News and Events
The Actors from the London Stage, offer three free performances of Shakespeare’s "The Winter’s Tale," September 18-20, 2008
POUGHKEEPSIE, NY—The theater troupe Actors from the London Stage features five British Shakespearean artists from such companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and their weeklong residency at Vassar College will culminate in three free performances of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, on September 18, 19, and 20 at 8:00 pm in the Martel Theater of the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film.
The five classical actors—Erin Brodie, Matthew Douglas, William Hoyland, Robert Mountford, and Eunice Roberts—will perform all the roles in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s play that explores intrigue at the court of the king of Sicilia. The story follows King Leontes (Robert Mountford), who suspects his boyhood friend Polixenes (Matthew Douglas), king of Bohemia, of adultery with Leontes’s queen, Hermoine (Erin Brodie). Polixenes flees to Bohemia with Camillo (William Hoyland), aide of Polixenes, however the pregnant queen is confined to prison, where she gives birth to a daughter, Perdita (Erin Brodie), and is then put to death, despite the strenuous objections of lady of the court, Paulina (Eunice Roberts).
After Perdita is abandoned on a hillside in Bohemia, she is found and raised by shepherds, and sixteen years later meets Polixenes's son, Florizel (Matthew Douglas), whom she hopes to marry. Polixenes discovers the plan and forbids the match. Camillo, still in exile, persuades the couple to fly to Sicilia. There a repentant King Leontes recognizes Perdita as his daughter, and additional surprises ensue.
The Actors from the London Stage (AFTLS) is an educational program that was developed by Homer Swander at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Patrick Stewart as one of the founding artists. The company is now based in London, England, and at the University of Notre Dame. This year's residency will be their fifth visit to Vassar College.
In addition to the performance, the actors will lead 26 workshop sessions in various classes of seven different Vassar departments. A new feature of the AFTLS residency will be special sessions with local middle school students, as well as with Vassar alumnae/i.
“Our company’s aim is to make Shakespeare’s words exert their magic and their power in performance, but we do this in a vital, and perhaps unconventional, way,” explained Notre Dame professor Peter Holland, who is director of AFTLS program. “We have no massive sets to tower over the performers and no directorial concept to tower over the text of Shakespeare’s play. In fact, AFTLS does not have a stage director at all; instead, the play has been rehearsed by the actors, working together to create theatre, cooperating with each other in their imaginative engagement with the play’s words.”
The Office of the Dean of Faculty, along with the departments of Drama and English, are co-sponsoring this performance of The Winter’s Tale at Vassar. For more information and reservations, contact the box office at (845) 437-5584, e-mail boxoffice@vassar.edu, or visit the Box Office in person (located in the Powerhouse Theater) from 1 to 5 pm, Monday through Friday. Reservations are required.
Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.
Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.
Posted by College Relations Wednesday, December 31, 1969
About the Arts
Powerhouse Theater
The Powerhouse Theater is a collaboration between New York Stage and Film and Vassar College. It is dedicated to both emerging and established artists in the development and production of new works for theater and film. During an intense eight-week summer residency on the Vassar campus, up to twenty different projects are publicly presented, typically engaging more than 200 professional artists and theater students. Plays, musicals, and screenplays are presented in a variety of forms: readings, workshops, and fully staged productions. Since the first Powerhouse Theater season in 1985, New York Stage and Film and Vassar have served more than 2,000 artists and over 175,000 audience members through the development and production of artistically exceptional and affordably priced performances.
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
Located just inside Vassar's Main Gate, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center houses the college's permanent collection, over 18,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and glass and ceramic wares, charting the history of art from antiquity to the present. The Permanent Collection Galleries feature 350 works, ranging from the sculpted Head of Viceroy Merymose from His Outer Sarcophagus (Egyptian, c 1375 BCE) in the Antiquities Gallery to Marsden Hartley's oil on canvas Indian Composition (1914-15) in the Twentieth Century Gallery. For information on current and upcoming special exhibitions, self-guided and curriculum-based tours, and group visits, please visit the website. The art center is open to the public, and admission is free.
James W. Palmer Gallery
Located in the College Center in Main Building, the James W. Palmer III '90 Gallery presents eight shows annually, including exhibitions by renowned artists and photographers, studio art faculty and students, and local arts organizations. Recent highlights included Andrea Baldeck’s black-and-white photo exhibit, Touching the Mekong: A Southeast Asian Sojourn, organized by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; the Vassar Haiti Project’s annual exhibition and auction of imported arts and handcrafts; and Design Inside, showcasing the work of Vassar’s College Relations design team. All exhibitions are free and open to the public. For information on upcoming exhibitions, visit the website or call (845) 437-5370.
Music Department
Located in the Belle Skinner Hall of Music, the Martel Recital Hall is wonderfully suited, both acoustically and aesthetically, to music performance. With seating for 500, the Martel is home to the Vassar College Orchestra, Choir, Women's Chorus, Madrigal Singers, and numerous chamber groups and ensembles. The Martel concert schedule routinely includes distinguished guest artists, faculty recitals, senior recitals, and special musical events, such as last year's series of organ recitals celebrating the installation and dedication of the college's superb pipe organ, designed by masterbuilder Paul Fritts. For information on upcoming concerts and events (which are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted), please visit the website.
Dance Department
The Department of Dance sponsors several public performances each year. Among those, the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT) has a series of Works in Progress showings in the fall, a winter Modfest performance in conjunction with the The Department of Music, winter galas at the 1869 Bardavon Opera House, and two All Parents Weekend performances in the spring. The department's Master Class program annually invites at least one ballet and one modern expert to campus in addition to two people in other areas of dance. Public performances and lectures are often associated with these renowned visitors. Guest artists in the past have included: Irina Kolpokova, Arthur Mitchell, Helene Alexopoulos, Gregory Hines, Anna Kisselgoff, Donald Byrd, Edward Villella, Ronald K. Brown, Irene Dowd, Allegra Kent, Gelsey Kirkland, Pilobolus w/Adam Battlestein, Suzanne Farrell, Mummenschantz, Eldar Aliev, Deborah Jowitt, Bill T. Jones, Pascal Rioult, Clinton Luckett of ABT, Bill Irwin, and Donald McKayle. Many of the department's dance performances are in the Frances Daly Fergusson Dance Theater, located in Kenyon Hall.