Center for the Arts ’24-’25 Season Examines Art as a Way of Knowing the World

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) opens the 2024-25 season with a wide range of special exhibitions and performances that encourage interactions and exchanges between visiting artists and the campus community. The CFA’s season also features artists in residence who integrate themselves into campus life as they incubate new work.

CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy ‘06 and his curatorial team create opportunities for audiences to explore the way art can build new points of connection between otherwise discrete aspects of life and learning. “I invite students, faculty, and visitors to consider the CFA as more than a space, but rather as a conceptual laboratory for moving between thought and action, from critical thinking to embodied knowledge,” Lubin-Levy said.

Highlights of the 2024-25 Season

Playwright, actor, and educator Anna Deavere Smith presents the first public staged reading of her new work This Ghost of Slavery at the start of her yearlong artist residency at Wesleyan on Oct. 27. First published in The Atlantic, Smith’s play blends contemporary interviews with activists and social justice workers with her research into the archives of American slavery, revealing how historical trauma shapes present-day behavior. The Wesleyan reading is co-produced with the Long Wharf Theatre, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities.

Brooklyn-based composer and dhol (double-headed drum) player Sunny Jain offers a work-in-progress preview of his new music theater work Love Force on Sept. 27, at the conclusion of his artist residency. Building on Jain’s personal experience of Punjabi diaspora, Love Force uses hybrid musical styles in an immersive ritual of gathering and storytelling, illuminating the power of song to create unity in the face of divisive systems of oppression.

Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00, two complimentary solo exhibitions will be on display in the unique space of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from Sept. 17 to Dec. 8. For Triple Solitaire, Justin Caguiat combines three large abstract paintings made with pigments that change slowly over time in response to the environment in a singular panorama, with sound installations suspended from the ceiling. In calcis, Grant Mooney uses sculptural works made from calcium carbonate — a chemical compound that is also a core component of limestone — which is what the bricks of the CFA, which opened in the fall of 1973, are made of.

Wesleyan’s 48th annual Navaratri Festival celebrates the diversity of Indian music and dance from Oct. 10 to Oct. 12, including the 20th annual concert collaboration between two Adjunct Associate Professors of Music and Global South Asian Studies: vocalist B. Balasubrahmaniyan and mridangam (double-headed drum) player David Nelson PhD ’91. The festival will feature a concert by violin master Shri. V.V. Subrahmanyam, who returns to campus for his 80th anniversary concert. The festival will also include a showcase of Indian dance featuring Connecticut-based choreographers Sarada Nori and Rachna Agrawal alongside Wesleyan students Akhil Joondeph ’26 and Tanvi Navile ’25.

The National Theatre from Osaka, Japan returns to the United States for the first time in nearly two decades with a stunning production of traditional bunraku Japanese puppet theater. The group’s Connecticut debut will be co-presented by the CFA at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts on Oct. 1.

The Wesleyan Javanese Gamelan Ensemble and guest artists, including Indonesian vocalist Peni Candra Rini, will perform a retrospective of compositions, including a world premiere commission, by University Professor of Music I.M. Harjito, under the direction of the composer and Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Sumarsam MA ’76, on October 4. The concert was organized by Wayne Forrest ’74, MA ’77 and is sponsored by the American Indonesian Cultural and Educational Foundation, in collaboration with the Asia Society and Wesleyan, to mark the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Indonesia.

On Dec. 6 and 7, the Dance Department presents the world premieres of two works: ROWDIES IN LOVE by inDANCE, led by Professor of Dance, Global South Asian Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Hari Krishnan; and The Jewel Thief, a collaboration with choreography by University Professor of Dance Patricia Beaman and music by John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Neely Bruce. Bruce will also premiere three chamber music works during the fourth installment of his concert series This Is It! 2.0 on Sept. 15

Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl directs Agnes Borinsky’s play Of Government, about making theater and making society, from Nov. 7 to Nov. 9.

Dean of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Music Roger Mathew Grant said he is excited about the upcoming season of programming, including Jain’s Love Force, and the work that is in process for Electric Gamelan, which include two new commissions from composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton). Jlin will adopt and transform the sounds of the University’s historic gamelan orchestra, gifted to Wesleyan in 1983, and present the electronic and acoustic works on campus in spring 2025.

“These projects, like much of the programming this season, challenge us to re-route our contemporary creative impulses through tradition,” Grant said.

Visit wesleyan.edu/cfa to see all fall events. Tickets for fall events are available online at wesleyan.edu/boxoffice. The box office opens for walk-up and phone sales on September 3.