Choreographer and dancer Erin Gottwald ’98 joins rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 to lead longstanding Short Term unit “Tour, Teach, Perform,” in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools. Video produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

More about ‘Tour, Teach, Perform’

For the second year, the theater and dance department at Bates College and the local arts agency L/A Arts have teamed up to bring the dance program “Tour, Teach, Perform” to local elementary schools in May.

A course created by Bates in 1973, “Tour, Teach, Perform” brings Bates students to public schools in the Lewiston-Auburn region every spring to offer a performance and an arts lesson.

This year’s performance piece is “Welcome to Illyria (a 12th Night Story),” a multidisciplinary adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” The piece was written by Postell Pringle and created by Pringle, choreographer Erin Gottwald and L/A Arts’ director of arts in education, Joshua Vink, who is teaching the course.

“Tour, Teach, Perform” will travel to 11 schools, presenting performances to more than 2,300 students and workshops to more than 1,400. The visits began May 8 and continue through the 23rd. Please note that the school performances are not open to the general public.

Postell Pringle ’98, center rear, and his classmate Erin Gottwald (in green) led these students in creating a piece for the 2013 “Tour, Teach, Perform” unit.

Pringle and Gottwald are performance collaborators and members of the Bates class of 1998. Pringle is a playwright, hip-hop artist-producer, actor and director. He is one of the four Q Brothers, a troupe that creates new musicals, recordings and multi-disciplinary productions using the tools of hip hop.

Pringle recently played the title role of the Q Brothers’ acclaimed multimedia production “Othello: The Remix,” presented in Chicago, London, Germany and Edinburgh. He has performed on and off Broadway, in film and in such television programs as “Rescue Me,” “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, has worked throughout the United States. She has taught dance for more than 15 years, and since 2005 has taught at Spoke the Hub Dancing in Brooklyn, where she is co-director of the Young Artists Program and producer-curator of the annual performance series, Gowanus Guest Room.

“Tour, Teach, Perform” is a course presented annually during Bates’ five-week spring Short Term. Students create a production and learn how to teach an arts lesson to K-6 graders. When they visit the elementary schools, they perform their show and then fan out to teach a 45-minute lesson in 10 classrooms, giving the pupils a chance to explore the elements of performance for themselves.

Bates is an important partner in the arts in Lewiston-Auburn, with hundreds of performances open to the public on campus each year and multiple partnerships off campus. Bates is also home to the internationally renowned Bates Dance Festival, which offers six weeks of performances on and off campus by recognized artists from around the world, as well as the Youth Arts Program for young people from the region.

L/A Arts is the designated arts agency for Lewiston-Auburn. For “Tour, Teach, Perform,” L/A Arts has provided outreach to the local schools and supported transportation and accommodations for Gottwald and Pringle, who were in residence for the first two weeks of Short Term.

Travis Jones ’13, a double major in art and visual culture, and theater, with a minor in dance and a concentration in mathematics, is a standout in competitive diving with passions for architecture and aerial arts. Here he explains how and why he takes on the exploration of things that he loves. Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

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Loring Danforth, professor of anthropology, is this year’s Kroepsch Award recipient. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Asking students to examine their own cultural investments and engage with one another is part of getting them to think like anthropologists, says Danforth, Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology.

When students begin to see the cultural underpinnings of their hobbies and beliefs, “that’s the most fun.”

At the same time, he says, “you get students who are insulted, offended, troubled. That can be really agonizing to work through, but it means you’re hitting on something really important and interesting.”

Danforth’s ability to work through these sometimes-visceral discussions has earned him a devoted following of students throughout his more-than 30 years of teaching at Bates.

This year, he received the college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, established in 1985 by a gift from Robert Kroepsch ’33.

Watch a brief video about Loring Danforth. Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

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His lecture, titled “#Bates2Saudi,” takes place at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 21, in Room 201 of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections, 70 Campus Ave.

The lecture is open to the public at no cost. Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. For more information, please call 207-786-6066.

Proposed and coordinated by Saudi native Leena Nasser ’12, Danforth’s student at the time, the excursion introduced the class to Saudi culture and included meetings with a range of activists, professionals and everyday citizens.

Leading the trip proved to be as much a learning experience for Danforth as his students.

“I was being an anthropologist myself, just taking notes furiously,” he says. At the same time, he recognized that he was “modeling for the students asking questions, doing interviews and taking notes.”

The cultural exchange did not always go smoothly. Danforth recalls an incident in which one of his non-Muslim students attempted to pick up a copy of the Q’uran, an act widely regarded as taboo in the Muslim world.

Danforth used the incident as a teaching opportunity, engaging their Saudi hosts in a debate about how non-Muslims interact with Islam’s sacred text.

Steven Kemper, chair of the Bates anthropology department, says Danforth “brought to this department a notion that anthropology, the content of the discipline, is a moral endeavor…that it is a way of treating people and caring about people.”

Danforth puts the writing on the wall for his students. Photograph by Ryan Donnell.

Nasser agrees. She says, “There is a lot of diversity” among students at Bates, “but not many classes utilize this diversity and perspective in the classroom like Professor Danforth.”

Reflecting on her experience in Danforth’s courses, Claire Jakimetz ’08 of Litchfield, Conn., says, “Every class was a dialogue — a safe, supportive environment to pose questions, dissect puzzles and offer our own explanations.”

Almost a year later, a few students from the Saudi trip continue to meet with Danforth to discuss ways they can use their experience to dispel myths about Saudi Arabia and Muslim culture more broadly.

Together, they have contributed essays and op-eds on the subject. Danforth is contemplating writing a book based on his “furious” notes and observations.

It’s an example of how Bates is the “perfect balance of teaching and scholarship,” he says. “And you need to do both really well and really seriously.”

“To have a community of people who are good scholars and care about teaching has been a blessing.”

Danforth’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Kroepsch Award Selection Committee, the college division chairs, Information & Library Services and the Dean of the Faculty’s Office.

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Photographer and videographer Michael Bradley produced this audio slide show featuring Avril Dunleavy ’15, of Salt Lake City, and Emily Bamford ’15, of East Melbourne, Australia, talking about life as an alpine skier at Bates in the lead-up to the NCAA Skiing East Regional Championships, hosted by the Bobcats on Feb. 22-23, 2013, at Sunday River in Newry, Maine.

Dunleavy is one of four Bates skiers competing at the NCAA National Collegiate Skiing Championships March 6-9 in Middlebury, Vt.

And lest those topics seem a tad stuffy for a student radio show called Chin Wags and Grab Bags with DJ Nosebleed and Friends, Spencer rose, or sank, to her host’s level as needed during the 75-minute interview.

Besides big-picture topics, Spencer offered responses to questions about the new Bates Bobcat (“not unduly aggressive, but looks like he could handle pretty much anything”); her celebrity crush (Alan Rickman); and why she wanted to get the whole thing over with — so she could get  home to watch Downton Abbey.

“I think she’s actually kinda funny. She’s not a suit,” host Clay Baldo ’13 of Santa Fe, N.M., said to his fellow DJ, Corey Gingras ’13 of Eastford, Conn.

Here’s a brief video of the Feb. 10 event and, below, a selection of edited audio clips from the interview.

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Audio clips

Spencer sums up her perspective on what creates a career. “All you need to figure out at any given moment is your next gig,” she says. But, “you have to want to do it.”

Despite a long tenure at Harvard, Bates was not her presidential “safety school.”

What sets Bates students apart is their sense of “collective good,” the feeling of “intellectualism with respect that is among the strongest I’ve seen on any campus.” 

To the question of why, in 21st century terms, should someone go to a liberal arts college, Spencer says it’s about creating a valuable and productive sense of self in the world.

The best way to ride the tidal wave of technology is not to “muddle down the middle” but to “go to two different extremes.”

Working hard or hardly working? It’s no joke: The liberal arts education must address careers, Spencer explains.

More than any other, here’s the one quality that Spencer hopes every Bates student possesses upon graduation: Authenticity.

Responding to a question from Annie Cravero ’13 of the campus organization Bates Energy Action Movement, Spencer explains that responsible investing is about reconciling two important obligations.

The relationship between Bates and Lewiston is “strong and growing,” Spencer says.

Host Clay Baldo ’13 (center) and fellow DJ Corey Gingras listen to President Clayton Spencer during her WRBC radio interview on Feb. 10, 2013. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

You can also check out the time-lapse video of the storm coming and going at Bates by Will Strathmann ’13 of Newtown Square, Pa.

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While this wasn’t a snowball/snowman type of storm, these photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen and Mike Bradley show that Bates made the most of it.

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Several hundred Bates students braved extreme cold to leap into Lake Andrews on Jan. 18, continuing the annual tradition of the Puddle Jump. With commentary by Ellie van Gemeren ’13, co-president of the Bates Outing Club. Produced by Mike Bradley.