Award-winning performers and an original Little Mermaid — available now in — highlighted ����ֱ��’s Spring Dance Concert in March.����

The award-winners from the previous month’s Youth America Grand Prix in San Diego were twelfth-graders Eddy Pérez Trimiño (first in the Men’s Senior Contemporary Competition) and KraShane Sims (second in both the Men’s Senior Contemporary Competition and the Men’s Senior Classical Competition).

In the Spring Concert they and the other ����ֱ�� Dance majors performed a forty-seven-minute piece based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, rather than on the Disney film.

Though ����ֱ�� Dance instructor Jonathan Sharp conceived of this brand-new Little Mermaid, Dance Department Chair Ellen Rosa-Taylor speaks proudly of how the performance highlighted not only how well her teachers work with one another, but also their versatility in teaching numerous dance styles. ��

“Jonathan wrote it,” Rosa-Taylor says, “but he asked several of our teachers to choreograph different parts. So the piece as a whole made room for different types of dance and different musical genres.”��

“The different dance and music styles served as voices distinguishing the characters from one another,” Sharp explains. “For example, when the story focused on the Prince, the voice was classical. But when the Sea Witch was at the center, we went very rock-and-roll.”����

He mentions himself and his teaching colleagues Hai Cohen, Yuka Fukuda, Rosa-Taylor, and Leslie Stevens as contributing choreographers.����

“There was such a broad range of composers represented! We had modern operatic music by Gian Carlo Menotti, from Amahl and the Night Visitors, and we had classical music by Tchaikovsky and Prokoviev. We had John Mayer, who’s obviously not classical at all.”��

Sharp pauses.

“Oh! And I shouldn’t forget to mention our 2015 alum, Juan Miguel Posada, who’s a USC graduate. Juan came up from LA to choreograph one of the dances to a Missy Eliott song, doing the whole thing in two hours!”����

A Truly Progressive Dance Department

Sharp’s excitement is justified by a concert whose audience enjoyed beautiful dancing and imaginative choreography. Yet spectators were unaware of the behind-the-scenes work that makes the ����ֱ�� Dance Department such a progressive force. In February, to supplement the brilliant work of her permanent faculty, Rosa-Taylor invited Academy graduate Kenny Borchard (2008) and Mauro Villanueva, the Directors of , to visit campus to work with the Dance seniors on a piece for the concert.

Joffrey Texas toward gender nonconformity, and even the teacher/student relationship. Borchard and Villanueva will help if a male student wants to study pointe, and they also level the teacher/student relationship by stating their pronouns at the beginning of class.��

Traditionally, the teacher is the master of all students irrespective of gender; therefore, in an important sense the teacher stands beyond gender distinctions. But when the Joffrey Texas Directors announce that their pronouns are he/him, they make themselves vulnerable to a mode of categorization to which dancers have always been vulnerable.��

“Telling students that my pronouns are he/him,” Borchard says, “is a simple way of telling them there’s an honored place for every gender identity in the class.”

Honoring a dancer’s individuality takes on special importance when one recognizes that, as Rosa-Taylor points out, “A dance career is demanding, and you need to recognize the limits on how hard you can push yourself. If you don’t learn to self-regulate, the lesson will be taught to you in a way you don’t want to hear and when you’re least ready to hear.”

So Rosa-Taylor invited to Zoom in from New York last fall to teach about yoga and healing, and she has had 2000 Academy graduate Wendy Reinert teach some Zoom sessions. Reinert, whose supports dancers “advocating for better working conditions” and “all the things that go with being more than just a body,” credits , , and with doing similar work.����

Reinert teaches body neutrality, not body positivity, because “it’s unrealistic to insist on always loving one’s body, especially when injured or exhausted. Acknowledging and appreciating one’s body for what it can do, not focusing on and trying to change its flaws, makes all the difference.��

“Body neutrality is about understanding your body’s capabilities and needs,” she continues. “It’s about building trust and connection between mind and body so you can work with your body, not against it. When you know yourself as a human being and you know your values and strengths, whether or not you book a gig you’ve auditioned for doesn’t affect your self-worth or identity as a dancer.”

The results of the exceptional education given to ����ֱ�� dancers were displayed in their , when all the people who attended counted themselves fortunate.

The post A Truly Progressive Dance Department appeared first on ����ֱ��.

Daniela Rendon Alonso, a 2016 Academy alum, recently sat down to describe her duties as an AEL intern for 2021-2022. Not surprisingly, the former Dance major’s duties encompass teaching classes in her discipline (including Dance History) to ����ֱ�� students. In addition, she teaches five-and-six-year-olds and eight-and-nine-year-olds in the Children’s Dance Program.

But as much as Dani loves being active, the sitting she did for the purpose of talking about her work is something that the internship also gives her plenty of time for–though it’s certainly not inactive sitting.

“I interview students about their applications for grants,” she explained. “Then after a grant has been awarded I regularly check in with the student to make sure the project is on track, and even after the project is completed there’s more interviewing in order to learn how the student’s growth as an artist has been affected by the extra creative work. I also need to track the Master Classes that AEL funds to find out how they’ve benefited students.”

She pauses to smile.

“It’s a lot.”

Dani smiles because she loves the work, not only in the moment but as a means for reflection on her future. She remains passionate about dance, and a career in choreography is a possibility. But the opportunities to work in arts administration or otherwise to support the arts are limitless. The AEL internship is giving her a taste of those opportunities at a time when she has finally understood that “just doing science isn’t going to cut it for me.”

Studies Abroad

Just doing science had seemed plausible as she neared the end of her three years at the Academy. She led the school’s Environmental Club and was looking forward to a college major in Environmental Science. She had previously considered a double major in Dance and Environmental Science. But tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee–“I tore it a hundred percent”–during her junior year had caused her to miss the auditions for college dance departments.

She chose to pursue her Environmental Science studies in the Netherlands. Surgery had enabled her knee to heal, so she was also able to dance with the ��company, “which was really special to me.”

On the other hand, Dani found that her university was not so special.

“After ����ֱ��, studying at a place where the teachers didn’t care about the students came as a shock. There was an earthquake in Mexico, but no one at the university said a word about it to me or to any of the other Mexican students. You can’t imagine that kind of indifference at ����ֱ��.”

She was also disappointed to find that the university had inflated its reputation as an “international” institution.

“If ‘international’ means that almost everybody is from the Netherlands, Germany, or France, okay, but. . .”

Let’s Talk About Vitamin D

With a little initiative, however, Dani succeeded in finding the breadth of internationalism that the Academy’s population of students from some three dozen countries provides.

“I spent a semester in Berlin,” she recalls. “And I have to say that if ����ֱ�� were to become a city, it would be Berlin. The people were so unapologetically goofy that it really felt like I was back home in Idyllwild.”

In the strictest sense, Dani’s home is Mexico City. Yet her energetic curiosity about the world beyond Mexico City has helped make her comfortable in other places. These include Iceland, where she spent another semester.

“In Iceland the natural environment is incredibly beautiful. I loved it there even though I had to take Vitamin D because on a winter day you only get two hours of light–which I can’t bring myself to call sunlight because it’s not bright enough! The project I chose for my semester there was interning at an ecovillage called Sólheimar, fifty miles south of the capital, Reykjavík.”

The Sólheimar identifies it as “the first community of its kind in the world, where so called able and disabled people live and work together” and “the first community in Scandinavia where organic cultivation is practiced.”

“Among other things,” Dani says, “I helped out with arts projects.”

Dani has probably stopped taking Vitamin D now that she’s back in Southern California. But she is still in a beautiful natural environment and still helping out with arts projects, and still in love with her work.

The post Enterprising Dancer appeared first on ����ֱ��.

“When I was at ����ֱ��, I wanted to write very serious��things about adult problems,”��Amber Morrell��says.

TikTok, the��Game’s Not Locked

The post Her Method Is Magic appeared first on ����ֱ��.

Cooper Dai admits that he paid for his four hours of translation work with twelve hours of sleep.

Cooper, whose Chinese given name is��Jingze, spent his last three years of high school at the Academy. He had come in 2010 from Dalian, in northeastern China.��Dalian sits��on the��southern tip of the��Liaodong Peninsula, a little more than two hundred miles west of��Pyongyang, North Korea.��

The post A Graduate from 2013 Returns appeared first on ����ֱ��.

The Academy has bought fifteen hundred tests, developed by����and approved for emergency use by the��Food and Drug Administration. They test for two antibodies: immunoglobulin IgG and immunoglobulin IgM. The presence of lgG indicates exposure to COVID-19 and that the body has prepared an antibody response, while the presence of lgM indicates that the body is currently responding with new antibodies. Antibody testing is not confirmation testing. But the Academy will use the tests to screen students once the ����ֱ�� campus opens to them, perhaps as early as October 1.

Explaining��the achievement��to the ����ֱ�� Vice President of Student Operations, Justin Barrett, Brockman speaks of “thousands of confirmation��tests��on the antibody testing” with “no��false��negatives.”

Barrett adds that the tests have “a three-percent��false��positive��rate, so with the size of our student body we could have up to eight��false��positives��at the start of the year. But we think that’s an acceptable inconvenience to be able to give��tests��on site with a very low false negative rate. Since anyone who��tests��positive��will be sent for confirmation testing immediately, a student with a��false��positive��would only have to spend two or three days in isolation while waiting for the confirmation��test��results, assuming they’re negative.”

Moving by Leaps of Imagination

The story of the efficiency of the��Confirm BioSciences��rapid finger tests is good news for an ����ֱ�� community determined to remain safe during the pandemic. But the story of how an Academy Visual Arts graduate became involved in the tests is great news for anyone who believes that an ����ֱ�� education teaches creativity and adaptability.

Al Brockman was born in Bakersfield, California, and raised partly in Buenos Aires. At the Academy he focused on graphic design, while signaling the versatility that would define his career: for his Senior Show he converted the campus gallery to a restaurant and served meals.

After graduating, Al nearly attended��the California��Culinary Academy, in San Francisco.

“But instead I went to the Bahamas,” he says. “Did lots of scuba diving. That’s hard to beat when you’re nineteen.”����

In��the Bahamas, it started to become clear that Al would move through life less by measured steps than by leaps of imagination.

“I met some people who were doing risk assessment for companies entering foreign countries. Risk assessment is huge for companies like that because a foreign country’s laws won’t be the same as at home, and as a foreign entity you wonder how much the government cares about protecting you.” ��

Al’s interviewer stops him.

“Wait. Suddenly you’re involved in risk assessment? You were nineteen. And an artist. And a cook. And you’re having fun scuba diving.” ��

“I was scuba diving,” Al says. “But they could see I knew my way around a boat, and around machinery in general.” ��

He shrugs.

“They saw I was capable.”

The foreign countries where Al did risk assessment were in Latin America, for which he may have had an affinity because of his��childhood time in Argentina. When the business switched to the Middle East, he got out.

“I’d been doing security work—securing assets—so moving into law enforcement seemed natural.”

He pauses.

“You’re following this?” he asks��his��interviewer.

The interviewer nods.

Al joined the Sheriff’s Department in Tulare County, just north of his home county, Kern.

“The most interesting part of my work was done together with the National Park Service in��Sequoia National Park��and��Kings Canyon National Park,��on both law enforcement and environmental restoration. Drug-manufacturing labs put a lot of harmful chemicals into the environment.”

One More Career Change

A more conventional law enforcement action would lead to another career change for Al.

“In 2015, apprehending a break-in suspect who was also wanted for murder, I shattered two vertebrae. I recovered my ability to walk, but I was done with active law enforcement. The Sheriff’s Department paid to retrain me, so—remember that I already had experience with boats—I earned my captain’s license.”

At this point, Al’s leaps from career to career start to look more like flight.

“I met someone who wanted to build a semi-submersible vessel—kind of a half-submarine. I helped out with my old ����ֱ�� graphic design skills. Then. . . Look, I’ll skip the ‘I met so-and-so, who introduced me to so-and-so’ part. Basically, computer-assisted imaging of big objects like boat parts isn’t fundamentally different from imaging microscopic entities like viral particles. That’s how I’ve gone from boat captain to Chief Bio Safety Officer��for��.”

He takes a breath.

“Credit��Confirm BioSciences��with developing the rapid finger tests, but credit the��Innovative Bioanalysis labs with designing how to validate the tests. If you bring a couple hundred teenagers to this beautiful campus in October, you’ve got to keep them and the teachers and staff safe. I’m proud to��help.”

Twenty years on from ����ֱ��, this alum’s��past��includes cooking,��scuba diving, risk assessment,��law enforcement, skippering boats, and designing a half-submarine. His present is rewarding and exciting enough. But you wonder what the next twenty years hold for someone with Al Brockman’s curiosity, imagination, and flexibility.

The post Determined to Remain Safe appeared first on ����ֱ��.

Mara Schoner and Mark Yardas, regular ����ֱ�� Foundation volunteers and parents of two alumni, created MCCMA. Zora Schoner ’17, Dante Yardas ’14—the children of Mara and Mark—Gemini Anderson ’12, Mark Beebe ’19, Audrey Carver��’17, Yan Ivanov��’18, Lainie Wilke ’20, and Owen Zorn��’17 are the participating alumni citizen-artists. All are currently local, though some have recently returned from residences as far away as Wales, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The broad commitment by the ����ֱ�� community to citizenship as well as the arts is also reflected by the involvement in the food program of current students Rory Wilke and Geneva Dagnall, as well as of current and recent staff members too numerous to name.

Chris Stroud attended ����ֱ�� for a time in the 1990’s and now manages the ����ֱ�� dining hall.��He and the dining hall staff, with help from volunteers like those mentioned above, distribute the boxes on Thursdays at Camp Maranatha, using the Academy’s refrigerated trailer. Residents can pick up a food box from MCCMA near the Camp Maranatha entrance, then pick up more food from ����ֱ�� near the exit.

The post Food Fight: Winning the Fight to Get Needed Food to Locals appeared first on ����ֱ��.

Among the many honors earned by ����ֱ��’s graduating seniors, three stand out:��the Richard H. MacNeal Award,��Valedictorian, and the��Outstanding Artist Award. In this very difficult year, those honors go, respectively, to Aurora Winger, Kelly Chen, and Michael Dunaevsky. Their achievements serve as reminders of how the������ֱ�� campus, as beautiful as it is, is made even more beautiful by the presence of the��Academy’s young citizen artists—and of how eager the community is to welcome the students back once the threat posed by COVID-19 has been��brought under control.

Aurora, a Theatre major who lives in Ogden, Utah, was profiled����in December 2018. She is winner of the Richard H. MacNeal Award, given to the senior who has excelled most in all aspects of the Academy mission: arts, academics, and personal growth.

In 2018 she explained that despite her love of acting, her goal was to become a stage manager, “taking care of all that you forget happens in theatre: budgeting, the tech stuff. . . organizing rehearsals, dealing with the actors’ issues. . . if somebody’s sick or has to go to a funeral. . . and basically just making whatever the director wants happen.”

That hasn’t changed. She has played lead roles in a handful of short films made by the Academy’s Film and Digital Media students. But in the fall,��when Aurora begins her studies at Fordham University, in New York, her major will be Design and Production, with an emphasis on Stage Management and Lighting Design.

She��hopes that “Everyone at������ֱ�� has happy memories about her positive energy and happy and uplifting personality.” It’s certain that the memories of her��will be good, and that she’ll generate many more happy memories in��Fordham’s Theatre Department.

And this summer, vacationing with her family in Utah’s breathtaking national and state parks, she’ll��generate other fond memories among the residents of the lakes in those parks—if fish have memories.

“My family loves fishing and I love being with them on the lakes,” Aurora laughs. “But I��don’t use a hook because I��don’t want to hurt the fish. I only use a sinker!”

Don’t Stop Until You’re Proud

The Academy’s 2020 Valedictorian, Kelly Chen, a Dance major, has excelled academically despite coming to ����ֱ�� from Taiwan, still needing English as a Second Language support, for ninth grade in 2016. Kelly, born Ying-Chu, interviewed for this story from her home country, widely praised for its��.

“Nothing is locked down and life is normal here,” she said at a time when, in California, all the measures associated with Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order remained in effect. “So my own life is normal except that I’m not going to school.”

She meant that she wasn’t leaving her parents’ apartment to attend school, since all ����ֱ�� classes had been moved online. She felt she’d adjusted well to��online classes even though there were challenges.

“Finishing my piece for the Student Choreography Concert, which all junior��and senior��Dance majors are required to choreograph��for,��has been very hard.”

Her piece has only one dancer, Mariana Ballesteros, who lives in Michoacán,��in Mexico.

“Mariana��has really bad WiFi at her house,” she says. “I’ve had to send her the video of me dancing the piece, and then go back and forth with her by sending texts—so��many texts!—until she had it the way I wanted it. It’s a three-minute piece, but editing the video of her��dancing it has probably taken four hours!”

Doing her dance classes at home in Taiwan in the��apartment has been all right, since “we have no couches, so there’s a lot of floor space. For the barre, I use a dresser.”

Assuming the U.S. will be safe to come back to this fall,��she will be in Dallas, at Southern Methodist University.

“SMU has made me a Presidential Scholar, so I’ll be there on a full ride, doing a double major in Dance and Mechanical Engineering.”

The��central theme��of her planned��Valedictorian’s speech at the������ֱ�� commencement exercises, on May 22, was “Don’t stop until you’re proud,” reflecting her own determination to work hard at everything she does, whether artistic or academic, in order to perfect it.

You wonder how many other��choreographers would have stopped after half an hour of��editing the dance video mentioned earlier. But��Kelly Chen has always been willing to put in the extra time.

Freedom and Camaraderie

As for the��Academy’s Outstanding Artist for��2020, pianist Michael Dunaevsky extends the Music Department’s streak of producing the award winner to four years.

Michael, who begins his studies at��The New School, in New York, this fall, began playing piano at age six. He enjoyed it right away, and was already thinking by the time he was eight or nine that it was something he “might want to make a life of.”

Like most young pianists, he started with classical piano. But he always played solo.

“Then, in ninth grade, I began playing jazz. I loved two things about it: the freedom to improvise, and the camaraderie.”

His appetite for jazz is voracious and his understanding of the possibilities of jazz is generous.

“There’s no jazz genre that I’ll ever prefer to the��others,” he says. “All jazz is amazing.”

During his freshman year at��Santiago High School, in Corona, California, he wasn’t getting much of a taste of��East Coast winter, of course. But that’s where Michael��enjoyed his first taste of the��freedom and camaraderie of jazz. And that first taste, courtesy of playing with Santiago High’s jazz band, whetted his appetite for learning from������ֱ�� master jazz teachers, including Marshall Hawkins and Paul Carman.

His ongoing jazz education also involves learning from recordings by great pianists like��McCoy Tyner and the late Bill Evans, as well as from��Tyner’s bandleader during the early Sixties, the legendary saxophonist and composer John Coltrane.

“John Coltrane is definitely an inspiration to me,” he says.

Aurora Winger, Kelly Chen, and Michael Dunaevsky have been inspirations at ����ֱ��.�� ����

The post Happy Memories of Three Top Graduates appeared first on ����ֱ��.

“That, and the fact that my dad was an oboist!” he recalls.

Jeff was “serious about music from a very young age” as he grew up in Thousand Oaks, in Ventura County, California. On the first oboe he played in public school in Thousand Oaks, “some of the keys were falling off, so I would just take off��all��the keys and then put the instrument back together.”

That may have been a prelude to taking apart and putting together musical notes, which he does as a composer.

His serious love of music brought him to the ����ֱ�� ����ֱ�� Program thirty summers ago. Jeff progressed to the renowned Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, where he majored in Oboe Performance, and then to the University of Southern California, for a Master’s degree in Oboe Performance, completed in 2003. Not long after earning his Master’s he joined the����(SDSO), where he’s been ever since.

Still performing on oboe, yet now doing so much more with music, he returned to ����ֱ�� for the February 21��. The friends and colleagues who accompanied him gave evidence of Jeff’s devotion to being what the Art in Society program calls a

That’s because Jeff and the other musicians came from South Dakota as representatives of SDSO’s commitment to its��, meant to address “a history of racial tension. . . between whites and American Indians” by creating “an environment of openness through the sharing of music.”

SDSO’s home is Sioux Falls, the largest city in South Dakota. There as everywhere, attendance of symphony performances tends to be dominated by people who belong to very particular social and economic classes.

“So the Symphony members think it’s important to share what we do with even the most remote corners of this very rural state”—South Dakota’s population is less than nine hundred thousand—”and that certainly includes the reservations.”

South Dakota has nine reservations and designated tribal land areas, the most of any U.S. state. The Symphony members involved in the Lakota Music Project “have visited at least seven of the nine, although strong community support has meant that we’ve focused on Pine Ridge, which is a Lakota reservation, and on the Lake Traverse Reservation,” homeland of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.

The Beauty of Desert Wind

For these Symphony members, sharing what they do includes more than performing and thereby designating other people as passive listeners.

“One of our summer projects, the Lakota Composition Academy for high school students, has three instructors, including myself. Every student composes a piece to be performed by either our string quartet or our wind quintet, who make up SDSO’s nine full-time members.”

Another of the Composition Academy’s instructors is the Navajo (Diné)��composer, Michael Begay, who lives in Arizona. Michael met up with the Lakota Music Project’s��South Dakota contingent for the February 21 Sustainability Symposium at ����ֱ��, and played cedar flute. He and the visitors from South Dakota played with other visitors, from the��, of Los Angeles, as well as with ����ֱ�� music students.

The six performed pieces did not include Michael’s work. Sounding as if they’d rehearsed together for years rather than for hours, the musicians performed Dvořák’s “American Quartet,” Lakota Composition Academy student works by Trinity Burning Breast, Alexander Trujillo, and Jar Cottier, and two pieces by Jeff Paul.

One of Jeff’s compositions, in particular, “Desert Wind,” was an astonishing embodiment of the Lakota Music Project’s ambition of building��cross-cultural collaborations among new friends: SDSO’s wind quintet was accompanied both by an electric guitar and by the traditional Lakota vocalist, Emmanuel Black Bear.

Jeff explains that “Desert Wind” is “based on a melody originally written for electric guitar, when I was taking road trips alone through the desert of Southern California almost twenty years ago.”

As for the parts sung so movingly by Black Bear, they came from “a song by Melvin Young Bear, about how he feels when his granddaughter isn’t around.”

Black Bear, in his sixties, is well suited to express the felt absence of a grandchild. Yet, during the performance of Jeff’s work, he also succeeded, paradoxically, in voicing the elation he must have experienced in the presence of so many other young people, from the Neighborhood Music School and ����ֱ��.

This is a joy that Jeff himself experiences. It will surely continue to drive his involvement with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and its Lakota Music Project.�� ����

The post ����ֱ�� ����ֱ�� Alum Thrives in South Dakota appeared first on ����ֱ��.

Surviving the pandemic is our immediate challenge. But living well is a perpetual challenge, and��Celeste has made an important contribution to the debate about how to do that.����notes that the 1987 Academy graduate’s point that “years of scientific research have proven that better than trading your time for money, it’s best to trade your money for time”��is “well taken and will prove useful for harried readers.”

It may of course be a good time to put your feet up and read this book by��the Musical Theatre major from ����ֱ��’s first (1987) graduating class, though you’ll need to have it delivered to your door instead of picking it up from a bookstore.

Do Nothing��follows on the heels of her previous book,��,��published in 2017 by HarperCollins.��We Need to Talk��was a response to the demand created by her hugely successful TED talk,��.

When��We Need to Talk��was published, Celeste’s daily National Public Radio show,��, required her to coax conversation out of guests who, like many of us, had fallen into the habit of communicating from behind electronic screens. Hiding your phone—not simply putting it down, since a cell phone’s mere presence can be distracting—was one of her book’s many proven, practical suggestions for strengthening our connections to one another.

Being Herself at ����ֱ��

Celeste’s interest in genuine conversation may have been provoked by the difficulty she experienced, in public school before coming to ����ֱ��, in talking about things she “didn’t give a damn about.”

“I’d managed to fit in: I was a cheerleader! But pretending to be someone other than who I was—the kid who had memorized the entire score of��Evita—was a tremendous strain. ����ֱ�� was full of kids who’d experienced the same strain, and suddenly we could be ourselves.”

The brand-new school’s tiny Musical Theatre program allowed her to take oboe lessons while also cultivating her love of Broadway. As her voice matured, she discovered that it was as well suited for opera as for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

“I’m a lyric coloratura soprano,” she says.

Musical talent may be in her blood: her grandfather,��William Grant Still, was the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, and the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company. One of��Still’s symphonies was performed by the������ֱ�� Orchestra three years ago, in William M. Lowman Concert Hall.

Celeste’s family has therefore made substantial contributions to American culture—contributions which now include her book,��Do Nothing.

The post An Alum Advises Doing Nothing in Order to Live Well appeared first on ����ֱ��.

“The restaurants��are open, but they’re not busy like they used to be.”

Youree Jin, a 2006 ����ֱ�� graduate, is talking on Skype from her home city of Seoul. In a country widely thought to have handled the danger posed by COVID-19 better than most, she admits that it’s not only��restaurants that have had a hard time coming back from the worst days of the pandemic.

“It’s put a lot of people in a mood that we hope goes away,” she says. “We call it ‘corona blue.'”

For Youree, her parents, especially her father, have been of particular concern.

“I was teaching at Idyllwild in the Visual Arts Department and also dorm-parenting in Pierson until 2011, when my father needed a kidney and my mother donated hers. The surgery weakened his immune system, so. . . You know, he loves Idyllwild and he wanted to buy a house there, except his��surgery was going to be so much more expensive in the U.S. But we all still love Idyllwild.”

She continues to demonstrate her��love of Idyllwild as an educational consultant, advising Korean teenagers who want to go to high school in the United States.

“My advice is always the same,” she laughs. “Go to������ֱ��. When I started there��as a ninth-grader in 2002, I barely spoke��English. But it was wonderful, just like for SooYeon.”

Youree is referring to a young Korean who graduated from the��Academy last May, as a��Visual Arts major. SooYeon Kim��had also spoken almost no English as a ninth-grader. Now a freshman at��the School of the Art Institute of��Chicago,��SooYeon had hoped to visit Idyllwild to see some of her former teachers during Spring Break, but COVID-19 made that impossible.����

“Of course she’s back in Seoul now,” Youree says, “but it’s hard to see her. Even with the students that I’m advising to go to��Idyllwild right now, we have to keep our distance.”

An Uncertain Future

Five of Youree’s clients hope to start at������ֱ�� this fall.

“I think all the ones who are accepted will go. They and��their��families are all very committed and positive. But I’m a little worried about the future because I don’t know how the virus will affect a lot of people’s economic circumstances. So because of the economy, maybe it’s a good thing that I’d already decided to start on a Master’s degree in Education.”

Though a Master’s in Education would increase her career options, that’s not why she’d made the decision. Part of what makes her an outstanding educational consultant—surely the consensus favorite of the������ֱ�� Admission office, whose staff works with many consultants—is her ongoing dedication to her clients. Almost all of her clients are visual artists, to whom Youree gives art lessons during the application period. She often continues those lessons when the students return to Seoul during their breaks from Idyllwild.

“I’m getting a Master’s because I decided that I need to be more professional if I’m going to keep teaching.”

No doubt she’ll benefit from��a Master’s in Education. But anyone who has seen��her����and listened to how the ����ֱ�� students who’ve been her clients talk about her will know that��Youree is already a true professional.

The post Corona Blue appeared first on ����ֱ��.

The words come from Dr. Baltaian, Director of Instrumental Music at Orange County School of��the Arts, in Santa Ana, California. But the idea to celebrate the 250th year of the birth of a man whose music “is bigger than life”—Baltaian speaking again—came from his lifelong friend, Dr. Todorov. Todorov, Professor of Violin at San Francisco State University, is performing and recording all ten of Beethoven’s sonatas for��piano and violin during his year-long sabbatical from SFSU.

The recording will take place this June in Sofia, historic capital city of Bulgaria. Bulgaria is the native country of��Todorov and Baltaian, friends for the past four decades, ever since Todorov was five years old and Baltaian four. They are also former roommates at ����ֱ��. In��the early 1990’s, both attended��the Academy, where Todorov was a student of the Academy’s beloved longtime violin instructor��, at that time a new teacher.

Todorov has become astonishingly skilled with a camera:����is among his many achievements. Yet his recording of the Beethoven sonatas��indicates that he has no intention of setting��aside his 1914 Enrico Rocca violin.

Have Violin, Will Travel

June will be exhausting as well as thrilling for Todorov, as he takes on his ambitious recording project in collaboration with Baltaian on the eighth, ninth, and tenth sonatas, and with two other pianists, both of them Russian, for the first seven sonatas.

Much of the exhaustion will be mental, since Todorov must count not only on his own health and safe travels, but on equal good luck for his three��pianists.

Yet one undertakes such a bold project because the pleasure will outweigh the exhaustion. Some of the thrill will derive from reuniting with old friends and colleagues: Todorov and Baltaian live just four hundred miles apart, but of the other two pianists, one lives in Bulgaria and the other in Moscow. Another part of the thrill will come from travel: in preparation for their recording, Todorov and Baltaian will play a concert and judge a competition of young musicians in Ohrid, the��Republic of North Macedonia’s picturesque “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” known for its breathtaking setting on the banks of Lake Ohrid.

Finally, of course, there will be the thrill of performing and recording Beethoven. Baltaian suggests that “To do his music justice when you play it, you need to find in yourself some of the composer’s own spirit of finding hope in the darkest times.”

One could argue about whether we live in the darkest times. But it seems impossible to argue that this kind of spirit is not��always��inspiring—a powerful reason to look forward to the release of the recording, about which our newsletter will keep you informed.

The post Serenading Beethoven for His Birthday appeared first on ����ֱ��.

Yixuan “Maisie” Luo wants it understood that she’ll still be a painter even if she pursues a Master’s degree in theology.

“A lot of my art is already drawing on theological themes, and that will continue.”��

Maisie is the��2019-2020����Intern��at ����ֱ��. She is teaching in the Visual Arts Department, from which she graduated in 2015. As an Academy student she was serious about art, and she remains serious.

But, despite her commitment to art, Maisie can also be serious about��a Master’s��in theology, about which she’ll decide one way or another in the next couple of months. After all, she wants to have something to paint about, and the��Master’s program she’s considering would focus on issues she cares deeply about and that have indeed been central to her art: women, gender, and sexuality.

“I didn’t grow up in a religious family,” she admits.

If most people who go to graduate school for theology are believers, however, there must still be plenty of��theology students who don’t have a religious bone in their bodies. Religion has shaped, and arguably dominated, every human culture. This makes it deserving of study, irrespective of one’s own beliefs.

In the case of Maisie, raised in Shenzhen, China, the most relevant religious��traditions are those of Chinese Buddhism��and Taoism, as well as Hinduism.��Buddhism, in particular, started to interest her during her time at������ֱ��, in part through conversations with��Visual Arts teachers David Reid-Marr and Terry Rothrock.

Then, after spending her freshman year at��Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), she transferred to��Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania. At Swarthmore��she began to think even more deeply about the effects of religion on women, gender, and sexuality. She��graduated from Swarthmore last year, in Studio Art and Religion.

Misogyny Ancient and Modern

“Chinese Buddhism is extremely misogynist,” Maisie argues. “Women often become masculinized in order to attain enlightenment. The��tradition includes a story about a woman cutting off her breasts��to reach enlightenment. To attain enlightenment, women are��also required to detach from their families, but the mother’s grief caused by that detachment isn’t recognized.”

Mere ancient history?

“The past is never dead,” the American novelist William��Faulkner suggested. “It’s not even past.”

Or, as Maisie observes,��misogynist attitudes find new life in generation after generation.

Thus, she notes that with capitalism, originating some two thousand years after the time of Gautama Buddha, “the spread of land privatization exacerbated the poverty of women who weren’t attached to a man,��and many of these women got persecuted as witches.”

Later, the second-wave feminism erupting in the early 1960s succeeded in bringing women masculine agency in many respects. Yet feminine “independence” remains burdened with underacknowledged—and unreimbursed—child- and family-linked responsibilities of a kind that rarely impinge on male��independence.

And as the centuries roll on, women remain identified, on the profound mythic level that surfaces in real-life consequences, with Mother Earth. Hence,��Maisie’s growing interest in the ecofeminist analysis of the parallel between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of the earth and its natural resources.

While��she��studies theory, she is also throwing herself into practice, volunteering for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in New Hampshire and Iowa. She is especially passionate about the Vermont Senator’s��“Medicare for All”��bill.

Her political engagement comes as no surprise to ����ֱ�� community members who recall her four years here, from 2011 to 2015. As a senior, she won the��coveted Richard H.��MacNeal Award for��Outstanding Citizenship.

The Academy leadership has lately become increasingly passionate about their goal of training “citizen artists.” If the leaders want examples of citizen artists to point to, Maisie is there.��

The post Something to Paint About appeared first on ����ֱ��.