News

“Give it back.” These are the first words seen by visitors to The World’s UnFair, the newest multimedia work by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” cofounded by brothers and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14. World’s Fairs “have historically presented a theory of progress, technological advancement, imperial advancement,” Jackson Polys, who cocreated NRO with the Khalil brothers, told the New York Times. The World’s UnFair, by contrast, subverts expectations with an animatronic beaver who speaks about private land ownership and satirical real estate ads featuring “comically small” portions of land given back to Native groups. The exhibition, curated by Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, is meant to be provocative, asking questions about not only Native sovereignty, but also performances of Indigeneity and art’s place (or lack thereof) in the pursuit of decolonization. The World’s UnFair is on view now through October 15 in Long Island City, Queens.

Read More in the New York Times

Further Reading:

• NPR: “An 'anti-World's Fair' makes its case: give land back to Native Americans”
• Smithosian magazine: "‘The World’s UnFair,’ a New Exhibition Calling for the Return of Indigenous Land, Comes to Queens."
• Artnet: “A New Kind of World’s Fair Is Coming to Queens. Its Message? Give Back All Indigenous Land”
• Hyperallergic: “The World’s UnFair in Queens Echoes Calls to Give Native Land Back”

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music announces the sixth season of the China Now Music Festival, from October 2 to 8. The festival’s major concerts will take place at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

The China Now Music Festival is dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of music from contemporary China through an annual series of concerts and academic activities. In the previous five seasons, China Now has attracted more than 10,000 live audience members, and nearly 100,000 viewers have participated in online programs. The sixth annual festival will focus on the theme The Bridge of Music, with an unprecedented series of uniquely curated events that will trace how generations of musicians and music organizations from the US and China have worked together and inspired each other through music exchange.

“Music is both the common wealth of human civilization and the unique creation of individual cultures and peoples,” said Jindong Cai, the artistic director of the China Now Music Festival. “It is a bringer of hope and joy, and a bridge to understanding. I hope that this year's China Now Music Festival will bring you this hope, joy, and understanding.”

The first concert program, “Bard East/West Ensemble and Special Guest Wu Man,” presents new arrangements of music by Tan Dun and Zhou Long, as well as several new works by outstanding young composers from China, including Tian Tian and Yao Chen, faculty members at the Central Conservatory of Music. It will be held on October 2 at the Bard Conservatory in Annandale-on-Hudson, and on October 4 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. The ensemble combines Chinese and Western instruments together as a new model of cross-cultural performance, consisting of a Western string quintet and seven Chinese instruments including dizi, erhu, pipa, ruan, suona, and guzheng, as well as Chinese and Western percussion. The program features renowned pipa virtuoso Wu Man performing “King Chu Doffs His Armour” by the Pulitzer Prize winner composer Zhou Long and based on the famous love story portrayed in the 1993 film Farewell My Concubine. It also includes Tan Dun’s Northwest Suite, a collection from his dance score “The Yellow Earth,” which blends traditional Chinese elements with contemporary concepts. 

The second program, “The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Celebrates the Music of Chen Yi and Zhou Long,” on October 6 at Bard’s Fisher Center and October 8 at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, will pay tribute to the extraordinary Chinese-American composers, along with works by their mentor and teacher, Chou Wen-Chung, and two of their acclaimed students, Zhou Juan and Li Shaosheng. Chen Yi and Zhou Long, two remarkable composers now in their 70s, had studied at Columbia University in the 1980s under composer Chou Wen-Chung, whose compositions reflected his deep connection to both Eastern and Western traditions. Chen Yi and Zhou Long were greatly influenced by their mentor’s fascination for exploring the intersection of different musical cultures, and over the decades of their storied careers in America, both have blended their cultural heritage with contemporary compositional techniques, resulting in a unique and captivating musical language. Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 3, My Musical Journey to America, was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra for its centennial season and premiered by the SSO at Benaroya Hall on March 18, 2004, conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Zhou Long composed Beijing Rhyme in 2012 and it was commissioned by the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, first performed and recorded in September 2012 in Beijing, conducted by Tan Lihua.

The third program, “US-China Music Forum – Confronting Challenges and Looking to the Future,” on October 7 at Asia Society in New York City, will present an afternoon of engaging discussion and live music with a distinguished panel of musicians and leaders in the world of classical music performance and education, providing diverse perspectives on the future of US-China relations in music. The panel speakers will include Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and artistic director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN); composer Chen Yi, Lorena Searcy Cravens/ Millsap/ Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition at University of Missouri, Kansas City; Gary Ginstling, president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic; and Yu Hongmei, chairwoman of  the University Council of the Central Conservatory of Music, China. The panel will be moderated by Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and Jindong Cai, director of the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. The forum will also feature live music performances by pipa virtuoso Liu Xiaojing from the Central Conservatory of Music, China, and members of the Bard East/West Ensemble.

EVENT DETAILS AND TICKETING

Program I: Bard East/West Ensemble and Special Guest Wu Man
Monday, October 2 at 8 pm
László Z. Bitó ‘60 Conservatory Building, Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Free and open to the public.
           
Wednesday, October 4 at 7 pm
(Pre-concert talk at 6:15 pm)
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
The Shops at Columbus Circle, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://ticketing.jazz.org/15697/15698

Program II: The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Celebrates the Music of Chen Yi and Zhou Long
Friday, October 6 at 7 pm
(Q&A with the composers at 6 pm)
Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
For tickets, visit: https://tickets.fishercenter.bard.edu/3084/3085
           
Sunday, October 8 at 3:00 pm
(Q&A with the composers at 2:15 pm)
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
The Shops at Columbus Circle, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://ticketing.jazz.org/15697/15700

Program III: US-China Music Forum – Confronting Challenges and Looking to the Future
Saturday, October 7 from 3 pm to 5 pm
Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium
Asia Society of New York
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://asiasociety.org/center-us-china-relations/events/us-china-music-forum

For more information about the China Now Music Festival and for full programming details, please visit: barduschinamusic.org/the-bridge-of-music

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jindong Cai, artistic director
Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN). Previously, he was a professor of performance at Stanford University. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia.

Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming for Contemporary Music. Cai started his conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and has worked with orchestras throughout North America and Asia. He has conducted most of the top orchestras in China.

At Bard, Cai founded the annual China Now Music Festival, which presents new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time. Concerts are performed by The Orchestra Now at Bard’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and Stanford University. In 2019, the festival premiered Men of Iron and the Golden Spike by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Zhou Long—a symphonic oratorio in commemoration of the Chinese railroad workers of North America on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

With his wife, Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored many articles on the performing arts in China, as well as two books, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese and Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic.

Chen Bing, conductor
A professor in the Conducting Department at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Chen Bing is one of China’s most promising conductors. She has conducted concerts in more than a dozen countries in Asia, North America, South America, and Africa. Her repertoire covers a wide range of musical forms, including symphony, opera, choral works, Chinese music, and chamber music. She has conducted at a number of events for world leaders, heads of state, and ambassadors, and produced numerous albums, including Tug at China’s Heartstrings, which is in the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. She frequently conducts new concerts featuring a wide variety of both Chinese and Western pieces.

Wu Man, pipa
Prominent instrumentalist of traditional Chinese music, composer, and educator Wu Man has premiered hundreds of works for the pipa, and performed with major orchestras worldwide. She is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. Born in Hangzhou, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa. Wu received the 2023 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and was honored with the Asia Society’s Asia Arts Game Changers Award for her contributions to contemporary art. She is visiting professor at CCOM and a Distinguished Professor at the Zhejiang and the Xi’an Conservatories.

Liu Xiaojing, pipa
A pipa teacher in the Folk Music Department of the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Liu Xiaojing also is an instructor for the CCOM Plucked String Orchestra and a primary member of Zhang Hongyan’s Plucked String Band. She earned both her undergraduate and her master’s degrees at the Central Conservatory, studying with famed pipa player Zhang Hongyan and earning several scholarships. She has held solo concerts and participated in major state performances and cultural events, and has participated in exchange visits with more than 20 countries and regions.

Bryan Zhe Wang CMC ’24, guqin
Bryan Zhe Wang is among the first candidates in Bard Conservatory’s Master of Arts in Chinese Music and Culture, where he studies with guqin virtuoso Zhao Jiazhen of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Wang ranked first in both the traditional and nontraditional categories at the 2021 Singapore International Guqin Tournament. In 2022, he won the Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition.

The Bard East/West Ensemble aims to combine the instrumentation and musical traditions of the East and the West, to bring together Chinese music and Western music, and to seek a new model of cross-cultural music cooperation. Under the direction of Jindong Cai, the ensemble consists of young musicians from the Bard College Conservatory of Music and invites accomplished artists to collaborate as guest soloists.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS  Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023–24 recipient of  the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an  annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The fellowship, which was fully endowed in 2022, represents a longstanding commitment by Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation to support scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and activism.

Through her work as a journalist and author, Kim has provided unprecedented insights into one of  the world’s most secretive and dangerous dictatorships. Born in South Korea, Kim has been  traveling to North Korea since 2002, where she has contributed groundbreaking reporting on the  country to publications including the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. In 2011, Kim published the New York Times bestseller, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014), based on her experience living  undercover in Pyongyang for six months with the country's future leaders during the final year of  Kim Jong-il’s reign. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the PEN Open Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Open Society Foundations fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar  grant, an American Academy Berlin Prize, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship  at Harvard University. 

“It is an honor to welcome Suki Kim to Bard, where I am sure she will inspire a new generation to act boldly in advancing human rights in their respective fields,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the center for curatorial Studies, Bard College. “As a novelist and significantly as an  investigative journalist, her work has led to real change in our world.”

“Suki Kim is at once a courageous risk-taker and a brilliant writer," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “That rare combination of political commitment and artistic  eloquence is exactly what the Haring Fellowship was created to honor." 

Kim’s appointment follows that of Haytham el-Wardany, the 2022-23 Haring Fellow. Additional details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism follow below, with more information on previous fellows found at ccs.bard.edu.

About Suki Kim
Suki Kim is an investigative journalist, a novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea.

Kim’s New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Her novel, The Interpreter (Farrar,  Straus, & Giroux, 2003) was the PEN Open Book Award winner and a PEN Hemingway Prize finalist.

She is currently working on her next nonfiction book The Prince and the Revolutionary: Children of  War (W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a 2022 Lukas Prize work-in-progress, given by  Columbia University School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Kim’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington  Post, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Her TED Talk on her  experiences living undercover in North Korea has drawn millions of viewers. She has appeared in  media around the world including CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

Kim served as a Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University in 2017. 

About the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
Founded in 1990, CCS Bard is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively  to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform  exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside  an extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for  the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice. Broadly  interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical  and political dimension of art and its social significance.

About the Human Rights Project
The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, introduced the first interdisciplinary  undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. The Project maintains a  special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and through teaching, research,  and public programs is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and  representational dimensions of human rights discourse. Since 2009, the Human Rights Project has  collaborated with CCS Bard on the development of seminars, workshops, research projects, and  symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts. While  academic in nature, this research and teaching draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving  human rights advocates, artists, and curators.

About the Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes  during his life. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public  service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and  communities impacted by systemic inequity. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure  that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation gives grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and  educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving  in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people, and the support  of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV  infection. The Foundation additionally maintains a collection of Haring’s art and archives and  funds exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the  artist’s work and philosophy. www.haring.com.

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra will present a performance from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz, which will merge the 1939 cinematography produced by MGM Studios with a live symphony. The event, taking place in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, September 23, and Sunday, September 24, “marks the first time many of the student musicians will perform a so-called film concert, an experience that conservatory educators say will teach the popular side of the symphonic tradition,” writes Andrew Checchia for the Daily Catch. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a screening of the film, replacing the film’s original songs and keeping precise timing with the original studio voice recordings. “This score was written for studio orchestras, and those scores sound good from the very beginning,” Bagwell told Checchia.

 

The Fisher Center at Bard continues its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Ulysses, from Elevator Repair Service, which the New York Times has called “one of New York City’s few truly essential theater companies,” September 21 – October 1 (opening Sunday, September 24). 

James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. ERS takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature having staged modernist works including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—all with highly acclaimed results.

In the world premiere at the Fisher Center, seven ERS ensemble members—Dee Beasnael (7 Daughters of Eve), OBIE Award-winner Kate Benson (Fondly, Collette Richland), Maggie Hoffman (founding member, Radiohole), Vin Knight (Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), The Sound and the Fury, and more with ERS), OBIE Award-winner Scott Shepherd (Gatz, The Wooster Group), Christopher-Rashee Stevenson (Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge), and Stephanie Weeks (The Whitney Album)—sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents an eclectic sampling from Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece.

Ulysses is directed by ERS Artistic Director John Collins, with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd and text by James Joyce. The production features set design by dots (The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Public Obscenities), costume design by Enver Chakartash (A Doll's House, Is This A Room on Broadway) and Assistant Costume Designer Caleb Krieg, lighting design by Marika Kent (ERS’s Seagull) and Assistant Lighting Designer Matt Lazarus, sound design by OBIE Award-winner Ben Williams (The Whitney Album), sound engineering by Gavin Price, projections by Matthew Deinhart (El Amor Brujo, ANIMUS ANIMA//ANIMA ANIMUS) and Assistant Projections Designer Alessandra Cronin, and props by Patrícia Marjorie (Wolf Play, Flex) and Assistant Properties Designer Ned Gaynor. Maurina Lioce (Fondly, Collette Richland; Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge) is the Assistant Director and Stage Manager, and Jack Ganguly is the Assistant Stage Manager. Hanna Novak of ERS is the producer.  

Ulysses is a Fisher Center LAB commission and is co-commissioned by Symphony Space, where the work was partly developed. Daphne Gaines, April Matthis, and Mark Barton contributed to the development of the work.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of Ulysses take place in the LUMA Theater at the Fisher Center:
Thursday, September 21, at 8pm
Friday, September 22, at 8pm
Saturday, September 23, at 8pm
Sunday, September 24, at 3pm
Thursday, September 28, at 8pm
Friday, September 29, at 8pm
Saturday, September 30, at 2pm
Saturday, September 30, at 8pm
Sunday, October 1, at 3pm

Critics are welcome as of Saturday, September 23, at 8 pm for an official opening on Sunday, September 24, at 3 pm.

Tickets start at $25 ($5 for Bard students through the Passloff Pass) and can be purchased here. 

Credits
The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership. 
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.