Warning: This article contains references to racial and sexual violence that some readers may find upsetting.
“I will not be quiet.”
- Angie Epifano, “An Account of Rape at Amherst College,” The Amherst Student (2012)
Yagil Eliraz, stage director and professor of theatre and dance, facilitated the “Re-Imagining the Greeks” Conference.
Amherst Follows T-shirts are a subtle and wry comment on athletic culture at Amherst that also suggest how empty slogans are. You could go as far as to say it’s satirical pop art. Deemed offensive by some athletes and sported by others, you could say they’ve trumped the “Spring Carnival” shirts and started a miniature movement — making students from all walks of life reflect, with humor, on the contradictions of programs here at Amherst. This week, A&L is talking to the creators of Amherst Follows, Aditi Krishnamurthy ’18 and Megan Do ’18.
Ben Kissinger ’19 is directing a one-act play for his directing studio class with Ronald Bashford, who he worked under last year in his first production, “The Cherry Orchard.”
Q: How did you come to directing and theater? Do you do other arts?
When I think about the sometimes-beautiful intersections between settling down and disappointment, Middlemarch by George Eliot comes to mind. It was the first book I read for an English class at Amherst, and it has so much to say about time because it spans many years of a life in a town. The narrator often makes observations about time and describes how the characters observe their own lives and their own time. “For a while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” Eliot writes.
Bryan Doniger, who you may have spotted on the first floor of Frost in a camo baseball cap and Wilco t-shirt, embraces his job as Marsh Art’s House Resident Counselor wholeheartedly. The deep love he has expressed for the house shines through his varied contributions over the past two years, first as a resident and then as a resident counselor.
When I started trying to write about how I processed the election, I found myself incoherently, guiltily stumbling over acknowledging my privileges in a way that centered them and sounded both self-righteous and oddly self-congratulatory.
