Arts Alive

The visual and performing arts have a lively presence and a rich history at Dickinson. Here, meet three professors who balance active careers in the arts with teaching and mentoring. Meet, too, the director of The Trout Gallery and one dozen graduates who danced their way through a small but prospering program with a “Happening” history.

Drama Queen

Karen Lordi (left) and Natalie Diener ’05 practice some moves in the advanced directing class as James Sampson ’05 looks on.

Karen Lordi blurs the boundaries between education and performance
By Barbara Snyder Stambaugh

Karen Lordi is as busy as a moth in a mitten, but you can’t tell. She’s not running in every direction, looking for her keys, not slamming doors or phones. No chaos, no hysteria. Her hair’s not even messed up.

Lordi looks calm, cheery and rested. She’s lovely. She’s juggling two hectic careers—associate professor and theatre director, along with occasional stints as actor and writer—and she’s balancing it all with the grace of a dancer.

Oh, she’s a dancer, too.

That’s where Lordi’s career started, with dancing, with the human body’s relationship to physical space, with the expressive movement of bone and tendon across time and distance, and with the ideas and emotions evoked by the body’s presence on stage … all of which, Lordi knows, are powerful sensibilities for a director, too.

It’s this process of connecting disciplines—as with dance and directing—that enables Lordi to seamlessly merge her professional life in the theatre with her professorial life at the college.

“As a director, you’re teaching all the time,” Lordi says. “In both disciplines, you have to inspire people, get them to understand. The best directors are teachers. And the most vibrant theatre programs hire professors with professional experience.”

Lordi’s alter egos work together—where goes the director, so goes the professor. When Lordi directed The Dance of Death at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York City, for example, she had with her a few student assistants from Dickinson. During many of Lordi’s summers spent directing at the Pendragon Theatre in New York’s Saranac Lake, there have been Dickinson students gaining extraordinary experience by working at her side.

“These professions complement each other,” she says. “It’s not as though I’m trying to work in fields that are unrelated to my passion.”

Lordi knows of what she speaks. At the beginning of her career, she took a short look at one of theatre’s notorious traditions (working as a waiter or as a “temp” to make ends meet in New York) and opted out.

“People are under the illusion—or delusion—that being in New York City will make your career,” Lordi says. “I’ve done that, but I was unhappy that my focus was not on what I wanted to do. Teaching is the way for me to have that focus.”

So Lordi took her B.A. from Rutgers, and her M.F.A. and D.F.A. degrees from the Yale School of Drama and threw herself into education with the same passion that she feels for the theatre.

Now the time Lordi spends in classrooms and theatres in Carlisle is enriched by professional stints in theatres far and wide. Her productions have included occasional star power like Julie Harris in Amber Patches, along with tours in Germany and Scotland. Lordi has been an assistant director on Broadway (for Redwood Curtain starring Jeff Daniels), and she won the Drama Logue award for best director for her staging of Terra Nova in Los Angeles.

Lordi’s latest project took her into Toronto’s vibrant theatrical community. It also gave her a new identity—playwright—when she wrote a play at the request of her uncle, Adelmo Melecci.

Like Lordi, Melecci combined education with the performing arts. He was a notable composer, and he taught piano for 70 years at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

On his 100th birthday, Melecci announced that he and Lordi would collaborate on a project. She would write a play, and he would compose the music for it. Among other past achievements, he wrote a song for Perry Como and the original music for Disneyland, including “Teddy Bears on Parade,” which, in a bizarre twist, was recently optioned by John Waters for the new film, A Dirty Shame. (Melecci hadn’t heard of the outrageous filmmaker, so Lordi had the unusual task of explaining John Waters to a centenarian.)

This fall Lordi’s play, The Man of Three Centuries, which featured her uncle’s music, was performed as a one-night tribute in Toronto, just one month after Melecci’s death at 105. Fortunately, he had seen a tape of the play when it was workshopped last summer at the Pendragon Theatre and had loved it.

Lordi continues to find ways to blur the boundaries between education and performance. She created a pilot project to bring professional dancers, actors and musicians to the college to work with students. During spring semester the avant-garde director and experimental performer Andre Gregory, who is most famous for the film My Dinner with Andre, will be here to interact with students and to accept the Dickinson College Arts Award.

This kind of project is the continuation of a collaborative theme that runs through Lordi’s academic and theatrical life. Over the years, she has taken the seniors in her advanced-directing class to New Dramatists in New York City, a writers’ colony and research and development center for playwrights, to choose new one-act plays to stage at the college. And last year her students pulled off a world premier in Carlisle with their staging of a new play by a talented and much-heralded new writer, Julia Jordan, who came to campus to work with the students on the production.

“This way, artists and educational institutions help each other. Such a program helps writers, helps performers, and it helps the students. I want to use my time and the resources I have to bring these disciplines together,” she says. “It’s an extraordinary experience for the students—and for me.”

On the Upbeat

Pound makes a musical suggestion to Jamie Greenberg ’06 in his advanced composition class.

Robert Pound teaches, conducts and composes with aplomb
By Sherri Kimmel

It isn’t hard to spot Robert Pound on an airplane. He’s the handsome, young, well-dressed man composing music. He’s quiet about it, though. All of the parts are swirling in his head, which is bowed to scrutinize black notes he is penciling on white manuscript paper laid before him on the plastic tray table.

With a schedule jammed with teaching, conducting and composing, Pound makes use of every precious second. But don’t suspect that he’s out of balance. He loves the juggling act.

If It’s Thursday He Must Be Teaching
Robert Pound is meeting with three of his advanced-composition students: Jamie Greenberg ’06, Rob Isaacs ’06 and Scott Nowicki ’06. Under discussion is Isaacs’ progress on what will eventually be a seven-minute composition for five instruments that will be “read” by the college’s resident group, Alarm Will Sound. Pound moves back and forth between blackboard, where he dissects scales on the board, and piano, where he plays snatches of Isaacs’ work.

“What does it mean if you have five instruments [and only four notes in a chord]?” Pound asks.

“Something gets doubled?” responds Isaacs.

“What do we want to double?” he shoots back.

“I think I’d like to double the F because it comes back later,” replies Isaacs a bit hesitantly.

“Doubling a note gives it more presence [or emphasis],” affirms Pound. “If you have an F that comes back later that’s a great reason for doubling. Now let’s go back to doubling the F and try to make it work.”

Pound’s own experience as a composer informs the class discussion a little later. “I wrote a whole piece this way. Rob, you tapped into my past imagination.”

In a few minutes he cautions, “If you omit these two notes you will get rid of the dissonance. But I’m not trying to get you to write like I do.”

Though this is the day before his deadline for a composition he was commissioned to write, he conducts the class with ease and good humor and dressed in his usual teaching attire—starched shirt with French cuffs, tie and jacket. He makes occasional references to Cover to Cover, the piece he’s composing for the Youth Orchestra of Greater Columbus, Ga., to perform at a library opening in his hometown.

The request came in August when Pound was in Sofia, Bulgaria, for two weeks attending a conducting workshop with the New Symphony of Bulgaria, funded by a college research and development grant.

It was a busy time for the associate professor. “I had to get my classes ready before I left for Bulgaria—my syllabus ready and my private lessons [scheduled]. On my flight back I got a lot of composing done.”

And some curious glances. One passenger asked him, “Can you hear all of that in your head?”

“Making connections through music to people in strange places can be pleasant or awkward,” Pound says with a smile.

When he landed in Harrisburg, he kept on charging.

“I got back, got my students going, and then I went to New Mexico.” Pound spent a few early September days in Albuquerque as assistant conductor for the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra’s performance of music from The Lord of the Rings films. Pound also serves as conductor for Dickinson’s 55-person orchestra, which has a blend of community members and students.

In late October, he began work on an overture-length piece commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for a November 2005 performance. He’s titled it Irrational Exuberance.

And the Beat Goes on
Despite the hectic pace, Pound says, “I’m really happiest when I’m doing all of these things, I love the hyper-stimulation of my work. I would rather be too busy than not at all.”

Pound has been immersed in music since he was 14. This was a bit of a mystery to his parents, a Realtor and a salesman.

He begged his parents to let him take band, then started playing the trumpet and composing. His teacher took note, asked Pound to write a piece for the band and to conduct it in the spring concert. “And so I became a composer and a conductor at the same time. I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

Pound majored in music at the University of North Texas, then earned a master’s and doctorate at The Julliard School, where he studied with contemporary composer Milton Babbitt. Pound came to Dickinson in 1998.

“Here I get to teach composition and theory and conduct—doing all the things I want to do. It’s the right sized department. And I can make my schedule fit so I can take assistant conducting jobs. It’s a primo situation, especially for a composer.”

And also for students of music.

Program is Sweet Music for Students
“Where I went I would not have had a professor for composing until my junior year,” Pound contends. “I would have had a graduate student. Here, as soon as a student begins to study composing, they have me. If I had known about a program like this, I would have been happy to go to Dickinson.”

At Dickinson, he says, students needn’t be lifelong aficionados to study music.

“For students who got a late start, we have a lot to offer. We’ve sent some students to really fine graduate programs. We’ve heard from those programs that our students are well prepared. We can do a lot for motivated students.”

Even for those who don’t pursue a career in music, there is great value to be gained, he says. “They will be better-informed audience members and patrons.”

Pound and other members of his department foster this interest by taking students in the college’s Music Society to New York City, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere to hear professional groups.

Going beyond Carlisle, whether to Bulgaria or Albuquerque or elsewhere, is important for Pound and all members of the campus community, he says.

“[President] Bill [Durden] looks for engagement in the field beyond the walls of the school. This is a place that is not just a shelter. It’s a place that benefits from what we do everywhere else.

Storm Chaser

Ward Davenny critiques student work in the Goodyear Building studios.

Ward Davenny finds inspiration in extreme weather
By David Smith

Limitless horizons unravel where natural light falls from the rafters of an old Carlisle factory roof and lands inside painted-white brick walls.

Gaze into the large charcoal-on-paper drawings that hang in Ward Davenny’s studio in the Goodyear Building on Carlisle’s West Louther Street. See the approaching storm. Feel the wind. Hear the thunder.

Davenny did many years ago. The associate professor of art remembers the day. He was a boy in Cleveland digging in his back yard, making tactile discoveries in the dirt.

“I found what had been kind of a dump from who knows how long ago,” he says. “There were pieces of old silverware and jewelry and watches and doll parts. There was this whole treasure, and I remember being totally absorbed by this cache of stuff.

“All of a sudden I looked up and realized something was very different. One of those dark, black-cloud storms was coming in off Lake Erie. The poplar trees were beginning to really wave in the wind. The whole light had changed. I felt like the whole world had changed.”

In a way it had. Davenny, now 53, is more than an ordinary chaser of storms. In his latest series of large-scale drawings—which will debut at The Trout Gallery in March as part of his multimedia exhibit “Wind Wheels: Serious Weather of the Midwest”—he reveals the power, wonder and almost limitless proportions of formidable atmospheric phenomena. Think tornadoes; then think again.

Think of towering, changing, threatening mountains of cloud, landscapes of air with bright peaks, cellar-dark canyons and swirling gray eddies bursting over the horizon, overtaking the senses, overwhelming a flat, mostly featureless landscape.

“Even when I go out and do the storm chasing, the actual tornado that I might see is oftentimes less evocative,” Davenny says. “It’s what comes before—the dread, the anticipation—that I prefer. It’s just so awe-inspiring.”

Air, light and space have always captivated Davenny, nurturing the Romantic landscape artist within him. He has found inspiration in his memories. In his 1998 pastel Industrial Landscape, fire and smoke concoct a stygian mix not unlike the industrial Cleveland to which his family moved in 1954 from his native Hartford, Conn. His charcoal-on-paper Carlisle Rooftop from 1999 delivers light and shadow in another familiar setting.

Memory is like the gathering storm.

“I think when you have a visual memory and you try to take that memory apart,” Davenny says, “you can’t quite focus in on some particular area of that memory. It remains a large, fluid, shifting kind of thing, depending on where we place ourselves.”

He forges an artistic world where figures are overwhelmed by their surroundings, where weather’s fury comes in sharp relief that, despite its two-dimensional medium, invites people to step inside.

In the storms he has put to paper, Davenny seeks “to make sense out of all this energy coming down and slamming into the earth, all becoming focused on one point.”

Davenny plays energetic electronic dance music—not sounds of wind and rain—while he draws. He gains added inspiration through the wide artistic world he has been able to embrace at Dickinson, where he has taught with an engaging multidisciplinary approach since 1992.

“I teach painting, lithography, etching, woodcut, drawing, figure drawing—it’s really unusual for someone at a school to teach all that,” Davenny says with warm smile that accentuates his Paul Newman-like good looks.

“It’s actually fun when I teach here,” he explains, “because as you teach it gets you involved and starts you thinking in that particular medium. It’s broadened my interests. It’s given me incentive.”

As he thumbs through a stack of striking color photographs he took of Midwestern weather systems, he stresses the importance of a distinct horizon line and gauges the artistic potential in each image.

“I’ve frequently used a photograph as the starting point,” Davenny says. Sometimes, the photograph is a completed image. Other times, a single photograph can serve as a springboard for dozens of drawings.

Davenny, a father of three whose eldest daughter, Maya ’00, is a graduate student in adolescent psychology, has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Hawaii before coming to Dickinson.

Music formed the perfect backdrop for his artistic development. His namesake father, a concert pianist who died in 2002, directed the Hartford School of Music, then the Cleveland Institute of Music, before embarking on a 30-year career as a professor at Yale School of Music.

“I spent a lot of time having to sit at concerts,” remembers Davenny, who received his M.F.A. from Yale in 1982. “If you’re going to be a good boy and sit still, you have to internalize something. The music gave me a comfortable” place to go.

Since beginning his current focus on extreme weather in 1999 he has discovered that no two storm-chasing trips have been alike. “The second time [in 2001] it was just utterly, totally, mind-blowingly different,” Davenny says. “What can happen is so varied—dust storms, microbursts, multiple tornadoes, incredible hail storms, what they call the mothership kind of clouds.”

The “Wind Wheels” exhibition will include innovative use of videos and photographs, all adding to the boundless mystery swirling in the clouds. And if viewers can’t keep their eyes in one place, even as they look into Davenny’s drawings, that’s just as it should be.

“It’s so vast out there,” Davenny says. “If you turn around, or look up, or look slightly in another direction, it’s entirely different, and you just can’t take it all in.”

Dickinson College, PO Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013, 717-243-5121