ELEMENTS
Elements is a multi-year arts and humanities project, which explores the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. We seek to bring together scholars and practitioners as we trace the roles played by these material elements and their constant state of flux in shaping conceptions of the cosmos, framing notions of origin, myth, religion, balance, and natural philosophy, and capturing the poetic powers of the natural world.
WATER
For calendar year 2024 (spring and fall terms), events will be oriented around water and its pre-modern, contemporary, and future imaginings. The changing, moving states and qualities of water — melting, freezing, drying, evaporating, flowing, soaking, dripping, rising, flooding, poisoning, disappearing, cleansing, nourishing, preserving — are central to our programming. From rivers, lakes, and oceans, to fog, snow, and glaciers, we will explore human and non-human contexts of myth, cosmology, creation, disaster, extraction, consumption, pollution, scarcity, health, hygiene, and renewal. Events include performances, readings, viewings/listening sessions, and conversations.
Director, Evan MacCarthy, Professor of Music and Dance, UMass Amherst
Spring 2024 Workshops
Sounding Waters:
Elements of Water, Ice, & Snow in Sound and Music
MARCH 1 — 4 - 6 PM @ THE KINNEY CENTER
This is the inaugural event of Elements, the multi-year arts and humanities project exploring the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. Evan MacCarthy will offer a guided listening session of excerpts of works of music and sonic art of the last four centuries, which evoke the creative, destructive, and restorative forces of water. The program will highlight instruments fashioned from water or ice, the expressive, recorded sounds of flowing, dripping, and melting, as well as songs and instrumental works capturing images and echoes of seas, rivers, floods, glaciers, and storms. We will investigate how composers, musicians, and sound artists have found musical meaning in the watery depths, rising tides, and quickly changing states and qualities of water.
Water-Worlds:
Ripple Effects or Sea Change?
SPRING 2024 EXHIBITION @ THE KINNEY CENTER
This exhibit, co-curated by Evan MacCarthy and Marjorie Rubright, is an outgrowth of many cross-disciplinary campus-wide collaborations, including Renaissance of the Earth and Elements. Water-Worldsemerges at the crosscurrent of conversations. In the exhibition cases, you’ll discover water-worlds depicted in drama, poetry, novels, natural philosophy, early earth science, music, origin myths, fables and more. As you explore, we invite you to consider how these water-worlds transform by way of subtle ripple effects and stunning sea changes. Much of what you’ll discover is drawn from the Kinney Center collections as well as works of Shakespeare on loan by a generous friend of the Center. Our exhibit also features the contemporary poetry of Joan Naviyuk Kane. Inside these works, water appears in all its states (from ice, frost, and snow to liquid and vapor). In adopting water as an Element we are exploring at the Kinney Center throughout 2024, we are interested in how humans have engaged the changing, moving states and qualities of water: melting, freezing, drying, evaporating, flowing, soaking, dripping, rising, flooding, poisoning, disappearing, cleansing, nourishing, preserving. In this exhibit and our programming in the months ahead, we will explore human and non-human contexts of the creative, destructive, and restorative powers of our waterworlds.
Ice Blue:
Toward a Poetics of Solid Water
MARCH 12 — 4 - 6 PM @ THE KINNEY CENTER
Evan MacCarthy (Music and Dance), Marjorie Rubright (English), and Steve Mentz (English) will lead a multimodal workshop on sonic and poetic icescapes of the Arctic. A part of The Great Melt: The Arctic Frontier of the Anthropocene, this workshop centers the role of the humanities in shaping Arctic imaginaries. Moving across sonic, linguistic, and poetic engagements, we will open onto conversations that delve into the blue humanities.
The dialogue-centered workshop will feature guided listening of musical works by John Luther Adams, Tanya Tagaq, and Lei Liang, and an exploration of the place of language in imagining human relations with ice, together with a close reading of the Inupiat poet Joan Naviyuk Kane’s recent collection of lyrical poems Dark Traffic (2021).
Invited guest, Professor Steve Mentz (St. John's University), early modern scholar and pioneer of the blue humanities, will show how we are moving “Toward a Poetics of Solid Water.”
Ripple Effects:
Reflections on Water
in Story and Sound
APRIL 9 — 4:30 - 7 PM
@ JOHN W. OLVER DESIGN BUILDING ATRIUM
A series of provocations led by Evan MacCarthy and Marjorie Rubright as part of a larger event titled Y3K: Awakenings, organized by Sandy Litchfield, which also features performances by Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, Pantelis Lykoudis, Ghost Ensemble, The Five Agents, and Lauren Cox with jazz dance students, as well as the exhibit Y3K: On Distant Keys.