For the arts at Brandeis, 2006 was a year of eclecticism and a year of change.
It saw the end of the inaugural season of the Brandeis Theater Company, which includes undergraduate and graduate theater arts students, as well as professional actors. The BTC's performances included the Russian dramatist Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide, with a new English translation by Prof. David Powelstock (ROCL) and an outdoors performance of The Bacchae, by the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, during the Festival of the Arts. The Company began its second season this fall.
Several students founded the Free Play Theater Cooperative, a student-run undergraduate theater troupe that staged four plays in unusual and novel locations across campus. Club leaders said the group will mostly produce experimental and topically controversial works.
"We thought that Brandeis students deserved to have a true alternative," Josh Mervis '08, one of the club's founders, said, "which would mean they could do productions on the high-quality level of the Theater Department while still maintaining the flexible and normal life schedule of the [Undergraduate Theater Collective]."
In November, the University unveiled Andy Warhol's 1980 portrait of Justice Louis Brandeis in honor of Brandeis' 150th birthday. The unveiling took place during a festive party in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium, celebrating the life and memory of the University's namesake.
A successful new group, the Punk, Rock n' Roll Club, packed Cholmondeley's and other campus spaces with a series of underground-music concerts, filling the gap left by WBRS Waltham, which before last year's Student Activity Fund reforms hosted small concerts with some regularity. This past semester included shows by acts Oh No! Oh My!, Girl Talk, Mount Eerie and others.
Student Events brought the popular roots-rock band O.A.R. to the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center in April, but abandoned its usual format in October, bringing two shows featuring the smaller acts Broken Social Scene, an orchestral-indie band, and Flogging Molly, who blend traditional celtic music with punk rock.
In the fine arts, the Rose Art Museum hosted large exhibits featuring the popular New York painter Dana Schutz, works by arts faculty, a large instillation by Clare Rojas and important works of video art by Vito Acconci, Warhol and others. At the Women's Studies Research Center, "Ricas y Famosas" featured photographs of Mexico's wealthiest housewives.
The Lydian String Quartet wrapped up their five-year study and concert series, "Vienna and the String Quartet," and MusicUnitesUs series brought to campus Sol y Canto, a pan-American group representing the Nueva Canci?n movement, and Kayhan Kalhor and Erdal Erzincan, who blend Persian and Turkish musical traditions.
The third annual SunDeis Film Festival screened and honored works by dozens of student filmmakers from across the country, and hosted the actors Celeste Holm, Margaret O'Brien, S. Epatha Merkerson and Jesse L. Martin.
The transgender playwright and performance artist Kate Bornstein performed and spoke to a number of classes in October. The International Business School hosted in April a two-day symposium on the popular and innovative computer game Civilization that included a number of experts on gaming and technology, including, via satellite, the game's creator, Sid Meier.
The annual Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts brought over 150 artists to campus in May, concluding with an advance screening of the film A Scanner Darkly, based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick.
-Jonathan Fischer