Endstation Theatre Company has expanded its Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival beyond the campus of Sweet Briar College for the 2013 season. Two of three plays — Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Cymbeline” — will also be performed at historic locations and theaters in downtown Lynchburg.

According to Endstation’s artistic director Geoffrey Kershner, it’s a “season of travel,” and that applies to the musical “Violet,” as well. The musical, he says, “tells the story of a young woman who travels across the country on a journey of self-discovery.”

The festival will open with “The Taming of the Shrew,” directed by Kershner, on Friday, May 31, with a special 10-performance engagement at the Renaissance Theatre in downtown Lynchburg until June 9. The downtown leg of the production is made possible with the support of the city of Lynchburg and a James River Arts and Culture District Project Grant. Audiences will enjoy a special pre- and post-show 15-percent discount to the locally owned restaurants Dish and Bull Branch.

The second leg of “The Taming of the Shrew” will be performed outdoors on the grounds of Sweet Briar College from June 15 to July 7. During the Sweet Briar performances, audiences are encouraged to bring blankets and picnic at dusk while enjoying wine and beer made available by local vineyards and breweries.

While Endstation has taken its troupe off campus only once before, transplanting Shakespeare into a (more) modern context is a recurring theme. Last year, Macbeth found himself in the midst of the Civil War; this year, the company’s take on “The Taming of the Shrew” is inspired by the historic vaudeville theaters that existed in downtown Lynchburg at the turn of the century. In “Cymbeline,” the second play of the summer, a troupe of Depression-era actors bring Shakespeare’s fairytale world to life with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and “Violet: the Musical” is set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement.

Directed by Walter Kmiec, “Cymbeline” will be performed on the grounds of Sweet Briar College from June 14 to July 14, followed by a Central Virginia historical tour July 19 to 21 — at Old City Cemetery on July 19, Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest on July 20, and concluding with a special family event at Presbyterian Homes and Family Services on July 21. The family night will include study guides for children and ice cream for the whole family.

The only ‘stationary’ play of the festival, “Violet” will be performed at Sweet Briar’s Babcock Fine Arts Center June 28 to July 14. Directed by Chad Larabee, it features lyrics by Brian Crawley, music by Jeannine Tesori and is based on the book “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by Doris Betts. “Violet” follows the emotional transformation of a young woman scarred by her father …read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

Sweet Briar College will host the Girls on the Run of Central Virginia Spring 2013 Celebration 5K at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 4.

A non-competitive ‘fun run,’ this race is the culmination of the region’s Girls on the Run spring program. Central Virginian girls ages 8 to 13 have been training for 10 to 12 weeks in preparation for this event, which recognizes and celebrates their efforts.

Saturday’s event will also include runners from the spring 2006 team, said Central Virginia council director, Mary Hansen. The girls, who are now graduating high school or entering their senior year, will assist with the opening ceremony, and eight of them will participate in the race.

“We thought it would be fun to introduce them to the younger girls,” Hansen said.

Among them are Girls on the Run junior coaches Meghann Hansen, for the R.S. Payne Elementary School team, and Jessica Winters, who is in charge of Madison Heights.

The Lynchburg-based Girls on the Run council has already held three races at Sweet Briar since the two women’s organizations announced a partnership in August 2011 — one in the fall of 2011, one last spring and a third race this past fall. As in November, the picturesque route will take runners from the old train station through campus and along the Dairy Loop, winding its way past the riding center and through the woods.

Sweet Briar is a proud supporter of Girls on the Run’s mission, which is “to inspire girls to be joyful, healthy and confident” and to “educate and prepare girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living.” Girls on the Run also provides opportunities for Sweet Briar students to volunteer, mentor the younger girls and share some of the benefits they’ve experienced in an all-women’s educational environment.

Dozens of volunteers, including Sweet Briar students and employees, will help with course setup, work pre-race activities such as the happy hair table, or serve as running buddies for the 280 registered girls as they tackle the challenging 5K course.

For more information, visit girlsontherunva.org or call (434) 607-2024.

…read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

Sweet Briar College’s agrarian past is the focus of the upcoming exhibition “ ‘I have lately bought me a Plantation’: A Brief Survey of Farming and Land Use at Sweet Briar,” which opens at 1 p.m. Thursday, March 21, in Whitley Gallery at Sweet Briar Museum. It will be on view through March 2014.

The result of a practicum project undertaken by senior Sarah O’Brien, the exhibition provides a brief overview of Sweet Briar’s farming history, from the days of the Fletchers, who founded the College, to the later 20th century, when the dairy was still in operation. O’Brien, a history major, says her interest in the subject was not just academic.

“I was born and raised on a farm, so I wanted to know the history of farming at Sweet Briar before it became a college,” she said, adding that it was her intention to create a narrative through which visitors can access the College’s past. The hardest part, she said, was deciding which items to include.

The final selection features an eclectic mix of artifacts, such as early 19th-century letters in which Elijah Fletcher wrote to his brother about farming; ceramic drainage tiles from the old tilled fields (courtesy of the archaeology lab); old farm tools; documents and photos related to the College’s early days farming for profit; and milk bottles, milk cans and signage from the era of the dairy.

Museum hours during the academic year are 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. For more information, contact Karol Lawson at klawson@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6248.

…read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

Madeleine Coleman ’16 (right) inputs settings on the GigaPan, a robotic device that takes multiple exposures with a mounted camera in order to stitch together high-resolution panoramic photos. Janet Stevens’ biology class used the device to observe changing fall foliage. The course is “Economic Botany,” a Y:1 Program seminar that examines biological properties that make plants valuable to humans. Students also use iPads and photographic technology to study plant communities on campus.

— Photo by Meridith De Avila Khan

…read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

Guion 127 is a sensory riot. Colors melt into stark white T-shirts, a pattern repeated among rows of young girls, 20 or so, all chattering above a thumping boom box. Isopropyl alcohol fumes escape the open windows.

Kelsey Barta, a sophomore engineering major from Seattle, has invited the Lynchburg and Amherst middle schoolers here for an after-school “Engineering for Girls” event. The project is T-shirt chromatography, an introduction to chemical engineering. It is the first of three workshops Barta is running to get young girls excited about the field of engineering. The other two, focusing on electrical and mechanical engineering respectively, will take place in January and February.

Barta is funding her project through an Anne Gary Pannell Merit Scholarship. She is one of nine members of the Class of 2015 to qualify for the program, which was initiated in 2010-2011 to reward exceptional first-year students with the opportunity to fully explore an area of interest during their sophomore year. The Class of 2014 was the first to complete projects under the program.

Pannell Scholars receive a merit award applied to their tuition and funds to support their project. It can be used for research, creative endeavors, or travel for academic purposes or service.

On this Thursday evening in early November, those funds have purchased a rainbow of permanent markers, white T-shirts, household rubbing alcohol and an assortment of packaged snacks. The latter fly about as Sweet Briar student volunteers toss little bags of Cheese Nips to waiting hands across the crowded room.

Barta explains that chromatography is a process used to separate substances, for example blood or ink found at a crime scene or pollution in air or water.

The girls stretch the shirts over plastic cups and secure them with rubber bands. Using eyedroppers, they drip alcohol onto dot patterns they’ve drawn in the circles formed by the cups, which causes the colors to separate and spread. The more they drip, the more the colors run.

They get creative. A sixth-grader makes a peace sign. Another draws the face of Firestar, the sleek ginger cat in “Warriors.” She’s a big fan of the children’s book series and, by the looks of it, a budding artist. Maybe just the kind of inventive female mind Barta wants to see entering the engineering profession.

She recalls being one of only two girls who participated in her high school’s engineering pathways program. “I always thought, ‘I don’t know why there aren’t other girls in here, because the stuff that we do is fun,’ ” she says.

“So I figured middle school would probably be a good age to expose girls to engineering, because they can then discover what it is and that they can actually have a career in it. So maybe as they move on to high school and start thinking about what they want to do, they might think of engineering.”

It seems to be working so far. Many are there because they like science in school, others are simply curious. But when Barta starts to wrap up …read more
Source: Serving an Expanded Student Body

Sweet Briar’s historic 19th-century cabin will be open to visitors for self-guided tours in November and December.

Current research suggests that the cabin was built during the antebellum period to house enslaved laborers, who lived in dozens of similar dwellings on the Sweet Briar Plantation. This cabin, located behind Sweet Briar House, is the only one that survives.

Indiana Fletcher Williams’ overseer, Logan Anderson, likely lived in it during the 1880s. When the College was founded in 1901, Sterling Jones Sr. and his family resided in the cabin until the mid-1920s. Following that period, the cabin was used to house the alumnae office, a theater classroom, a coffee shop, a chapel and a farm tool equipment museum. It has been in continuous use for about 170 years.

In 2012, the College was awarded a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grant to re-interpret the complex history of this building and to create an exhibition that highlights the history of African Americans at Sweet Briar. For now, the historic structure is open to the public on the following days:

November:
Friday, Nov. 9: 1-5 p.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 13: 10:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Thursday, Nov. 15: 10 a.m.-noon
Tuesday, Nov. 27: 10:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Thursday, Nov. 29: 10 a.m.-noon
Friday, Nov. 30: 1-5 p.m.

December:
Tuesday, Dec. 4: 10:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 7: 1-5 p.m.

Hours are weather-dependent. In case of freezing conditions, please check the cabin tours website at tusculum.sbc.edu/africanamericans.

For more information about the cabin’s history, contact Lynn Rainville, director of the Tusculum Institute, at (434) 381-6432 or lrainville@sbc.edu, or visit the institute’s website at tusculum.sbc.edu.

…read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

Sweet Briar College will host the Girls on the Run of Central Virginia Fall 2012 Celebration 5K at 9 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 17.

A non-competitive ‘fun run,’ this race is the culmination of the region’s Girls on the Run fall program. Central Virginian girls ages 8 to 13 have been training for 10 to 12 weeks in preparation for this event, which recognizes and celebrates their efforts. Anyone wishing to run along must register online. Registration is $25 until Nov. 14. Beginning Nov. 15, the registration fee will be $35. Pets or strollers are not permitted. For more information, visit girlsontherunva.org or call (434) 607-2024.

The Lynchburg-based Girls on the Run council has already held two races at Sweet Briar since the two women’s organizations announced a partnership in August 2011 — one in the fall of 2011 and one this past spring. As in May, the picturesque route will take runners from the old train station through campus and along the Dairy Loop, winding its way past the riding center and through the woods.

Sweet Briar is a proud supporter of Girls on the Run’s mission, which is “to inspire girls to be joyful, healthy and confident” and to “educate and prepare girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living.” Girls on the Run also provides opportunities for Sweet Briar students to volunteer, mentor the younger girls and share some of the benefits they’ve experienced in an all-women’s educational environment.

Dozens of volunteers, including Sweet Briar students and employees, will help with course setup, work pre-race activities such as the happy hair table, or serve as running buddies for more than 515 registered girls as they tackle the challenging 5K course.

…read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

Joseph McGill, creator of the Slave Dwelling Project, will make an overnight stop at Sweet Briar College on Sunday, Oct. 7 and Monday, Oct 8. He will present a public lecture on the project at 2 p.m. Sunday in the Sweet Briar Museum and again at 12:15 p.m. Monday in the Johnson Dining Room at Prothro. The lectures are free and open to the public.

McGill’s overnight accommodations during the visit will be a sleeping bag on the wooden floor of the 19th-century cabin behind Sweet Briar House. The cabin is the former home of both enslaved and freed blacks who worked at Sweet Briar during its days as a plantation and as the College was being established — and it is the object of McGill’s visit.

Sunday’s event also will include guided tours of the slave cabin and of Sweet Briar House, presented from the perspective of African-Americans who would have worked there.

In 2010 McGill began traveling to antebellum plantations, spending the night in former slave dwellings to bring attention to the importance of preserving and interpreting the historical structures. As a field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he was struck by how few outbuildings and dependencies survive relative to the many antebellum mansions that have been preserved as part of our heritage.

“The reason for the scant existence of these dwellings is debatable,” McGill says. “My solution to the problem is the Slave Dwelling Project.”

In the past two and a half years, he’s slept in dozens of slave quarters, rural and urban, from Connecticut to Texas. In doing so he also calls attention to the efforts of those who are actively working to preserve the sites that do still exist.

Although he began the project sleeping solo, McGill usually has company during his overnight stays and expects that will continue to be the case.

“I want others to share the experience, therefore becoming vested supporters for extant slave dwellings,” he says.

Sweet Briar will be his second stop in Virginia — his first trip to the state and his first stay on a college campus for the project. He will be at Bacon’s Castle in Surry on Oct. 5-6. While on campus, he will discuss with audiences why he carries on with the project and its future, along with a look back at some of the 37 sites he has visited.

The Sweet Briar cabin is the only one remaining of 28 that once stood on the property. Before College founder Indiana Fletcher Williams’ death in 1900, her overseer Logan Anderson occupied the cabin. Campus brick maker Sterling Jones lived there with several of his children during the College’s earliest years. By 1930, updated with running water and electricity, it served as the Sweet Briar Alumnae Association’s first home.

The building has since been used as a classroom, student clubhouse and “farm tool” museum. It is mostly empty now, as work to re-interpret the site gets under way to reflect its history as an African-American dwelling and its role in the development of …read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning

There is more to the notion of “diversity” than meets the eye, say a group of passionate Sweet Briar upperclasswomen. And they’re not afraid to expose some of their rawest emotions to explain what they mean.

About a dozen students presented the Diversity Monologues for members of the Class of 2016 in Murchison Lane Auditorium Monday evening. Beginning last year, the monologues were added to first-year orientation. A spring semester program also was held.

Some students read their own material; others brought to life stories of someone else’s experiences, both before and after their arrival at Sweet Briar. They explored race, religion and sexual identity, but topics came from less expected places, too: being too tall, being “ginger,” having epilepsy or just coming from a complicated family situation. One monologue was about being a college student who doesn’t like to party.

They were funny, serious, poignant — and spoken from the heart.

Senior Molly Harper has written several monologues that she and others have performed since the inaugural program in fall 2011. An outgoing leader on campus working on her Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater and music, her inner struggles don’t announce themselves. But they are there. She has written on being a pagan, weight and body image issues and on being a bully — and how one led to another. As a child, Harper said she was picked on for “being too tall, too large, too everything.”

“I find the bully monologue to be very important, because it touches on the matter of civility and the treatment of others,” she says. “The fact is, when I was little I was bullied so much, I became a bully to stop the kids from making fun of me. It led me into a lot of trouble and so today, I am extremely intolerant of bullying in general.

“That is the reason I participate [in the monologues]. Name calling, jokes and pranks that hurt a person because of their differences are something that I hate and so I want to stop any and all of that on the Sweet Briar campus.”

The monologues recognize that such differences, visible and otherwise, come in all forms. They help new students, who may be working through their own conflicts, understand that they are not alone.

“By presenting a monologue you are showing yourself to be a person who can be approached on the subject matter and saying you are willing to help anyone who needs help,” Harper says.

The monologues show Sweet Briar as the diverse community that it really is, says junior Ty Shreve.

“They’re a way of telling everyone a story that they can relate to about different topics,” Shreve says. “Because a lot of people will take a quick glance at Sweet Briar and the first thing that pops into their mind might not be diversity. [The monologues] show there are all types of diversity.”

She says the monologues start conversations that continue afterward, and allow new students to open up about what’s on their minds. As …read more
Source: Serving an Expanded Student Body

Construction crews have broken ground on a new wing on the west side of Sweet Briar College’s Mary Helen Cochran Library. The work is the first of three phases that will include removal and replacement of the Dana Wing, a 1964 addition to the north side of the historic 1929 building.

The $8.8 million dollar project — the money for which is already in hand, thanks to generous donors who designated contributions to support it — also includes renovations to the original library. Anyone familiar with the plans inevitably hastens to explain that “renovations” refers to essential upgrades such as air conditioning, improved ventilation and better lighting. The library is one of the campus’ most important buildings, both in purpose and in architecture.

“Nothing will be torn off of the original Cram structure,” says librarian Lisa Johnston, having personally calmed the fears of many a Cochran devotee.

To the contrary,  some of its grand elements will be restored, including the ability to look through the sweeping round-top windows along the original rear wall. The new atrium design will open the view now blocked by the Dana Wing, and reveal the brick exterior wall that was covered up by the 1960s addition.

The elegant, south-facing gallery adjacent to the Powell Reading Room also will be restored. It will again display art, as it was intended to, as well as provide a pleasant workspace.

The College is working closely with VMDO Architects and the builder, C.L. Lewis, to ensure the project will qualify for federal tax credits for historic preservation. Environmental sustainability also is a priority, influencing decisions about materials, design and construction to make it a “green” as possible, says Scott Shank, Sweet Briar’s vice president for finance and administration.

Ralph Adams Cram, the College’s chief architect during its formative years, dedicated Cochran Library on Founder’s Day in October 1929. It was a time with parallels to today. Then, as now, some desired features of the building were scaled back because of cost constraints, according to former art history professor Aileen Laing (Sweet Briar College and Ralph Adams Cram: Dreams and Reality, 2001).

But the College and Cram were lucky, too. Cochran was nearly complete when the stock market crashed on Oct. 29 of that year. This time around, Sweet Briar was forced to overcome difficulties presented by the recession that began in late 2007.

Laing also notes that Cochran was the last and most architecturally rich building that Cram was directly involved in at Sweet Briar. Nevertheless, proper library spaces of 50 or 80 years ago haven’t always stood the test of time, says Sweet Briar libraries director John Jaffe.

This is particularly true in the application of digital technology. That’s why the 1960s “book storage facility” will become sun-washed “people spaces,” where students can study alone or work collaboratively, always within reach of an electrical outlet and an Internet connection.

“This project will create a library for this generation,” says Jo Ellen Parker, president of the College. “It will enable students and faculty members to work together in new …read more
Source: A Landscape for Learning