Featuring performers from Bates and from around the region, the fourth annual F.A.B Winter Dance Showcase takes place at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 8, at the Franco-American Heritage Center, 46 Cedar St., Lewiston.

This year’s showcase features music and dance ranging from contemporary to classical to national genres. A collaboration between the Franco-American Heritage Center and Bates College, the F.A.B. (Franco American-Bates) Winter Dance Showcase provides opportunities for regional dance artists to perform in Lewiston and for local audiences to have access to a wide variety of dance presented in a historic downtown venue.

Admission is $12 for general seating and $10 for students and senior citizens. For reservations, please call 207-689-2000 or purchase tickets online.

The Bates College contribution includes a Nepalese dance performed by two students, a “Bates Bollywood” number featuring 26 dancers and the a cappella singing group TakeNote.

Local and regional dance artists taking part are Jenn Bourgeault, the Androscoggin Ballet, Heather Baur, Sara Smith, Trish Harms and Christine Simes, and Caribeth Klemundt.

The concert also features Bates pianist James Parakilas, violinist Mary Hunter and cellist Steve Witkin performing the Piano Trio in A minor by Maurice Ravel.

The Bates College Modern Dance Company performs works developed at the college by renowned guest choreographers in three concerts in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.: 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15; 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16; and 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17.

Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for senior citizens and non-Bates students. For more information, please call 207-786-6161 or visit the online box office.

Choreographers Janis Brenner of New York City, Kellie Lynch of Connecticut and Tania Isaac of Philadelphia have developed dances with Bates students in the course “Dance Repertory Performance.” Bringing sharply distinctive creative processes and visual styles, each has a piece on the November program.

Also featured is a lyrical jazz piece by Portland choreographer Tina Rae Kelly, who has worked with Bates students in an extracurricular capacity.

Finally, in a notable exception to an annual concert typically dedicated to works by faculty and visiting professional choreographers, Bates junior Marlee Weinberg of Tampa, Fla., will present a piece she created.

Artistic director of Janis Brenner & Dancers, Brenner is a dancer, choreographer, singer and teacher. Her work has been commissioned or restaged at more than 40 companies and colleges throughout the world, and she has received such honors for her work as the New York Dance and Performance Award, the Lester Horton Award for Choreography in Los Angeles and the Leach Fellowship for Outstanding Achievement.

Since 1990 Brenner has performed with the pioneering composer and singer Meredith Monk. “Lost Found Lost,” her Bates piece, is set to music by Monk.

Based in New Haven, Conn., Lynch works with choreographer-dancer Ariel Cohen Gonzalez in the two-woman company “slipperyfish dance.” Slipperyfish dance received a 2008 Choreographic Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which the pair will use to introduce their work to communities throughout New England.

Lynch dances with Nazorine Ulysse & Dancers and Bronwen MacArthur’s MacArthur Dance Project. She is also a member of Heidi Henderson’s “elephant JANE dance.” In summer 2008 she premiered new work at the Built on Stilts Festival, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Fledgling Festival, Providence, R.I.

A regular presence at the renowned Bates Dance Festival, Isaac has presented work with her company, Tania Isaac Dance, throughout the U.S., Japan, England and the Caribbean. Originally from the island of St. Lucia, she offers a unique marriage of Caribbean and contemporary movement, music and aesthetics.

Isaac has taught at Temple University and Bryn Mawr College and is a Commonwealth Speaker with the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. She received a 2004 Rocky Award for her piece “Home Is Where I Am,” and her video work has been screened at video dance festivals in North Carolina and Argentina.

Kelly is a jazz and hip-hop choreographer who has been working with Bates students as an extracurricular activity. Her “Three Out of Four Ain’t Bad” will feature a completely different Bates cast and a different style from the rest of the program.

“It’s been exciting to have so many new dancers volunteer for this piece,” says Carol Dilley, director of the Bates dance program. “It is a great starting place for first-years who are just finding their way into the Bates dance community.”

Weinberg performs her duet, “My Eyes on You,” with Jake Lewis, a senior from Katonah, N.Y. Minoring in dance, Weinberg has attended the Bates Dance Festival since her first year at Bates and has choreographed a variety of works in her time here.

Performances take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Oct. 30, 31 and Nov. 1; and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 1 and 2, in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. Admission is $6 general admission and $3 for senior citizens and non-Bates students. For more information, please visit www.batestickets.com or call 207-786-6161.

Winner of the 1986 New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play, A Lie of the Mind depicts two families joined by marriage and torn apart by a brutal act of domestic violence. It’s the darkly humorous story of archetypal American characters trying to piece together their lives while dealing with rage, vengeance, disillusionment and abandonment.

See a short video about Dissanayake’s mainstage production below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“The play is universal in its dysfunctionality of families,” says Dissanayake. “We all know people like that. It’s just how some families behave. The two families seem to avoid the reality of what’s happened.”

Where Bates’ mainstage productions are usually directed by a member of the theaterfaculty, Dissanayake directs A Lie of the Mind as a part of her senior directing thesis.

“This is very rare,” says Katalin Vecsey, lecturer in the theater department and vocal director for theater productions. “I’ve been here for 14 years and this is the first time that a student has been invited by the theater department to direct a mainstage production.” Dissanayake has already acted in a show and directed several others, and directed a short film for a filmmaking course. “Sulo was invited to direct the main stage because she has displayed not just imagination and intelligence, but rarer qualities like organizational skills, dependability, keen listening abilities, and interpersonal warmth and care,” says Paul Kuritz, professor of theater and Dissanayake’s thesis advisor.

Coming from southern California and Montana, the play’s two families are connected by the marriage of Jake and Beth. An incident of spousal abuse leaves Beth brain-damaged at the beginning of the play.

The play follows the two families in their struggle with Beth’s brain damage and Jake’s retribution. The families mirror each other, and the audience sees that Jake’s out-of-control nature is influenced by his environment and his family.

Dissanayake chose the play in part because of its wit. “Shepard uses a completely brilliant humor to comment on how absurd families can be,” she says. “It’s very dark but absolutely hysterical.

A Lie of the Mind has contemporary young people in the main roles but in socioeconomic conditions very unlike those of the typical Bates student,” says Kuritz. “From underneath the superficial differences, the common brokenness of all people emerges.”

Shepard is an American playwright who acts and directs in many of his own plays. In 1979, his play Buried Child received a Pulitzer Prize for drama. He has been nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actor’s Guild Award. “A Lie of the Mind,” says Vecsey, has “a lasting impact. It will make you think about how people live their lives.”

Dances created by students and by visiting choregrapher Kellie Lynch are on the program for a Bates College Modern Dance Company concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4, in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

Taking place during the college’s annual Parents & Family Weekend, the event is open to the public at no cost.

For more information, please call 207-786-6161 or visit the online box office.

In addition to the work by Lynch, one of four choreographers coming in to work with the Bates dance program this fall, the concert features a dance in the classical Indian form called “Bharatanatyam,” a new duet created by Bates students and the reprise of a student work created last spring and accompanied by accordion.

“The most important aspect of the Parents & Family Weekend show is its diversity,” says assistant professor Carol Dilley, director of the dance program. In addition to department-sponsored work, the concert includes dances made “by students who are not necessarily regular participants in the modern dance program. It is the most open showcase of our whole season.”

Lynch is working with 11 students in a Bates repertory performance class on a piece titled “What If I Don’t Want To,” featuring a lighting design by Justin Moriarty. The piece will be shown this weekend as a work in progress and performed with full costumes and lighting design in November.

Lynch is one of three choreographers with whom the class is developing material for the its fall concert, scheduled for Nov. 15-17; the others are Janis Brenner, of New York City; and Tania Isaac, of Philadelphia. In addition, Portland choreographer Tina Rae Kelly is working with students on a fourth piece for the November program on an extracurricular basis.

Also on the program: Abritee Dhal, a junior from Westford, Mass., performs a piece in the Bharatanatyam genre that she learned during the summer with her teacher, Ranjani Saigal.

Marlee Weinberg, a junior from Tampa, Fla., and Jake Lewis, a senior from Katonah, N.Y., offer a duet created for this performance, informed by Weinberg’s summer at the Bates Dance Festival and Lewis’ introduction last year to contact improvisation.

Barbara Byers, a junior from Elkins, W.Va., shows a piece she created last spring, accompanied by Byers’ own accordion music.

Lynch works with choreographer-dancer Ariel Cohen Gonzalez in the two-woman company “slipperyfish dance.” Slipperyfish dance received a 2008 Choreographic Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which the pair will use to introduce their work to communities throughout New England.

Lynch currently dances in New Haven, Conn., with Nazorine Ulysse & Dancers and Bronwen MacArthur’s MacArthur Dance Project. She is a member of Heidi Henderson’s “elephant JANE dance.” In summer 2008 she premiered new work at the Built on Stilts Festival, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Fledgling Festival, Providence, R.I.

Other Bates students performing in the concert are first-year student Kristen Gavin of Lewiston; sophomores Sarah O’Loughlin of Big Flats, N.Y., Lindsay Swan of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Elizabeth Sweet of San Francisco; junior Katie Mack of Trumbull, Conn.; and seniors Samantha Coran of Philadelphia, Kelly Griffin of Turners Falls, Mass., Katherine Reilly of Merrimack, N.H., Elizabeth Rogers of Mansfield, Mass., and Kimberly Russell of Old Lyme, Conn.

For Sulo Dissanayake ’09, the pitfalls of filmmaking came into focus when, for the course “Acting and Directing for the Camera,” she directed a scene at the Blue Goose — and then pretty much had to scrap it.

Paul Kuritz, a theater professor who is advancing film production in Bates’ curriculum, assigned the 12 students in the course to adapt and shoot a scene from a feature film. Dissanayake chose a pivotal encounter from Neil LaBute’s 2003 movie The Shape of Things. This being a wintertime course, Dissanayake brought LaBute’s outdoor scene inside, to a barroom.

“I thought the Goose would be ideal,” she says, and the management was agreeable. However, as Dissanayake explains, “I didn’t expect half the town to be at the bar on a Saturday morning. So our audio got completely screwed,” as bar hubbub obscured the actors’ dialogue.

She ended up shooting the scene on a set on campus.

Kuritz’s students in Theater 371 chose source films worthy of any Netflix queue, from the classic (Rebel Without a Cause) to the hip and funny (This Is Spinal Tap) to the teeth-clenching (Misery). As directors, they had to do it all, from logistics to running the digital video camera to guiding the actors, who were also taking the course.

Kuritz has taught Theater 371 twice. He prepared himself by taking film production courses at the Rockport, Maine, school now called the Maine Media Workshops, and made his own short in 2006. (Premiered this year, A New Life will be shown at this summer’s Bayou City Inspirational Film Festival in Texas.)

Film studies is well-established in Bates’ curriculum, and the late rhetoric professor Robert Branham taught documentary filmmaking in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, after a gap of a decade and thanks largely to Kuritz, film production is again a fixture. Since January, theater majors who meet a variety of requirements, including Theater 371 and programs off campus, have been able to work toward a senior thesis in narrative film production.

The time is ripe, Kuritz says. “More people watch films and make films than watch or make theater.”

Continuity was a key lesson, explains Lana Smithner ’10, who aimed high for her project and chose a scene from the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. For instance, as she moved the camera to capture different angles, she had to shift the set and the actors, too, so they would appear to stay in the same places.

Similarly, actors must be able to play a scene exactly the same way through different shots so that they all fit together in the editing room. “Everyone thinks that acting for the camera, you can be more natural and real,” Smithner says.

“But the big thing that we learned right off was, it’s actually the opposite, because the way shots are composed is very fake.”

Illustration by Marty Braun

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stephen Lattanzi

“I’ve always had a plan for myself,” says Stephen Lattanzi ’08 of Winchester, Mass. And ever since he performed in a production of Robin Hood in second grade, theater has been central to that plan.

At Bates, Lattanzi has acted in eight stage productions, often in lead roles such as Angelo in this spring’s production of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”. One of two winners of a regional competition in the 2008 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, he’ll compete at the national level in April.

“Steve certainly has the talent and the drive to make a go of it as an actor,” says Martin Andrucki, a theater professor who has directed Lattanzi. “He’s a pleasure to work with, because he’s so dedicated and so creative.” [More...]

A dark romantic comedy about the nature of time and the human condition, Gillette Elvgren’s play Five Cups of Coffee will be performed at Bates College at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, Nov. 1-3, and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 3 and 4.

Performances take place in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for seniors, Bates faculty and staff, and non-Bates students. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz directs Five Cups of Coffee for the Bates theater department’s annual fall production. The college will enter the production in the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival, Bates’ first entry since 1988.

“This is a love story involving a boy and a girl of the age of Bates students,” Kuritz says. “The characters wrestle with a dilemma common to many college students — whether to commit themselves or not, given the rotten state of the world and the troubled history of their own parents’ marriages.”

The protagonist is Hal, a man plagued by the metaphysical implications of time: time past, time lost, future time, no time. He flees his wedding and his bride-to-be, Rita, and takes refuge in Milo’s Gourmet Coffee Shop, where he drinks his very first cup of coffee.

As the story unfolds, Hal and Rita get back together, but he continues his search for the sources and implications of human identity. “The course of their courtship takes them from Milo’s to the battlefields of Iraq, to a hospital emergency room, to the Gates of Paradise,” Kuritz explains.

“Various crises within Hal’s family drive him to seek four more cups of coffee over the coming years, and each cup marks a step in his development.”

So Milo and his coffee shop anchor the action. Elvgren’s experience watching an adult colleague drink coffee for the first time provided the hook for the piece, the playwright explains. But the deeper themes reflect the author’s own fascination with the concept of time.

“One of the enchanting things about consciousness is how it allows us poor human beings to live in different stages of time at any single moment,” Elvgren says. “We have been blessed, and perhaps cursed, with the angst of memory and the fear and delight of the future, all jumbled together in our short span of time on this Earth.”

The play was premiered by the professional Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado, Calif., in 2006.

The playwright, who will attend the play’s opening at Bates, is a professor in theater arts at Regent University, Virginia Beach, Va. Previously, as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, he headed the M.F.A. directing program and served as staff director for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival.

He is co-founder and resident playwright for Saltworks Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, as well as resident writer for Children’s Ministries, Scripture Union, Philadelphia.

Elvgren has been writing for more than 30 years. His plays have been produced by professional theater companies throughout the United States and Canada. There have been approximately 8,000 performances of Elvgren scripts.

Five students who conducted international research with the support of Phillips Fellowships from Bates present their research in October. Presentations begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, and Monday, Oct. 15, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

They are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-753-6952.

Three Phillips Fellows are featured in the Oct. 10 event.

A senior biochemistry major from St. Catherine, Jamaica, Shawna-Kaye Lester’s presentation is titled “Movement of Jah People.” Lester participated in a dance project with the Ndere Troupe, first in New York and then in the troupe’s hometown of Kampala, Uganda. There she was able to observe the dance styles of the African diaspora as they relate to African traditions and Uganda’s newest refugee populations.

Two seniors present “Addressing the Cycle of Poverty Through Education in Cambodia.” Anthony Begon is a resident of Peabody, Mass., double-majoring in political science and African American studies. Political science major Ross Van Horn hails from Highland Park, N.J. The pair will discuss their work with the nongovernmental organization Globalteer, teaching English to children in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the practical perspective on human rights challenges in Southeast Asia the experience provided.

At 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 15, two senior Phillips Fellows describe their research.

An African American studies major from Brooklyn, N.Y., Leeanne Cunningham presents “Racism, Discrimination and Prejudice of African Descendents in Brazil.” Cunningham will recount her visits to several “quilombos,” Brazilian communities founded by escaped slaves, as she explored how the communities have evolved in a shifting cultural context.

A physics major from Bansbari, Nepal, Suresh Rana presents “Exploring Bangladeshi Communities to Understand Cross-cultural Perspectives and Religious Interpretations of Cancer and Cancer Treatment.” Rana visited various sites in Bangladesh to investigate access to cancer treatment and compare approaches by different cultures and religions.

Phillips Student Fellowships at Bates support students who design exceptional international or cross-cultural projects focusing on research, service-learning, career exploration or a combination of the three.

The Phillips Student Fellowships, Phillips Faculty Fellowships and Phillips Professorships at Bates are part of the Phillips Endowment Program, an initiative of awards, honors and opportunities funded by a $9 million endowment bequest made to the college in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, fourth president of Bates, and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.