pigeons.

A week later, they returned to Connecticut, and Peña decided to buy his first pigeon in North America. “I think I found it on Craigslist,” Peña recalls. He drove to Massachusetts to pick up the bird and quickly began forging a

“YOU ALWAYS HOPE THEY’RE IN GOOD HANDS, THAT SOMEONE’S TAKING CARE OF THEM. THAT THEY’RE NOT DEAD. BUT THAT’S THE LAW OF THE LAND. IT’S THEIR FREEDOM.” network of fellow racers, first on Craigslist and eventually on Facebook. Since then, Peña’s friendships with other pigeon fanciers have developed to the point that he calls them a second family. “Quality friends. It’s hard to find those friends,” he says. “They’ll take their shirt off their back for you.”

Despite finding a support system in the racing community, Peña claims that his hobby did not ease his process of moving to the United States. “It was actually hard in the beginning,” he says. He needed to find a home of his own in Connecticut, and he sought a town that would permit residents to keep pigeon coops.

Fortunately, Peña’s wife, Guanzon, has always been supportive of his passion for pigeons, given the positive

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influence that pigeon racing has on his lifestyle. Instead of frequenting bars or causing trouble, as Peña claims he otherwise might, he devotes nearly all of his spare time outside the home to pigeons. “She knows where to find me,” Peña says of his wife, pausing to laugh as he reflects upon his time management. “I’ll be in my pigeon coop or I’ll be at my buddy’s where he’s got his pigeons.”

posed. A switch is flipped, the doors slide open, and a battery of birds spills out. Bodies tumble one into the next, wings thwacking onto wings, until, with a lifting motion, the birds spiral upwards, survey the land, and disperse, each making his or her own way home.

“When you let them out of the coop, they’re free,” Peña says as he watches his older retired birds waddle around on the roof of his house. “They’re pretty much on their own. If you love the pigeons, you watch for them to return. If they don’t like you, they just won’t come back to your house.” It has started to rain a little bit. “You always hope they’re in good hands, that someone’s taking care of them. That they’re not dead. But that’s the law of the land.

It’s their freedom.”

On race days, Peña waits outside of the loft in his backyard, throwing darts. Somewhere off in upstate New York, or rural Ohio, or Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania, a truck full of pigeons— some of them belonging to Peña—pulls into a wide, green clearing.

With a heaving sound, the sliding metal doors of the truck click up and up until the shelves of birds are ex-

– Skyler Inman is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.

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SNAPSHOT

EXPECTING AN EDUCATION A school closing shifts the resources available to New Haven’s teen mothers Vivian Wang

All photos by Elinor Hills

illustration julia hedges

For a long time, the Polly T. McCabe Center wasn’t somewhere you went because you wanted to. You went because you had no other choice. At least, not really: If you were a pregnant teenager in New Haven, you needed a place where you could learn to feed your baby and change diapers and escape from the smirks and stares of your classmates, and you were not going to find that at your normal middle or high school. So you went to Polly McCabe, an alternative school established in 1966 for pregnant students in the New Haven Public School system. For the duration of your pregnancy and through the academic quarter after you gave birth, you would attend traditional classes like math and biology, plus courses tailored to the needs of pregnant students, such as nutrition and group counseling. And, perhaps more importantly, you were provided a refuge from the stigma of teen parenthood.

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Today, “choice” is a loaded word in the contexts of both schools and pregnancy. But when Polly McCabe opened, the word was a bridge between those two worlds: for pregnant girls, a choice to go to Polly McCabe was a choice to stay in school. Their other options were bleak. They could either drop out immediately, or they could stay in their traditional schools without any special care or resources. A Yale study conducted at Polly McCabe in 2000, at the height of the school’s activity, found an 80 percent high school completion rate for its students. Nationwide, the current number for pregnant teens hovers around 50 percent.

In the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, Polly McCabe served more than one hundred students every year.

Last year, it served no more than sixteen—on a good day.

While sixteen students were officially on the school roster, only four to seven attended regularly, said Dr. Belinda CarTHE NEW JOUR NAL

berry, who served as Polly McCabe’s principal for the last three years. Enrollment had been decreasing for decades, in line with plummeting teen pregnancy rates across the country: a 68 percent drop nationwide since 1991, 65 percent in Connecticut. Of the teens who did get pregnant, more and more were choosing to stay in the schools they had already been attending; New York City closed its four remaining “P” schools in 2007.

Last April, New Haven followed suit. The Board of Education’s finance committee voted to stop providing services out of Polly McCabe’s Canner Street facility by the next academic year. Students now receive pregnancy support resources, under the McCabe name, from within mainstream schools.

Although administrators emphasized that Polly McCabe was not closed, just reinvented, the fact remains that pregnant teens in New Haven now have fewer options when it comes to their education.

But given how few girls chose Polly McCabe in the last decade, how important, exactly, is that option anyway?

– Administrators cited two main reasons for shuttering Polly McCabe: federal Title IX regulations and financial constraints. These justifications are closely intertwined. Title IX, passed six years after Polly McCabe’s founding, requires public schools to provide equal resources to students regardless of sex. But it became increasingly difficult to provide comparable academic resources at Polly McCabe, said NHPS Director of Instruction Billy Johnson. There was “no way” the district, with its $4.6 million deficit, could afford to offer the same range of courses and electives at a school with four students as it could at one with hundreds, he said.

By the end of last year, Polly McCabe no longer offered art, world languages, or science classes. And because graduation requirements are consistent district-wide, many new mothers were missing the credits they needed when they returned to their original schools after giving birth, undermining Polly McCabe’s goal of helping pregnant students get their diplomas.

New Haven’s high school landscape also may have contributed to the decline in enrollment. In addition to its traditional high schools, New Haven is home to a variety of magnet schools with highly specialized curricula: Hill Regional Career focuses on medicine and entrepreneurship; Co-Op on the arts. Polly McCabe likely felt increasingly limiting, Johnson explained. “The reality [is]...when it has ten different high schools to compete with, that’s a totally different ball game,” he said.

And so the school was caught in a vicious cycle. The fewer choices that Polly McCabe offered, the fewer students it attracted; the fewer students who enrolled, the fewer choices the school could offer. In 2014, the most recent year for which the state has data, there were 137 teen births in New Haven. Less than 15 percent of those mothers enrolled at 15

Polly McCabe.

Arguably, those 15 percent had no need to: all the resources those students could have received at 400 Canner Street are now available in their traditional schools.

– In a quiet corner of James Hillhouse High School on Sherman Avenue, Sharon Bradford sits in an office plastered with posters of young mothers cradling their babies. On her desk, she keeps a copy of the summer 2016 Southern Connecticut State University alumni magazine, which profiles a former Hillhouse student and teen mother who won a full Gates Millennium scholarship for college. Several decades ago, Bradford was also a teen mother in New Haven. In this room, secluded from the hallways where students weave around each other like cars on a busy freeway, she now heads the Support for Pregnant and Parenting Teens Program (SPPT), a statewide support program.

FOR PREGNANT GIRLS, A CHOICE TO GO TO POLLY MCCABE WAS A CHOICE TO STAY IN SCHOOL SPPT, established in 2012, is funded by a combination of state and federal programs. It operates in five Connecticut school districts, including New Haven; now that Polly McCabe no longer occupies a physical space, the services it used to offer have been folded into SPPT. Each year, Bradford and her staff meet with sixty to seventy students across the district—mothers and fathers—several times a week, depending on the students’ needs. They track the teenagers’ school attendance, coach them through conflicts with their partners, or just share M&Ms. Daphney St. Louis, a Hillhouse sophomore, said she never considered decamping for Polly McCabe when she became pregnant with her son, who is now three months old.

“I had support here,” she explained one Monday morning as she sat in Bradford’s office. The SPPT program provided St. Louis with advice, a car seat, and a breast pump. She still visits the office almost every day to do her homework and chat.

Since Polly McCabe’s founding in 1966, New Haven’s support services for teen mothers have grown. In the early 1990s, a group of Yale Law School students opened the Elizabeth Celotto Child Care Center, which operates out of Wilbur Cross High School and provides free childcare to teen parents district-wide who stay in school. Director Robin Moore-Evans said the center provides many services similar to the SPPT program, including academic advising and parTHE NEW JOUR NAL

enting classes.

The Celotto Center was the reason Maria, who asked to be identified by her first name only, also decided against Polly McCabe. Like St. Louis, Maria stayed at Hillhouse after becoming pregnant in 2014.

“I didn’t want to get separated from high school at all. I got along with the teachers and staff at Hillhouse, and I didn’t really know anybody at Polly McCabe in order to make new relationships with them,” said Maria, who is now a sophomore in college. “I felt like everybody as a community came together, and they have options and different resources for the different types of people that attend school…Polly McCabe, it seemed like a good school, it just didn’t seem like the right decision for me.”

– The numbers suggest that most pregnant teens in New Haven felt like Maria and St. Louis. But some still chose Polly McCabe.

I was unable to get in touch—directly or through administrators—with the handful of students who were still at Polly McCabe when it closed. According to Bradford, several were too busy or did not want to draw attention to themselves.

“I think that having a school dedicated to pregnant and parenting teens was better because the girls were more focused,” said Dorothy Mazon, the SPPT program’s registered nurse, who worked at Polly McCabe until it closed. “It was a like group of people. In a regular school there is still a lot of name-calling. There’s discrimination, harassment.

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Even some of the teachers don’t want to be ‘bothered’ with a pregnant individual. They act like they don’t know what to do.”

“I have known students to attend McCabe and testify that without McCabe, they could not have made it,” Carberry, the

“IN A REGULAR SCHOOL THERE IS STILL A LOT OF NAME-CALLING. THERE’S DISCRIMINATION, HARASSMENT. EVEN SOME TEACHERS DON’T WANT TO BE ‘BOTHERED’ WITH A PREGNANT INDIVIDUAL.”

school’s principal, said.

Both St. Louis and Maria said they sometimes felt stigmatized by their peers at Hillhouse. St. Louis said classmates stared at her belly when it grew. Maria recalled hearing some snide comments. But both women said they did not allow the scrutiny to deter them.

“I didn’t pay attention to them,” Maria said. “It was a matter of, I’m going to school to learn and not to listen to everybody else and what they have to say.”

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The importance of Maria’s choice to pursue and prioritize her education, in spite of her pregnancy, is a point everybody agrees on regardless of their views on Polly McCabe as a standalone school. But that choice, like the choice to attend Polly McCabe, is also under threat from funding shortages.

The shortfall is twofold: The school district did not gain any money from closing Polly McCabe’s educational services, and the support services, now under the umbrella of the state-sponsored SPPT program, are losing funding too.

On the educational side, the district is technically saving over $100,000 a year from the closure, both on the costs of running the Polly McCabe building and on the expense of teacher salaries—the latter of which was already reduced because for the school’s last year, the district had hired only part-time retired teachers, Carberry said. But given the district’s multimillion-dollar deficit, the money saved cannot be redirected to other resources. Money saved in a deficit, Johnson pointed out, “doesn’t really exist.”

On the support side, the grant money for SPPT, which has always come from the state rather than the district, is still active––for now. But another grant the program relied on, the Young Parents Program Grant, ended recently. Bradford’s staff has been reduced from six to four, and each member feels the strain.

“We just need more staff,” Bradford said. “We’re being asked to do more with less.”

And if the state or federal government decides to decrease educational funding or stop providing money for pregnant and parenting teens altogether, Bradford will face the pros 17

pect of doing more with less. When asked if the district would continue providing parenting classes and counseling if the grant money were to stop, Johnson turned his palms skyward.

“That’s when I go like this,” he said, shrugging. “It wouldn’t be up to me. I really don’t know.”

– St. Louis and Maria are testaments to the fact that pregnant students can flourish inside traditional schools. And Bradford and Mazon acknowledge that Polly McCabe’s closing has brought some unexpected benefits. School attendance, a frequent problem at Polly McCabe, is now slightly up among pregnant students.

“They’re around their friends, they have access to different activities that they didn’t have there,” Bradford explained.

“Polly was not the panacea,” Mazon said.

But pregnant students can succeed only with support, whether it comes from a standalone school or a support program.

St. Louis said she can’t imagine what her pregnancy would have been like without resources like SPPT. Sitting in the program’s office, as she chatted with Bradford about her son’s upcoming baptism, she described the help the program had given her.

“They helped me with the colic, and making sure he doesn’t sleep on his back,” she recalled. “A lot of things I did not know.”

There was a time when she didn’t think she would have that support. When she found out she was pregnant, she said, she had no intention of going to anyone at Hillhouse for help.

“I was petrified,” she said. “I was like, I don’t know them.

Why would I go there?”

It was a friend who had been through the program who finally convinced her. St. Louis remembered thinking, “Maybe I should try it out.”

That was the choice that shaped the rest of her pregnancy. And of all the choices now potentially limited by Polly McCabe’s closing—the choice to stay in school, the choice of what kind of school to attend—that is the one that matters most, and perhaps the one that is most endangered: the choice to ask for help, knowing that it can be found.

– Vivian Wang is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.

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F E AT U R E

DE RE METALLICA A Connecticut Blacksmith in King Arthur’s Court Spencer Bokat-Lindell

illustration julia hedges

In April of 2015, Jamie Lundell won a ten thousand dollar check from the History Channel for forging a Roman gladiator sword. The blade, which took him five days to fashion, was the length of a man’s arm and sharp enough to puncture bone, welded from 108 layers of steel all compressed within a fraction of an inch and patterned like clouds of petrified ink. Below the hammered bronze hilt adorned with buffalo horn caps, a blood-red inscription burned in the olivewood handle: AUDENTES FORTUNA IUVAT. Fortune favors the bold.

Demand for ancient swords has flagged somewhat in recent millennia, but to the judges of Forged in Fire, the reality TV show tournament Lundell competed in that spring, this did not seem particularly relevant. In every episode, four blacksmiths from around the country were summoned to a studio in Brooklyn, where their mastery of ironwork was tested in tournament. By his third round, Lundell had already proven himself by transforming a two-inch ball bearing into an arced fighting knife whose superior construction outclassed the work of two other contestants. For the final round, he and his rival returned to their home forges to produce the most faithful replica of an ancient sword they could muster. Both were pieces of art, but they had to cut, too. What mattered to the judges now was the sharpness of the edge and the construction of the handle, the temper of the steel and the trueness of the blade, all of which they tested on human-sized dummies with faux organs inside. When the credits rolled, Lundell walked away as the champion.

“It definitely helped me pay off my loans,” he tells me in earnest. More than a year has passed since the episode aired, and we are standing between two anvils in Dragon’s Breath Forge, the workshop in Wolcott, Connecticut, where Lundell

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wrought his winning blade. He has worked here for the past fourteen years. The building is the size and shape of a large greenhouse, but instead of shrubs the floor is crowded with vises and sledges and menacing power saws. It resembles the ideal filming location for an industrial-themed horror movie, the precise type of place where one would not want to find oneself lost in the middle of the night or held captive by a vengeful clown.

Fortunately, however, it is eleven in the morning, and I am in the presence of a master. He is currently inspecting a brick-sized piece of metal, called a billet, which he tells me will form the blade of a new sword by week’s end. I ask him how the billet is constructed.

“Oh—these are just five sheets of ten-ninety-five and fifteen-twenty.”

I wait for him to elaborate, but after a moment of silence I strike myself as embarrassingly dull and offer a few vigorous head nods. He seems satisfied by this response.

Lundell, who turned thirty-six this year, looks like a character from Game of Thrones but has the demeanor of one of its fans. He sports a haphazard boxed beard and a brown ponytail that hangs down the back of a flannel jacket. When he speaks, he sounds less like a blacksmith than a computer engineer from Minnesota: kind-voiced and unaffected, frugal with his words, and sort of confused as to why I don’t understand the particulars of his profession.

Dragon’s Breath Forge advertises itself as a producer of exotic weaponry: battle axes, Viking spears, Arabian split-tipped swords—even Hobbit knives. The market for such items is

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larger than one might think, but it isn’t particularly reliable.

In 2005, the Forge became a subsidiary of Falling Hammer Productions, the decorative ironwork parent company that provides the better part of Lundell’s paycheck. The distinction, however, is largely nominal: in addition to Peter SwarzBurt, the Forge’s founder, Lundell is one of only four blacksmiths on staff, and every piece of steel they sell is born in the same flames. (Incidentally, three of the four, including Lundell, have all won episodes of Forged in Fire.) Lundell spends about two days each week working with the other smiths on projects commissioned by homeowners typically from Greenwich or Manhattan, whose tastes tend to fall short of his imagination: balcony railings, Gothic gates and lighting fixtures, the occasional praying mantis garden sculpture.

Today, however, he is working for a different kind of client, and this client requires a sword.

– Those who conceive of the United States as a democratic republic might be surprised to learn that they also live under a system of monarchies. The twenty kingdoms of the Society of Creative Anachronism are spread out across five continents; seventeen of them are located in the United States alone. (If you live anywhere along the East Coast from Maryland to Quebec, you are a denizen of the Eastern Kingdom, where Lundell is a Society member.) The SCA’s unofficial motto is “The Middle Ages as They Ought to Have Been”— which is to say all the fun of archery, blacksmithing, and calligraphy without the unseemliness of chamber pots. The SCA hosts for its thirty thousand members what some might call Renaissance fairs, but to dismiss them as such would be to misrepresent the scope of the enterprise and the dedication of those involved. Each kingdom is districted into principal-

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ities, which are further subdivided into baronies, shires, and cantons—all of which are presided over by a king and queen who fight to the metaphorical death for their stations.

Lundell got involved in the SCA eight years ago when one of his clients, Gelleys Jaffrey—moniker courtesy of the SCA, pronounced like “aisles” with a soft ‘g’—informed him of its existence. Since then, he’s battled (with wooden swords) in a number of combat competitions, but he’s never made it far enough in the semiannual Crown Tournament to break into the royal family. (He has spent time with the king and queen, however; I’m given to understand they are lovely people.)

In about three weeks, Jaffrey will be knighted, and his wife has commissioned Lundell to make him a realistic Viking sword for the ceremony. Lundell forges a few weapons a month—orders tend to spike around the holidays—but each blade is unique. Before starting work on a piece, he draws a scaled diagram of the finished product. This week, there’s a piece of graph paper hanging on the wall promising a blade with an aqueous pattern similar to that of the sword that won him first place in Forged in Fire.

Instead of using something so prosaic as wood, though, he’ll construct the handle from a moose antler recovered from the plains of Montana. Depending on the amount of metal and labor, a custom weapon from Dragon’s Breath Forge might set you back anywhere from five hundred to five thousand dollars. This one quotes roughly at two thousand.

The other smiths are drinking coffee in the office, and the only thing that appears to be breathing besides Lundell and me is the forge that sits in the middle of the room. As the heart of the operation, it stands on a metal table, a hollowed

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barrel of concrete about the size of a human torso, inhaling a steady flow of propane from a five-foot tank and holding its breath at twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Behind the shimmer of the forge loom two colossal power hammers, about seven and twelve feet respectively, apparatuses that resemble cartoonishly large sewing machines with the ability to draw out scalding blanks of metal. Lundell uses the larger of the two power hammers—a hand-me-down from a World War I shipyard—to create billets like the one he showed me, a metallic sandwich made from five layers of two different steels, twisted and cut and reworked several times to form the swirled pattern that will reveal itself in the blade.

While the billet is heating in the forge, Lundell drains his coffee and offers me a pair of earmuffs. It takes about twenty minutes for the steel to reach the ideal working temperature, brightening from charcoal gray to a muted red to a glowing orange. At this point, the steel is not quite molten, but it’s hot enough to hammer into shape. His arms sheathed in elbow-high gloves, Lundell withdraws the billet from the forge and places it in the jaw of the seven-foot power hammer. He presses the lever with his foot, and immediately the room fills with the deafening sound of metal crashing against metal, not bright or tonal like a bell but deep and penetrating like a jackhammer. As the force of the impact draws out

the rapidly cooling metal, little cracks of gray oxide begin to crust around the billet’s edges. With every blow, the scales appear to dislodge not from the surface of the hot steel, but from within, flaking off the supple core in ashen crystals like snowpack under a ski boot. Sensing a change in the metal that I cannot detect, Lundell rushes it back into the fire: if it gets too cool, it could develop stress fractures under the hammer, or even snap in two. He continues this cycle—heat and hammer, heat and hammer—for about thirty minutes, until the billet is more than two feet in length. As Lundell works, I mirror his movements, gracefully focusing my faculties on staying out of his way.

While the billet is still hot, Lundell uses a band saw to cut a “v” at the end of the sword-to-be, forming a serpent’s tongue in the metal that he pounds with a hammer to a point. He takes the steel to a belt sander to profile the edges; sparks shoot out on the concrete floor as the bar becomes a blade.

Now that it has returned to its normal state of grey, the blade looks like little more than a blistered piece of sheet metal to me. Lundell walks by with it in hand, and I feel a rush of heat blow past my skin.

– There are very few people these days who (to borrow a somewhat plastic-age phrase) have always known they wanted to become blacksmiths. For his part, Lundell didn’t even realize his talent for metalwork until he was in college.

“I never thought I was going to be a swordsmith,” he says, “because I didn’t know that was a thing you could be.”

all photos by Spencer Bokat-Lindell

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But there had been signs, of course. At an early age, he became singularly enchanted with all things medieval.

Throughout his childhood in Middletown, Connecticut, medieval-style Legos, Dungeons and Dragons, and fantasy novels held particular appeal for him. “My favorite G.I. Joes were always the ones with swords,” he remembers.

In high school, he and his friends started to dabble in live-action role-playing games (LARPing, for short), a kind of interactive re-imagining of sundry fictions. Inspired by the books he read, Lundell worked with his friends to create their own LARPing universe with full scripts and plotlines, which they acted out while sporting tunics and foam-padded weapons they made themselves. It made for exactly the sort of training that is necessary for success in the SCA. After enrolling in Wheaton College, Lundell first planned to major in creative writing. Severely dyslexic, however, he soon discovered that he much preferred reading fantasy books to writing them. He knew from his high school ceramic classes that he enjoyed working with his hands, and during his sophomore summer he took a course in metalworking at the Museum School of Fine Arts. He’s been hooked ever since.

It’s the resilience of metal that he loves, he tells me, tossing a piece of bronze in the air and letting it tumble on the concrete floor, unmarked. “It’s so much more durable than ceramic or glass.”

His first-ever blacksmithing piece was a set of silverware, but it wasn’t long before he branched out. When he graduated in 2002, Lundell convinced Swarz-Burt to take him on as an apprentice at Dragon’s Breath Forge. Since then, 21

he’s become the resident specialist in “historically probable” Viking weaponry.

He’s also started to pursue more approachable projects, namely tap handles for a local brewery and a line of jewelry, all of which are ripe for featuring on his Instagram page. The piece of bronze I pick off the floor is a pendant Lundell cast in the shape of Mjölnir, the legendary hammer Thor uses to slay a world-eating serpent during the Norse equivalent of the apocalypse. It’s available for thirty dollars on the Forge’s Etsy page, under “Viking Bling.”

– It’s been a couple of days since Lundell profiled Jaffrey’s knighting sword, and he’s ready to process it through the final heat treatments before he joins it to its handle. He places the tang—the svelte end opposite the sword’s tip that he’ll insert into the moose antler handle—under a power drill and bores two holes in it. Helices of steel spring out of the blade and litter the floor around the machine like locks of hair in a salon.

He threads a piece of wire through the tang to make an eye hook before we step outside onto the asphalt lawn behind the Forge, where the other blacksmiths have been attending to a human-sized, propane-fueled silo with a central core of molten salt. (As it happens, molten salt does not look discernibly different from liquid water or simple syrup, though it tends to be about fourteen hundred degrees hotter.)

Lundell suspends the sword on a long metal rod and steps up onto a tree stump next to the silo. He gingerly lowers the sword into the outer chamber to preheat it. If there’s any moisture left on the blade when it touches the molten salt,

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it could splatter in his face like superheated frying oil. He begins to jig the sword in the salt, up and down like a length of fishing line, as the other blacksmiths look on from afar.

Swarz-Burt hums Darth Vader’s Imperial March from Star Wars while they make ice-fishing puns for the next ten minutes.

“Holy mackerel,” says one blacksmith.

“I don’t like the scale of that joke,” says another.

When Lundell withdraws the blade from the silo, it shines a sun-bright orange. Unlike the blistering air inside the forge, the even, liquid heat of the salt doesn’t risk oxidizing the blade and relieves it of unwanted stress points.

Lundell plunges the sword into a metal canister filled with room-temperature oil. Flames erupt out of the brim and lick the blade, and the shock of the heat exchange causes the walls of the canister to vibrate like a tuning fork. I can’t tell if the acrid fumes that have just filled the air are coming from the crusted salt or the scorched grease, but in any case the room smells profoundly of heavy industry. Burnt oil and blackened salt stream off the quenched blade in rivulets as Lundell blots it with a dirty towel. He looks down the length of the blade to ensure it hasn’t developed any warps.

“No woogity!” he says with relief.

There’s a commonplace kitchen oven in the corner of the workshop set perpetually to 425 degrees. In a few hours, he’ll place the sword in the oven to begin the tempering process, to soften the brittle blade.

For now, he hangs it up to cool.

– When I tell Lundell that I go to Yale, he immediately recalls the name of Sam-

uel Yellin. Yellin, Lundell tells me, did much of the ironwork for Yale’s residential colleges, including the gates below Harkness Tower. He was also arguably the country’s most famous blacksmith, at a time when the province of metalworking had retreated almost entirely to the artistic sphere. By the time he died in 1940, his ironwork could be found at four other Ivy League universities, the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan.

There was a time when some of Yellin’s contemporaries called him a genius, but the years when people called him anything were few. Those were the twilight decades after manufacturing revolutionized the economy, when the blacksmith still figured more prominently in public life. By the sixties, the role of both traditional and artisanal blacksmithing had all but vanished in the United States. At the time, the historian Alex W. Bealer predicted that the blacksmith would soon be an extinct species: “One can expect to see the general blacksmith disappear entirely before the end of the twentieth century. Probably he will pass unnoticed and unmourned by most.” One hundred and fifty years ago, there might have been thousands of blacksmiths like Lundell in Connecticut, all gainfully employed in local shops or factories. Twenty miles away from Dragon’s Breath Forge, the Hooker Carriage Company in New Haven, once one of the largest coach businesses in the country, used to retain 250 smiths on its payroll. It was liquidated shortly after World War I, wiped out by the automotive industry.

I ask Lundell what he thinks about this prospect––if, like typewriter repairmen or taxi drivers, he feels personally vic-

The knighting ceremony for Gelleys Jaffrey

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timized by modernity. It seems to me, standing here between a two-hundred-pound anvil and this century-old power hammer, that it doesn’t much matter what relics he’s able to revive from the past. Blacksmithing will never again be what it was.

But if Lundell is as bothered by this fact as I am, he shows few signs of having considered it. “It’s certainly not as common as it used to be, but I don’t think it’s in any danger of being lost,” he says. He notes that there is no shortage of hobbyists and professionals signing up for classes at the Forge, most of whom want to learn how to make swords. And besides, the advantage of working with metal is that it rarely ever disappears.

“One of the things that really drew me to blacksmithing is that I know the things I make are going to well outlast me.

You go into these museums, and you look at these swords that are a thousand years old,” he says. “It’s like a little bit of permanence.”

He knows, for example, that the sword he’s making now will be passed down for generations. After he polishes the surface to a mirror shine, Lundell will hand the weapon over for Jaffrey to keep. The knighting ceremony is coming up

“I KNOW THE THINGS I MAKE ARE GOING TO WELL OUTLAST ME” soon, during an annual SCA tournament called the 100 Minutes War. “You should try to come—although I’d try to dress up if you can,” he says. “People tend to get pretty into it.”

– November 19, 12:30 PM: The 100 Minutes War is in full swing, and things are not looking good. I’m standing at the periphery of a nondescript park in Sparta, New Jersey, between a Porta Potty and a man fashioning arrows out of foam padding and duct tape. I had been unable to salvage any of my childhood Lord of the Rings Halloween costumes from the recesses of my closet, and I’m starting to feel acutely out of place in my street clothes. Hardly more than thirty of the 100 Minutes have elapsed, and already one of the King’s subjects has been inauspiciously struck on the nape with a wooden cudgel, knocking him unconscious. The crowd of about 150 people, dressed in all manner of capes, helmets, and armor plates, clear the field to make way for an ambulance and a couple of EMTs, who appear surprised to find

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that there’s a war going on. We exchange glances in self-conscious solidarity.

I have been trying for the past hour and a half to obtain the scheduling details of the knighting ceremony, with very little success. A number of people have offered to help me find whatever it is that I am looking for—the camera and denim are dead post-Enlightenment giveaways—but when I inquire about the accolade, they tell me that it’s a surprise and could I please refrain from mentioning it.

Eventually I come upon a clearing at the far side of the park, where a small veiled tent has been erected on the grass.

A man wearing a cerulean tunic and a beaded beard-tie informs me that Jaffrey is sitting inside the tent, waiting for the court to summon him. He knows by now that he’s being considered for knighthood—the announcement was made this morning—but he still has no idea about Lundell’s sword, which his wife ordered confidentially as a surprise adornment. The man I am talking to once commissioned Lundell, known as Ulfgar the Nice in these parts, to make a battle axe for him, so he knows what kind of creation Jaffrey is about to receive.

“He’s gonna shit kittens when he sees it,” the man says.

After the sun sets, the few dozen people remaining head to a small clubhouse by the side of the road, where a pair of fife players with unique senses of pitch announce the court’s assembly. At the front of the room, Queen Anna and King Brion Tarragon sit perched on their thrones, surrounded by a retinue of about twenty nobles. Also in attendance is King Edmund of the Middle Kingdom, on visit from the Midrealm, a region known elsewhere as the swing states. He sits beside the bespectacled Queen Anna, whom he gifted upon his arrival with a fifth of Patrón (it’s her favorite).

After some thirty minutes of procedure, including a debriefing of the War casualties, the King and Queen begin the ceremonies. The man I talked to earlier has been promoted to an earl; another is made a lord. In both cases, the Queen presents scrolls of cardstock embellished with calligraphy and gold seals, which before bestowing she displays to the audience in a prolonged flourish. Oohs. Ahs. At one point, a ringtone version of the mockingjay theme from The Hunger Games goes off from someone’s phone in the back of the room.

Finally, the court summons Jaffrey from the crowd. He THE NEW JOUR NAL

kneels before the throne as King Brion produces a pair of spurs.

“These are a symbol of rank. But before I put these upon you that you may ride in the King’s name,” he says, “is there a member of the Order of the Laurels who would have words about this gentleman?”

A middle-aged woman standing near the door bounds into the aisle.

“It is my great honor and pleasure to be that voice!” she declares. “I am Mistress Aneleda Falconbridge.”

“Chivalry and art are not so dissimilar,” she says, continuing at a ruminative pace. “For it, like art, must be practiced, in order to appear effortless, and in order for it to appear constant. I have watched this man—my friend—practice the art of chivalry…and I recommend him to you for this reason.”

Four others come forward to speak for Jaffrey, including a duchess and a mistress from the Order of the Pelican. Sir Cedric of Armorica, of the Order of Chivalry, is last.

THE SWORD HE WROUGHT WILL NOT BE WIELDED, BUT FOR NOW IT DOES EXIST. THAT IS ALL THAT IRON IN EARTH CAN HOPE FOR. “All I will say right now is something I’ve said to him many times over the years, and it still holds true,” he says. “Dude, you don’t suck.”

Applause breaks out.

“Is there a belt?” asks the King. A subject presents him with a belt, which he bestows upon Jaffrey.

“Is there a sword?”

Lundell, standing obscured near the exit in a red poncho, steps forward.

“There is, your honor!”

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The clubhouse erupts into a collective gasp as Lundell offers the sword, sheathed in a brown leather scabbard.

“With this sword,” the King says, “you carry the strength of our kingdom. Carry this with honor, and use it in justice, and in our name.”

Jaffrey places the sword by his side, and, after being presented with a chain, takes his oath.

“I pledge my allegiance, my advice when wanted, my sword…and my fealty,” he says, a tear in his eye. “This I swear to you, until I die, or this world is destroyed.”

In a decidedly anticlimactic moment, the King forgoes Lundell’s sword—perhaps for fear of scoring Jaffrey’s shoulder—opting instead to pick up a prop with blunter edges.

“And so it is,” King Brion says, “that we dub thee once, we dub thee twice, we dub thee knight.”

The room erupts once again in cheers. Jaffrey’s wife is blotting her eyes with a Kleenex. The court disbands, and I feel a tinge of vicarious indignation for Lundell: the audience never got to see his sword. I look for him somewhere in the crowd and spot him congratulating Jaffrey, a smile lining his face. He seems far from piqued. The sword he wrought will not be wielded, but, for now, it does exist. This is all that iron in earth can hope for. As the clubhouse clears out and people start heading to their cars, I log into Instagram and search for Lundell’s name. There are a number of photographs, dated from a few days ago, of the work he just relinquished.

Caption: #handmade, #viking, #blacksmith.

The sword is poised on a worktable next to the original graph-paper design, where the whorls in the blade just catch the light.

– Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a senior in Morse College.

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POEMS

Rachel Kaufman

ROOTING DOWN It sounds like a room of tiny bells, the wind coming in through a small, stained window Butterfly shells pucker their lips and recede White birds bury orange beaks in the folds of their chests We are in a rounded world sun setting into darkened line between water and air You are wearing rose on your wrists, in your hair And I am staring as the clouds swallow the sun whole

SNOW ON THE AIRPLANE WINDOW It rains, and all for you, Of course, when it falls It lands in tea cups, blue rims, Bottoms curved and tipping, Water collecting in puddles, And tea cups lifting, Pushed along by thin Streams, and it is, after all, For you to see, to comment on, To wink at, to sketch In a wooden notebook, And for me, to watch the pavement, The ants, as I imagine them, Slowly wash away, to count How many drops it takes To tip it all over, or, how many To keep the bottom Firmly rooted To the ground.

– Rachel Kaufman is a sophomore in Trumbull College.

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illustration catherine peng

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F E AT U R E

CONSENT IN THE SPOTLIGHT

All photographs by Stephanie Barker and Catherine Peng

the s e t a g i a nav m a r D of l o o h c ault s S s e a l l a a Y sexu The f o e c an m r o f r e p lder

Sarah Ho

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Center stage at the Iseman Theater, a woman stands clutching two hands to her chest in front of seventy-five first-year students of the Yale School of Drama. “These are my breasts,” she says. “These are Evan’s breasts, and when I come to rehearsal, I don’t want you to touch them.”

The students gape. It’s day three of their first week of graduate school, and many of them have never heard a professor talk about her body so frankly. “Over the course of rehearsal, they become Blanche’s breasts,” she continues, referring to the female lead of A Streetcar Named Desire. “And if the play calls for another character to touch Blanche’s breasts, that’s fine. But the question is, how do we get there, from here?”

The woman onstage is Evan Yionoulis, a professor of acting at the School of Drama. (She is also my mother, which makes the boob grab especially uncomfortable.) This afternoon she isn’t teaching drama, but rather the kind of behavior needed to decrease the rate of sexual harassment among her students.

When last year’s Association of American Universities’ (AAU) Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct was released, graduate school faculty and students were shocked at the high rates of sexual harassment: 53.9 percent of female, 38.2 percent of male, and 78 percent of other gender graduate and professional students reported having experienced it in some form while at Yale. The School of Drama is not the only graduate school that ramped up its sexual assault prevention measures in the wake of the report.

The School of Architecture and School of Public Health have also scrambled to respond to the AAU findings. And, as the accusations against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign demonstrate, harassment is a problem that doesn’t end once confessed. The AAU survey was just a tangible, and troubling, set of statistics that quantified a cultural issue already on the minds of many.

“IT’S THE ONLY SCHOOL WHERE FACULTY ARE DIRECTING NAKED STUDENTS” The School of Drama is in a unique position, however, in that it is a place where students are asked to fully inhabit their characters and engage in physical, sensitive, and sometimes violent behavior. Students are trained in the art of fabricating intimacy, learning to flirt and fight and fall in love so convincingly they might believe it themselves.

“It’s the only school where faculty are directing naked students,” laughs Joan Channick, Associate Dean and Deputy Title IX Coordinator for the School of Drama. It’s the only 27

school where “a professor might say, ‘You should really get in touch with your sexuality,’” adds Emily Reeder, a theater management student at the School of Drama and a member of the Graduate & Professional Student Title IX board.

It’s the only school where, in the classroom and on stage, students and faculty are talking about, depicting, and reenacting sex. The environment of the stage, coupled with an emphasis on artistic freedom, creates a space with the potential for abuse.

In response to the AAU survey results and a growing consciousness of sexual violence, the School of Drama has made a few changes. Along with creating a new orientation for first-year students and updating a “Bystander Intervention” workshop for all students, they released a constitution of sorts: “Protocols for Rehearsing Material With Sexual Content, Consensual Sexual Touching, and Depicting Sexual Assault.”

These rules of conduct are meant to ensure that depictions of sexual behavior and assault “will only be rehearsed or performed with the ongoing affirmative consent of all actors,” and provide safety guidelines for pre-production, rehearsal, and classroom scene work. Every student and faculty member has to read, sign, and return the document to the registrar at the start of each semester, and every visiting artist working at the Yale Repertory Theater must sign and send in the protocols with their contract. With this document and its rollout, the School of Drama wants to encourage a shift in consent culture. They want to combat the high numbers from the AAU report.

But opening up more conversations about sexual consent has led the School of Drama to another issue—one that most, if not all, other departments never have to deal with. As Evan-not-Blanche’s breast clutching demonstrated, the line between actor and person is constantly shifting on stage. It’s in this middle ground that things can go wrong, but it’s also the space where artistry is cultivated. How, then, do you identify assault in the rehearsal room or on stage?

And how do you make art, particularly art that’s supposed to be painful, safe?

– Baize Buzan is pushed and falls face down in a pile of dirt. Below her, a wedding dress blooms. Behind her, a man lunges and paws at the chiffon. Before them, almost two hundred people watch as she is violently raped. Her knees are chewed up, her hands scratched. On good nights, she doesn’t bleed.

Buzan is an actress at the School of Drama, and the man lunging is her scene partner and fellow student, Galen Kane.

They are performing in the play Women Beware Women, which opened in January 2016 at Yale Repertory Theater.

Here, on stage, Buzan is safe, and the simulated rape is consensual: she and her imagined assailant have practiced these moves hundreds of times with the help of a fight choreograTHE NEW JOUR NAL

pher and director. But the terror on her face looks and feels real.

Women Beware Women started rehearsing in September 2015, on the same afternoon the School of Drama addressed the results of the AAU Survey. “The atmosphere in the room was tense,” says Leora Morris, the director. The cast grappled with the thought of embarking on this produc-tion— in which two actors are nude for an entire scene and one woman is raped—as they confronted the magnitude of Yale’s real sexual assault problem.

“The AAU report boggled the mind,” says Channick. As the Title IX Coordinator for the School of Drama, she fields complaints from victims of sexual misconduct who choose to use Yale resources to resolve them. Considering the infrequency of those visits, she says reading the report was “shocking”—she hadn’t realized the extent of the issues at the School of Drama.

Part of the reason the AAU results were alarming, according to Dean of the School of Drama James Bundy, was the magnitude of the harassment statistics and the responses from students who didn’t report these incidents. “It was clear that there were perpetrators who did not know they were perpetrators,” he says, “and victims who did not feel equipped to deal with the issues.”

The AAU report didn’t break down statistics by professional school. But when the results were published, the Title IX office was able to share the exact numbers with Channick, which she re-ported to the School of Drama. She and the University Title IX committee declined to share those numbers with me. “In terms of prevalence, the graduate and professional schools had similar results,” says Stephanie Spangler, University Title IX Coordinator. The types of sexual har-assment reported for all the graduate and professional schools were primarily “insulting sexual remarks” and “inappropriate personal comments.” More than 80 percent of sexual harassment cases occurred between students. And while the graduate school rate of sexual assault was lower than the undergraduate rate, the data still caused alarm: according to the AAU report, 13.3 per-cent of women in Yale’s graduate schools had been sexually assaulted, 3.9 percent of men, and 17.7 percent of students of other genders.

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Students were shaken. Many pointed to the glaring lack of consent education as the reason these instances were slipping through the cracks. “The first year I came in there was about 15 minutes of SHARE [Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center] getting up onstage and saying, basically, here’s where you go when you get raped,” says Sarah Mantell, a third-year playwriting student at the School of Drama and a member of the Graduate & Profes-sional Student Title IX Advisory Board. “[It was] like getting raped was an inevitability that the school had nothing to do with.”

Her second year, she says, the orientation was expanded to almost an hour, and they threw in booklets on bystander intervention. But still, says Mantell, “it was pathetically little.” So this summer, Channick worked with students and faculty alongside the head of the Office of Gender and Campus Culture, Melanie Boyd, and the Title IX office to develop a new set of workshops and draft the protocols. With these guidelines, they sought to preemptively address the problem.

“I don’t in my heart of hearts believe that most of what people are perceiving as harassment and assault is happening inside the classroom and inside the rehearsal hall,” said Dean Bundy. “But based on the magnitude of the numbers…” he trailed off. “We felt that it was possible for an im-provisational moment to become an assault unless people know what the ground rules were.”

– In the final scenes of the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, actress Maria Schneider is pinned down by her on-screen love interest, Marlon Brando, and raped with a stick of butter. Her whimpers echo as Brando thrusts. It’s a violent depiction of sex that critic Roger Ebert called “shockingly daring” and “sudden, brutal, and lonely.” In December 2016, an interview with director Bernardo Bertolucci surfaced in which he admitted that he and Brando planned the scene the morning it was shot. Schneider, ambushed in front of the camera, had had no idea what was coming.

Bertolucci feels guilty now, but he doesn’t regret the decision. “I didn’t tell her because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” he explained in the interview on College Tour, an entertainment TV show. “I didn’t want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage. I wanted Maria to feel.”

Directors like Bertolucci believe that in order to act truthfully, one must endure trauma. In this instance, the notion was taken to a dangerous extreme. None of the anecdotes I heard from Yale students involved the level of abuse Schneider endured—no scenes of gruesome assault happened unexpectedly—but my conversations with female actors, especially, revealed an insidious discomfort with everyday interactions in the rehearsal room.

One woman who asked not to be identified by name described a man who would spend time before he entered THE NEW JOUR NAL

v

Art in Focus: The British Castle— A Symbol in Stone April 7–August 6, 2017 John Hamilton Mortimer, West Gate of Pevensey Castle, Sussex, 1773‑74, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund

Free and open to the public 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven 1 877 BRIT ART | britishart.yale.edu @yalebritishart

Charles A. Ryskamp Travel Grant The Lewis Walpole Library, part of the Yale University Library system, offers a travel grant to Yale seniors whose senior essay project would benefit from extended use of the LWL’s collections of mostly British 18th-century research materials.

The grant provides funds for regular travel during the academic year to the LWL which is located in Farmington, ct; occasional overnight accommodation in an 18th-century house on the LWL campus; and research consultation and guidance by LWL staff throughout the year. walpole.library.yale.edu/fellowships/charles-ryskamp-travel-grant-undergraduates

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the scene “jerking himself off backstage so he would come onstage a little hard.” He’d ask people backstage to crack hand warmers to “keep his dick warm,” she explained. Other women’s romantic scene partners engaged in unexpected neck licking, added butt stroking, and kissing that lasted just a few seconds too long.

“Over the course of a rehearsal process, the actor becomes the character,” Title IX coordinator Channick explains. But before that switch occurs, actors are engaging on an intimate level with people they hardly know, or with whom they have complicated histories. Romeo and Juliet might be recent exes; Stanley might have dated Blanche’s friend; George and Martha might have matched on Tinder but never followed up with each other. Now they’re star-crossed, or abusive, or married lovers.

This divide between characters and actors makes the question of consent more complicated, but the School of Drama’s unique circumstances among academic institutions does not excuse it—the line is blurry, but it isn’t invisible.

“Your body doesn’t know the difference between when you’re acting and what it’s experiencing in life,” explains Buzan of her rape in Women Beware Women. “Your brain might know, but your physiological response is not coded in the same language.” The more she fought, resisted, and was thrown on the ground, the less her brain was confused. But at first, she left the stage each night feeling emotionally drained, with real cuts on her knees.

Joseph Fischel, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale, teaches the course “Theory and Practice of Sexual Consent.” He told me that it’s misleading to consider theater purely representational—that, when on stage, it’s impossible to deny an actor’s subjectivity.

“It’s hard to make the case that it’s not really that person’s vagina being grabbed or mouth getting kissed. We need to be careful here and not just say ‘Oh it’s drama, oh it’s art, that’s okay.’” Sexual or romantic scenes have to look real, but the bodies performing in them have to feel safe. To that end, the fifth point of the School of Drama’s protocols state that “when a depiction of sexual assault is first staged, the participation of a fight director is required.”

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The protocols try to prevent surprise: Each move of a sex scene is carefully choreographed, just as fight scenes or dance numbers are. “We did a lot of work to build physical shapes in a really mundane, a + b = c kind of way,” says director Morris of the Women Beware Women rape scene.

When undergraduate actors Ginna Doyle and Christian Probst, both seniors, staged a rape scene for the Yale Dramatic Association Fall Mainstage show Wild Party, they also described the process as “choreographic.” Each step was guided by a fight choreographer, who verbally checked on their comfort levels.

But planned movements can be forgotten in the moment.

Buzan recalls one night when her and Kane’s nervous energy resulted in new movements—Kane waited slightly longer than usual to scoop her up, and she hit her head on the wall.

On the play’s closing night, Kane said, he and Buzan agreed that they would “just go for it and see what happens,” which produced a new sequence of movements. Fortunately, Kane and Buzan say the actions fell within the framework of what their fight choreographer, Rick Sordelet, had taught them.

“WE NEED TO BE CAREFUL HERE AND NOT JUST SAY ‘OH IT’S DRAMA, OH IT’S ART, THAT’S OKAY.’” Under the new protocol, these improvised moments are discouraged: “Spontaneous changes to staging involving sexual touching are unacceptable, unless they fall within previously agreed boundaries,” it states. “Safety trumps spontaneity in every circumstance.” If a fight looks too real, maybe that’s because it’s moving too quickly. “Following instincts is important, but in those heightened emotional situations with intense sexual choreography, that’s actually the time where you have to be super militant,” Buzan explains. This is why the protocols have built-in safe words, detailed by Point Nine: “If at any time in rehearsal an actor feels unsafe… the actor may say, ‘Hold’—this requires any other actor, the director and/or stage manager, or faculty member if it is in a class, to temporarily suspend the action in rehearsal.”

The protocols also aim to prevent actors from getting into uncomfortable situations in the first place. When Women Beware Women began casting, Morris says she wanted to ensure that, before finalizing roles, each actor was aware what the part would entail: rape and nudity. Both Higgins and Buzan confirm those meetings took place. Under the first point of the protocols, the-se conversations will be made standard practice: “Directors discuss [sexual or nude] scenes …with the Chair of the Acting Department, who uses discretion in contacting the acting pool to opt in or out of being THE NEW JOUR NAL

cast in [those] roles.” At the undergraduate level, similar informal mecha-nisms exist. Before auditioning for Wild Party, Doyle and Probst had to sign “nudity clauses” that said they were comfortable baring it all, should they get the parts.

Even when given the option to refuse a role, however, it’s hard for actors to turn down a good gig. The natural dynamic between actor and director (or student and professor) is deference to authority. Directors direct, actors follow. “When you’re trying to get the role, you’re pressured to be down for anything,” says Doyle. “I think I could have just said no [to the nude scene] but felt like I owed it to the team to realize this vision.” The director of Wild Party did not respond to a request for comment. “I tried to make sure the actors were being asked if they were comfortable,” says Morris regarding Women Beware Women. “But there’s no way to know whether they truly were or if they just wanted the part.” After college, as actors begin to be paid for their work, the dynamic evolves yet again: employer, employee. If you won’t do your job (naked, or in your underwear, or in a parka), someone else will. Says Buzan, “If David O. Russell was like, ‘Come be in my film, but there’s a huge sex scene,’ I’d be like, ‘Of course.’”

– At least once a week, senior Emma Speer squats and contorts her body on a white podium in the middle of a classroom, completely naked. Around her, students sit at attention, eyes following the curves of her body, pencils tracing her outline. For her, discomfort isn’t a factor in this situation. “I feel like there’s a chunk of my brain missing,” she told me. “There are people on this campus who have seen the innards of my asshole.” She shrugs.

If Speer was playing a nude model in a play, if the people around her were fellow actors, and if those actors were able to touch her, her scenes would fall under Point Six of the protocols: “When scenes with partial nudity, nudity, and consensual sexual touching are being staged…closing such a rehearsal to all but essential personnel…is standard,” it reads. “Exceptions should be rare and agreed to by all actors, stage manager, and director.”

No such rules exist at the School of Art. Samuel Messer, Associate Dean of the School of Art, says that the school doesn’t have protocols like the School of Drama does because they don’t need them. “It’s a different kind of space—a nonsexual space,” he explained. It’s not like in an acting class or a rehearsal, where the students are physically engaging with each other. “You can’t touch the models,” he told me.

Gabby Bucay, a senior art major at Yale who began modeling last January, agrees that the space is “desexualized” during the majority of each class. “As someone who has also drawn nude models, I know you get 100 percent desensitized almost instantly,” she said. “It’s like drawing a box.” But in between poses, the professor sometimes pauses the action so students can get water or supplies. Bucay said that when the 31

pose is finished, leaving the situation less structured, “there’s this strange hierarchy.” Speer recalls instances where men have complimented her smile, or tried to talk to her even while she was posing. She hates it, she said.

Another argument against regulating nude models is that they are a self-selecting group. The job pays twenty-five dollars an hour, and students apply under the assumption that they’ll be naked in front of a class. This means most Title IX violations registered would fall under the employ-ment discrimination exception BFOQ—Bona Fide Occupational Qualification. “If there’s a casting call and they’re looking for a short black woman to play a part, it’s hard to say that’s racist or sexist because that’s a BFOQ,” Professor Fischel explains.

“In the case of having nude models it would be hard to say, ‘I don’t want to be naked.’” But with something as nebulous as sexual discomfort, should actors have to assume its possibility as part of the job description?

– Last year at the School of Drama, three plays, including Women Beware Women, dealt with graphic sexual abuse. By December 2016, two more productions had begun rehearsing: Bulgar-ia! and Othello. This spring, it’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (whose general content one can infer from the title) and Titus Andronicus (“Huge rape scenes, lots of dragging onstage,” explains Yionoulis). It’s clear: sex—and sexual violence—sells. So perhaps the protocols miss tackling a bigger question: why are non-consensual sex scenes so pervasive in theater and film? Why are bodies—particularly female bodies—constantly made vulnerable for the audience’s benefit?

“It gets a little bit, frankly, boring,” Professor Fischel says.

“I don’t mean that in a crude way, but rape is always the go-to metaphor. Directors need to be asking themselves, do you need to have this scene be assaultive?” Actor Sean Higgins agrees. He worries both about how enacting violence affects actors and the potential for graphic scenes to trigger audience members. “We shouldn’t shy away from the stories or be scared,” he says, “but there’s an inherent responsibility that we have to live the weight and truth of what those things are so that it’s not dealt with in an inconsiderate way.” This responsibility falls on the actors and creative team, whose

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vision for depicting graphic scenes can vary.

Speer, for whom nudity is second nature, starred in her own one-woman play in the fall. In the very first scene, she made the choice to enter fully naked. “I wanted to be completely vulnerable; to show people I’m just a person,” she explains. This was her project, over which she had complete autonomy: laying her body bare felt important, and fell within her comfort zone. Sometimes, the playwright includes the need for sexual content or nudity in the stage directions. But when the stage directions are ambiguous, it’s up to the director to decide how far to push the scene. Buzan told me that having a smart woman at the helm of Women Beware Women—rough as it was—kept it from derailing.

But boundaries were still pushed. For the nude scene, the only written stage direction read: “Leantio dressing,” and nothing else. This could have been interpreted several ways: maybe he was doing so after sex, and could end the nudity after five or ten minutes. Morris, however, says that in order to achieve the “bald rawness” of the relationship, she felt the nudity had to be complete and extended. As for the rape scene in Women Beware Women, which was indicated as an “attack” in the script, Morris insists that if anything, it didn’t go far enough: “If I staged it again, I would have made it harder to watch.”

– When his students at Yale read Romeo and Juliet, actor Peter Francis James wants them to embrace discomfort.

James, who is black, suggests that when Tybalt insults Romeo, he substitute “villain” for a more modern slur. “When you say ‘villain,’ the audience’s spines don’t do anything. When you say ‘nigger,’ their spines tighten,” he explains. It’s that tightening that James says is the essence of the theater. “The nature of what we do is to discuss the uncomfortable, to make the hidden seen, to make the repressed voiced.”

James also advised the School of Drama’s cast for their 2016 production of Othello. When the director mentioned the new consent protocols on the first day of rehearsal, James was dubious. “I fear that they might be interpreted that you should not make anyone uncomfortable in any way,” he says.

“There’s a distinction between comfort and abuse.”

Shakespeare’s Othello was the first play to require the protocols, and it’s filled with slutshaming, verbal slurs, physical abuse, sex, and murder. Buzan, who plays Desdemona, is assaulted and killed in her bed, in her underwear. “In this play, it would be beyond peculiar for Desdemona to say we shouldn’t kill her at the end because it’s abuse,” says James, laughing. “How would you be able to discuss the condition of women without it?” The protocols don’t suggest changing scripts, however, and make no mention of veto power over physical abuse.

But what if artistry and agency could go hand in hand?

Before, there may have been unspoken discomfort in the rehearsal room; now, there are structures in place for raising 32

concerns. “Of course you have to find the balance between not making rules that deter from the creative process, but you have to be comfortable with one another to make art,” says School of Drama student Francesca McKenzie. Fellow student Emily Reeder says she feels empowered by the protocols. “They disrupt the power structure of doing whatever the director or professor says,” she explains.

According to Channick, most of the complaints that come to her concern individuals outside the school, like professional actors at the Yale Repertory Theatre. She recalls one man saying, “I’m an actor—if the scene calls for me to grab you and stick my tongue down your throat, I’m going to do it.” When I repeat these words to six actors I interviewed, they shudder. Dean Bundy, however, asserts that there has been little pushback from professionals at the Yale Repertory Theater. No one has declined to sign the contracts they’ve sent along with the protocols.

Consent and communication protocols and workshops are easier to implement from within an institution like Yale.

“We don’t spend a lot of time here worrying about cash flow or keeping lights on or pay roll,” says Dean Bundy. With that cushion, the School of Drama can afford to focus on what kind of acting practices they’re sending into the professional world—an issue that takes consideration. “Thinking both about the kinds of communities we create here and the kinds of leaders these people go on to become is important,” she says. “It’s about the here and now, but it’s also bigger than that.”

Students at the School of Drama only spend part of their days in rehearsal and even less on stage. They’re often only at Yale for three years. So while the school’s protocol works within the con-fines of fantasy scenarios or rehearsal rooms, prioritizing mutual respect also applies to social and sexual situations outside of the theater world. It reminds us that consent can, and should, exist in every part of life, both in and out of the spotlight.

– Sarah Holder is a senior in Saybrook College.

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ENDNOTE

THE SCIENCE OF GETTING PAID Becoming a guinea pig for $13 and a tumbler Marc Shkurovich Fifty-six years ago, a flyer around downtown New Haven sought subjects for a social psychology study. Volunteers found themselves in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, in Professor Stanley Milgram’s lab. Milgram, who was investigating obedience to authority, commanded his subjects to shock someone else with increasing voltages of electricity until they refused. Before they were debriefed, volunteers thought they had actually caused another human being intense pain, and, perhaps, depending on how far they went, death. For their hour of service, Milgram paid his volunteers $4.00, plus an extra $.50 for car fare.

Though it’s now considered “unethical” for experimenters to make you think you murdered someone, university researchers still need volunteers to carry out their research. And many undergraduates are eager to serve as human guinea pigs in exchange for some fast cash. As with many things at this school, I first heard of paid studies through a panlist.

Yi-Chia Chen, a graduate student in the Psychology Department, was sending me emails on behalf of the Perception and Cognition Lab before I even attended my first class at Yale. So, what is it actually like to participate in these studies? And why do certain students seek them out so fiercely?

Given how neatly the weekly emails are formatted, I expected that these experi-

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ments would involve complex procedures and high-tech equipment. At least electrodes, if not lasers. Instead, I was left in a dark room with only a desktop computer (not even a Mac) on the third floor of SSS, where I participated in two underwhelming 30-minute studies.

The first study was an almost-fun game: all I had to do was move my mouse to evade little arrows chasing my cursor. But the second was the most monotonous half hour of my life. I was presented with pairs of swan-like creatures, two-dimensional and white but with too many wings. I had to pick which I preferred (an easy task because I’m great at arbitrarily applying human beauty standards to non-human entities). Though I had ample time to contemplate my tasks, I couldn’t decipher the objectives of these exercises until my experimenter “debriefed” me—which was just an explanation of the hyper-specific phenomenon they were testing; not nearly as exciting as the sleek word “debrief” might imply. I guess SSS isn’t the CIA, even though I was paid with what had once been government grant money. The experimenter slipped me a THE NEW JOUR NAL

crisp $5 bill after each study. That weekend, wanting to invest my hard-earned money in the local economy, I went to Junzi’s Night Lunch and spent the $10 on a rice bowl and iced tea.

The next week, I stumbled through the intimidatingly-clean chrome-and-blue corridors of the School of Management until I found the spartan basement where the SOM Lab conducts its studies. The activity I participated in had something to do with game theory and was complicated enough that I still haven’t received full payment—my reward will depend on decisions that another participant made; I’m either due another $20 on top of the $10 they gave me, or I’m shit out of luck.

The next day, I made the schlep up Whitney Avenue again for a second study. This one was basically online shopping, and much more up my alley: it involved picking between differently priced merchandise in each trial. After 30 minutes, I left with $13 dollars and a ceramic Yale-brand tumbler, one of the merchandise combos I had chosen. Unfortunately, it fell off my nightstand and shattered before I could even write about how excited I was to make martinis with it.

Unlike me, some students who engage in these paid studies are looking for more than bartending accoutrements. Ryan Mera Evans, who is taking time off from Yale and doesn’t have access to student jobs, speaks in devil-may-care socialist lingo that reflects his stance: “My ass is just broke and unemployed for several months now, kind of like scratching by.

And studies are a mainstay on the circuit to establish some sort of financial autonomy outside of traditional work.” He has

taken to strolling around campus looking at bulletin boards to see if any new posters have been put up. “This is a means of getting money that I’m required to have in order to fucking live… So, it’s work.”

And others still are just opportunistic money-grubbers. The catchiest posters are those searching for “healthy, lean, and sedentary” volunteers. Sophomore Louis DeFelice fits the criteria, and has done the study twice, making $200 each time in return for chugging a glucose solution, spending four hours on an IV, wearing a pedometer for three days, and finally suffering through an MRI at the School of Medicine (he is claustrophobic). But for him, “the money is really tempting,” and his phobia matters less than the paycheck: “If you think you’re going to be in there for 40 minutes and you’re gonna get $200, I don’t know… It’s a good hourly wage.” Besides involving more whirring metal tubes, the most extreme study he has done required him to fast for 48 hours, during midterms, on his birthday. (It paid close to $1000.) I felt compelled to ask him what he wouldn’t do. “There’s this famous experiment where these strangers come into a room and they’re delivering electric shocks to someone in another room…”

If you’re willing to put up with a half hour of tedium—or just want some compensation for researching a story—there’s petty cash to be made on campus. But the big bucks wait for those who chase these studies out of economic necessity or financial desire, sacrificing their time and bodies for cash: the true lab rats of Yale.

– Marc Shkurovich is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

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