Museum of Art

Join us for a viewing of Divide Light, a film documenting the opera by artist Lesley Dill, whose work is featured in the exhibition Lesley Dill: Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me, followed by a discussion with the director, Ed Robbins.

Divide Light documents Dill’s opera created in collaboration with composer Richard Marriott. It contemporizes the works of poet Emily Dickinson, linking the groundbreaking ideas of the mid-19th century American Transcendental movement to innovations and global concerns in today’s rapidly changing world.

Divide Light examines the nature of emotion and story-telling in contemporary society through the lens of Dickinson’s 19th century philosophical poetics. It challenges and expands the traditional opera format through its sparser and more closely developed presentation. The opera features eight operatic voices, and a string quintet. Its striking visual elements feature large projections on a back screen of images combining Dill’s edgy and evocative black and white photographs with text from Dickinson’s poetry. Poems stream, scroll, flash, twirl, pop out, edge in, seep out, fade in, fall down, and rise up on the screen. The performers sing Dickinson’s words and wear them scrawled across their costumes.

Ed Robbins is an award winning Director-Writer-Producer and Digital Journalist.  Drawn to stories of individuals in the face of adversity, he’s travelled extensively across America and internationally to countries that include: Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Iraq, India, Liberia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Rwanda, South Sudan and Syria.  The topics have ranged from social justice, crime, frontline war, the environment, human rights, religion, science, to the performing and visual arts.  Over the past two decades, he’s written-produced numerous hour programs for television outlets that include PBS, Discovery Channel, TLC, Nat Geo Channel, ABC, NBC, and in the UK: BBC2 and Channel 4. As a Digital Journalist and reporter his videos have been commissioned by the NY Times, Time Magazine, and the International Reporting Project.  In addition, The NY Times stationed him at their Pakistan and Afghanistan Bureaus to report stories and train local Afghan staff in video storytelling.  He’s been an Adjunct Professor at Columbia for the past three years, where he’s taught video storytelling in the Newsroom class.  He holds a BA in Fine Arts from SUNY Stony Brook.