Arts Events for Duke Reunions Week
Duke Arts invites returning alumni—and anyone!—to enjoy these offerings from across our vibrant arts community. This year, there is arts every day of Reunions Week!
April 12, 2021—April 17, 2021
It is Virtual Duke Reunions Week for classes ending in 0, 1, 5 and 6! The Duke Alumni Association has transformed this on-campus weekend experience into a week-long invitation to return to Duke through programs, special class events, and more. See the full schedule.
Featured Events
Duke Arts Student Showcase
Duke’s theaters, galleries, and other arts venues are typically busiest in April! This year, we bring the buzz, artwork, and stages online. Join us on Friday, April 16 at 7pm for the premiere of this produced special that highlights the artistic accomplishments of undergraduate students in our academic arts departments this spring. Featuring special guests and over thirty student performers, the Duke Arts Student Showcase will help bring Virtual Duke Reunions Week 2021 to a celebratory close!
duARTS ArtsFest 2021
duARTS, the umbrella organization for student art groups at Duke, is hosting its annual ArtsFest between April 10 and 17. There are in-person opportunities for students, as well as student-organized events offered virtually featuring current Duke students, professors, and arts industry professionals. (Graphic by Marie Cheng '24.)
Monday, April 12
DukeCreate
Dance Cardio Workshop
Mon, Apr 12, 11am-12pm
In this workshop learn some basic dance moves that are simple, uplifting, and safe to do in your home or dorm room. A Spring playlist strings together these moves in a guaranteed workout for your heart and your soul. Join us to ignite your creativity, celebrate the end of the semester, and boost your physical and mental health!
DukeCreate
Tai Chi & Photography Workshop
Mon, Apr 12, 4-5:30pm
Photography and mindfulness have a deep and enduring relationship. In photography, we are asked to be fully present, to call upon all of the senses and to respond with a single image. In Taijiquan (Tai Chi) we engage with several invigorating practices to relax, listen, and improve our awareness of self and surroundings. This 1.5 hour long workshop brings both Tai Chi and photography together and teaches us how to enrich our ability to surrender to, be fully awake in, and to capture the essence of the moment.
Duke Dance Program
Spring Dance Series
Preparing Grounds: Portals and Portability
Mon, Apr 12, 12pm
Faculty Work: Ava LaVonne Vinesett. The lynching of Black bodies was a ritual gathering. . . trees as witnesses of these acts of terror. . . In several African diaspora spiritual traditions, “practitioners recognize forests, rivers, and oceans as natural resources embodying spiritual subjects” (Concha-Holmes, 2012). What might we imagine as held memories by these spiritual subjects? How do we create points of access, or portals to engage in acts of remembrance and recovery? We are “preparing grounds” to reclaim, re-consecrate, re-articulate, restore, remember and reimagine liminal spaces as accesses to restoration. . . points of contact between the world of what is seen and unseen worlds. Members of the Duke African Repertory Ensemble are joined by Indigo Yard Gals.
Nasher Museum of Art
Online Interactive Exhibition Tours
All week long
The Nasher Museum of Art invites you to visit three virtual, interactive tours of its current (or recent) exhibitions: Cultures of the Sea: Art of the Ancient Americas, Ebony G. Patterson . . . while the dew is still on the roses . . ., and Graphic Pull: Our Biggest Virtual Tour Yet.
Tuesday, April 13
DEMAN Live & Innovation Co-Lab
From Christie’s to SNL: The ABCs of NFTs
Tue, Apr 13, 8:30–9:30pm
Join us for a conversation with NY-based Duke alumnae Nicole Sales ‘12 of Christie’s and multidisciplinary artist Carrie Able ’04 about their careers, current market trends and creative process at the convergence of art and tech, including the explosion of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) in conversation with Michael Faber ’05 of Duke Innovation Co-Lab.
DEMAN Live & Duke Law
A Streaming Industry Conversation
Tue, Apr 13, 12:30-1:30pm
Meet Kristen Baldwin ’95, senior counsel of Business and Legal Affairs at Netflix Original Film, and Jonas Blank ’01, Senior Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs at NBCUniversal. This discussion will focus on the business and legal issues involved with streaming services, as well as how the speaker started working in entertainment.
Wednesday, April 14
Nasher Museum of Art
Graphic Pull: An Interactive, 360 Virtual Tour
Wed, Apr 14, 11am-12pm
Join Molly Boarati, Associate Curator at the Nasher Museum, for an interactive virtual tour of Graphic Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Collection. Molly will discuss numerous printmaking techniques in the exhibition, which features works dating from the 1970s to today. Molly will escort visitors virtually through six galleries, zoom in on works of art and share short video clips of two artists whose works are in the exhibition.
DEMAN Live & Duke Law
A Conversation with NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts
Wed, April 14, 12:30–1:30pm
In honor of the 11th Annual Duke Sports and Entertainment Law Symposium, National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Michele Roberts will share thoughts on current issues facing the NBA, the future of basketball, and its intersection with college sports.
Franklin Humanities Institute
Preservation, Restitution, & the Idea of “Cultural Heritage”
Wed, Apr 14, 11:30am–1:00pm
Please join the Manuscript Migration Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute for a conversation about cultural heritage and restitution featuring Felwine Sarr and Astrid Swenson. Both speakers are experts on the ethical, epistemological, and historical contours of the category “cultural heritage,” as this concept has worked globally to shore up colonialism, imperialism, and the modern nation-state.
Social Practice Lab
Ongoing Biennale 20–22: Gabi Ngcobo
Wed, Apr 14, 1pm
Organized by Pedro Lasch and the FHI Social Practice Lab with support from the Franklin Humanities Institute’s World Arts Initiative at Duke University, this Conversation Cycle is part of a larger program entitled ’20-22 The Ongoing Biennial’. This week, join Gabi Ngcobo, curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale and the South Africa Cape 07 Biennale.
DukeCreate
The Mindful Path to Creative Insight
Wed, Apr 14, 6pm-7:30pm
How can mindfulness enhance the creative process? This workshop will teach you how to explore your inner and outer experience and translate your discoveries into writing and/or visual art. You’ll be guided in short bursts of mindfulness practice, lasting about 10 minutes each, to help you tap into your experience in different ways and draw inspiration from the present moment.
DEMAN Live, Hear at Duke & duARTS
Pitch to Podcast feat. Pushkin Industries
Wed, Apr 14, 8–9pm
Join Pushkin Industries‘ Jon Schnaars ‘05, VP, Business Development and Brittani Brown, Associate Producer for a conversation about their careers in podcast, media, business, and tech. Schnaars and Brown will take us behind the scenes and share both the creative process and business side of making a podcast, as well as answer your questions.
Thursday, April 15
DEMAN Live & Duke MBA MES Club
Behind-the-Scenes: Hollywood Writers
Thu, Apr 15, 8–9pm
Curious what it’s like to sell a script to a studio and be a staff writer in Hollywood? TV/film writers Haley Z. Boston and Roy Parker will join us for a panel discussion on how they have made their careers as writers in this new age of streaming.
Duke Music
Piano Students Group Recital
Thu, Apr 15, 7pm
Piano students perform an end-of-year group recital in the first of a two-night presentation.
Duke Chapel
Jazz Vespers
Thu, Apr 15, 7:30-8:30pm
This Jazz Vespers online service combines the form of the traditional evening vespers service with the musical improvisation of jazz. Professor John V. Brown, Duke’s vice provost for the arts, and his Little Big Band provide musical leadership, while Chapel ministers offer prayers and meditations on themes of hope, joy, and resurrection.
Duke Dance Program
Spring Dance Series: Creative Gifts
All Week Long
Students from this spring’s Interdisciplinary Performance Project (service learning) will co-create and publish an e-gallery of video archived performances, sound/media compositions, fiction/poetry, and visual artifacts in response to weekly creative care gatherings and storytelling sessions with community partners from Dementia Inclusive Durham.
Music, sound, video, and media composition: Brittany J. Green; applied theater and improvisation: Amy Sawyers-Williams; music, rhythm, and movement: Teli Shabu
duARTS ArtsFest
Music Industry Webinar: Mechanical Licensing Collective
Thu, Apr 15, 7pm
Join duARTS as we welcome Serona Elton, Head of Educational Partnerships at the Mechanical Licensing Collective. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is a nonprofit organization designated by the U.S. Copyright Office pursuant to the historic Music Modernization Act of 2018.
This event will introduce Duke music creatives to the MLC, and teach how to connect to collect these unmatched royalties for their music.
Theater Studies
Spring Mainstage Production
Medea
Thu, Apr 15, 7:30pm
This is a border zone with Corinth a thriving place—but poverty and loss beyond its walls. Medea is an immigrant who destroyed both her way home and her family for the man she loves, Jason. Now she suffers a great injustice by his hand and faces deportation alongside her children. She decides to take matters into her own hands and forces Jason to suffer as she does. This spring mainstage is also a distinction project from two of our graduating seniors María Zurita Ontiveros and Ash Jeffers.
Friday, April 16
Duke Performances & Duke Arts
In Conversation: Tift Merritt & Allison Russell
Fri, Apr 16, 12pm
Hungry River is a performance collaboration between Tift Merritt, Allison Russell (Our Native Daughters, Birds of Chicago) that explores the emotional history of formerly segregated mental asylums in North Carolina and the prophetic importance of the people who lived their lives there. Through song and monologue, ceremony and storytelling, this community history helps us understand not only the asylum’s past but also how that past informs the ways we view race relations, poverty, criminalized margins, and the stigma of mental illness today.
Duke Dance Program
Spring Dance Series:A Project in (Self) Reflection
Fri, Apr 16
A video presentation of Cordelia Hogan’s (Dance ’21) capstone project.
Duke Arts
Spring 2021 Student Showcase
7pm
Join us for the premiere of this produced special that highlights the artistic accomplishments of undergraduate students in Spring 2021, featuring remarks by Duke University President Vincent E. Price, Provost Sally Kornbluth, Vice Provost for the Arts John V. Brown, department chairs, and other special guests. Meet student artists as they share excerpts of their work and experience how artistic practice at Duke has evolved under pandemic restrictions.
Saturday, April 17
Theater Studies
Spring Mainstage Production
Medea
Sat, Apr 17, 7:30pm
This is a border zone with Corinth a thriving place–but poverty and loss beyond its walls. Medea is an immigrant who destroyed both her way home and her family for the man she loves, Jason. Now she suffers a great injustice by his hand and faces deportation alongside her children. She decides to take matters into her own hands and forces Jason to suffer as she does. This spring mainstage is also a distinction project from two of our graduating seniors María Zurita Ontiveros and Ash Jeffers.
Duke Performances
Ciompi Quartet
Sat, Apr 17, 8pm
The Ciompi offer the world premiere of Duke composer John Supko’s quartet, “soleil noir,” originally scheduled for April 2020. Jokubaviciute joins the Ciompi for César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F Minor, a late-romantic masterpiece defined by its cyclic structure and harmonies.