Northwestern Learning, Programs & Events

Behind-the-Scenes: William Blake Song Suites at the Block [Video]

Visitors to the Block Museum of Art on February 7, 2018 enjoyed William Blake’s art through music when students from the Bienen School of Music performed two song cycles inspired by Blake: Benjamin Britten’s 1965 Songs and Proverbs of William Blake and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1957 Ten Blake Songs. The performances took place in the museum’s gallery surrounded by […]

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Northwestern Learning

Block Museum Stages a Blake Inspired “Mad Song” [Video]

On Tuesday, February 20th Twelve student vocalists from the Bienen School of Music performed Mad Song, a work by Chicago composer, flutist and vocalist Janice Misurell-Mitchell that translates the text and imagery of a William Blake’s poem by the same name into a sonic experience. The performance was preceded by a discussion by Misurell-Mitchell and […]

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Artist Collaborations, Block Publications

Present Tense Pamphlets Look to the History and Future of Score-Based Performance

During the Block Museum’s Spring 2016 symposium “Performed in the Present Tense” artists Mashinka Firunts and Danny Snelson, shared an open call for a unique series of artists scores, a project they dubbed the Present Tense Pamphlets.  In the tradition of Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Festivals, Dick Higgins’ Great Bear Pamphlets, and La Monte Young’s An Anthology of Chance Operations, […]

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Artist Collaborations, Museum News

Trisha Brown Dance Company Performance of Roof Piece at Northwestern Arts Circle

  “Trisha Brown’s dances are shaped by dreams of levitation, by geometry, enigma, physics, by memory, mathematics and geography, by language. Her gestural imagery challenges perception of the moving body, making the impossible appear possible.” – Marianne Goldberg, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers Trisha Brown is among the most acclaimed choreographers to emerge from the postmodern era. She first came […]

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Museum News

Scoring the Symposium: Susy Bielak and Amanda Jane Graham on “Performed in the Present Tense”

On April 8 and 9 an international group of curators, scholars and performers convened at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art for “Performed in the Present Tense,” a free two-day symposium considering the present field of performance art. Inspired by the Block Museum exhibition, “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s,”  participants examined […]

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