2024-25 Austin Arts Center Events
Fall 24
SEPTEMBER 2024
Arts at Trinity: Welcome Back Celebration
Wed, Sept 4 (6-7pm)
Austin Arts Center Lobby
Join us in meeting and greeting over food and drink with other arts and arts-curious faculty, staff, and students to kick-off the new academic year.
Trinity Organ Series
Thurs, Sept 5 (Common Hour)
Trinity Chapel
Trinity College Chapel and Department of Music present the Trinity Organ Series, featuring Edward Tipton (St. Mark’s Church, New Canaan, CT) in recital. Our exceptional pipe organ, built by the Austin Organ Company of Hartford, contains over four-thousand pipes that range in size from pencils to large trees. Each pipe has its own unique sound, combining to a thrilling sonic experience.
Detritus
Mon, Sept 16-Sat, Oct 28
Reception: Thurs, Sept 19 (4-6pm)
Widener Gallery (AAC)
Detritus brings together four artists creating works of art from discarded objects and materials. Faustin Adeniran, Marsha Borden, Kathryn Frund, and Ian Trask each address how our trash reflects individual and societal values, while considering humanity’s impact on the natural world.
Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival with Hartford Symphony
Competition: Sat, Sept 21 (10am, 11am, 12:45pm)
Concert: Sat, Sept 21 (8pm); Sun, Sept 22 (3pm)
Trinity Chapel
Now over 25 years old, the Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival is proud to be one of the top competitions for young organists in North America. The festival’s mission is to support and encourage young organists in the earliest stages of their education and careers, and to increase appreciation of organ music in the general public. At the heart of the Festival is an annual, national competition for young organists hosted at Trinity College, Hartford. Alternating biennially between a High School and Young Professional Division (up to age 26), competitors earn significant cash prizes to support their education and career endeavors.
Finalists of the 2024 Biennial Young Professional Competition. The competition will be held live at Trinity College Chapel in Hartford, Connecticut on Saturday, September 21, 2024 beginning at 10:00 a.m. Each finalist will present a 45-minute recital including a J.S. Bach Trio Sonata and one of César Franck’s Three Chorals. In addition to other repertoire of the competitor’s choosing, the performance includes at least one work by a woman or BIPOC composer. Each 45-minute recital will also be live-streamed from the ASOFH YouTube Channel.
Bodies Becoming: Three Evenings of Choreographic Research
Rebecca Pappas—Learning//Caring
Thurs, Sept 26 (7:30pm)
Performance Lab (Trinity Commons)
In Bodies Becoming: Three Evenings of Choreographic Research, a company of student dancers stretch their minds and bodies, engaging in three distinct models of choreographic inquiry over the course of the semester. Each evening combines embodied experimentation with discussion, highlighting the ongoing choreographic research of artists Rebecca Pappas (September 26), Sara Smith (October 24), and Brandon Couloute (December 5).
In Learning//Caring (9/26), Pappas and the performers collectively imagine new futures. The piece is grounded in repeated physical acts – reflecting and refracting, echoing and materializing, holding, and letting go, embodying the challenges of truly caring for one another.
OCTOBER 2024
Jimmy and Lorraine Open Rehearsal
Tues, Oct 1 (6-7pm)
Garmany Hall (AAC)
Bear witness to HartBeat Ensemble’s creative process as Director Brian Jennings leads the cast through a rehearsal of Jimmy & Lorraine.
Cacophony Walk
Wed, Oct 2 (3pm)
Meet in Dangremond Family Commons (Hallden Hall)
CACOPHONY is an experiential art excursion series created collaboratively by choreographer Sara Smith and artist Gina Siepel. These walks focus on the act of listening as we move through an environment and are intended as introductions to practicing deep awareness and de-habituation from everyday experiences of a place.
Trinity Organ Series
Thurs, Oct 3 (Common Hour)
Trinity Chapel
Trinity College Chapel and Department of Music present the Trinity Organ Series, featuring Walden Moore (Lecturer Adjunct, Yale University) in recital. Our exceptional pipe organ, built by the Austin Organ Company of Hartford, contains over four-thousand pipes that range in size from pencils to large trees. Each pipe has its own unique sound, combining to a thrilling sonic experience.
Yootay Singers
& Mashantucket Pequot Community Drum Group
Thurs, October 3 (Common Hour)
Gruss Music Hall
The Connecticut-based group will perform Native American songs of the Eastern Woodlands in the Northern style. Yootay performs at Powwows all over the country and, most recently, was the host drum group at the Mashantucket Pequot Powwow (Schemitzun) in Mashantucket, CT.
Jimmy and Lorraine
Hartbeat Ensemble
Thurs, Oct 10 (7:30pm)
Fri, Oct 12 (7:30pm)
Thurs, Oct 17 (2:00pm)
Fri, Oct 18 (7:30pm)
Sat, Oct 19 (2pm & 7:30pm)
Goodwin Theater (AAC)
Written by Talvin Wilks
Directed by Brian Jennings
The Austin Arts Center presents a six-performance encore engagement of HartBeat Ensemble‘s acclaimed production of Jimmy & Lorraine: A Musing. Talvin Wilk’s poetic and political play focuses on the friendship between two groundbreaking Black American writers and activists, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. The production kicks off HartBeat Ensemble’s James Baldwin Centennial Season.
Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing is a meditation on the American political climate of the late 50s and early 60s through the lens of two significant artists of the time, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Following their impactful careers as artists, their call to social activism, and the challenges of wrestling with the balance of an artistic career and politics, their lives give us an opportunity to look at this rich period of political and social upheaval. Inspired by text from biographies, journals, personal correspondences, plays, novels, interviews, essays, and media clips, a picture of this significant period in American history is revealed with Baldwin and Hansberry front and center. Significant speeches, television interviews, and political debates all serve as fodder for this meditation. Hansberry and Baldwin were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. Still, both had arrived, through their art, efforts to depict and grapple with the complex lives of African Americans in American society. Together, the lives of these two artists and social activists give a profound perspective on the artist’s quandary in political struggle and the challenges of a radical life.
Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing is supported in part by Austin Arts Center and Trinity College, J. Walton Bissell Foundation, Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts, Greater Hartford Council for the Arts, The Roberts Foundation, and Travelers. Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing was originally produced by HartBeat Ensemble in 2016 at the Carriage House Theater in Hartford, CT, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, CT Humanities, the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and the Amistad Center for Arts & Culture.
Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart
Thursday, October 17 (6pm)
Performance Lab (Trinity Commons)
As part of the Jimmy and Lorraine engagement series, Austin Arts Center and HartBeat Ensemble offer this screening of Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart followed by a conversation with the film’s director, Tracy Strain.
Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is the first-ever feature documentary about Lorraine Hansberry, the visionary playwright who authored the groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun. An overnight sensation, the play transformed the American theater and has long been considered a classic, yet the remarkable story of the playwright faded from view. With this documentary, filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain resurrects the Lorraine Hansberry we have forgotten—a passionate artist, committed activist, and sought-after public intellectual who waged an outspoken and defiant battle against injustice in 20th-century America. The film reveals Hansberry’s prescient works tackling race, human rights, women’s equality and sexuality that anticipated social and political movements on the horizon. Lorraine Hansberry lived much of her 34 years guided by a deep sense of responsibility to others, proclaiming: “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”
A.K. Smith Reading Series: Tommy Orange
Wed, Oct 23 (7:00pm)
Goodwin Theater (AAC)
The A.K. Smith Reading Series presents Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma), author of There There and Wandering Stars.
Bodies Becoming: Three Evenings of Choreographic Research
Sara Smith—Inside the Breath (In Network Time)
Thurs, Oct 24 (7:30pm)
Performance Lab (Trinity Commons)
In Bodies Becoming: Three Evenings of Choreographic Research, a company of student dancers stretch their minds and bodies, engaging in three distinct models of choreographic inquiry over the course of the semester. Each evening combines embodied experimentation with discussion, highlighting the ongoing choreographic research of artists Rebecca Pappas (September 26), Sara Smith (October 24), and Brandon Couloute (December 5).
Sara Smith (10/24) will present an excerpt of Inside the Breath (In Network Time), an imagined utopia rooted in ecological and social questions, and the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa as modeled by octopuses. The series ends with Bradon Couloutte’s Marcus Rodriguez Live @ Trinity (12/5), a live hip hop concert experience featuring singer Marcus Rodriguez and professional and student dancers in an unforgettable, high-energy evening.
Encounters Dialogue
Tues, Oct 29 (6pm)
Garmany Hall
Encounters is a conversation model developed through UCONN’s Humility & Conviction in Public Life project to foster unexpected conversations around divisive issues and obscure knowledge. Through facilitated, small-group dialogues, we will dive deeply into the themes of Jimmy and Lorraine together. The aim is to strengthen our ability to know ourselves and to develop a forum for respectful and challenging dialogue.
Midnight Reading and Organ Concert
Wed, Oct 31
Trinity Chapel
NOVEMBER 2024
Devotion: Photographs from the Collection
Mon, Nov 11-Sat, Dec 14
Reception: Thurs, Nov 14 (Common Hour)
Widener Gallery (AAC)
An exhibition that looks at love, care, and tenderness within the Photography Collection of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College. Curated by Adrian Martinez Chavez.
Trinity Organ Series
Thurs, Nov 7 (Common Hour)
Chapel
Trinity College Chapel and Department of Music present the Trinity Organ Series, featuring Trinity Organ Studio (Students of Christopher Houlihan) in recital. Our exceptional pipe organ, built by the Austin Organ Company of Hartford, contains over four-thousand pipes that range in size from pencils to large trees. Each pipe has its own unique sound, combining to a thrilling sonic experience.
West End String Quartet
Fri, Nov 8 (7:30pm)
Gruss Music Hall (GMC in AAC)
Baltimore
Thurs-Sat, Nov 21-23 (7:30pm)
Sat, Nov 23 (2pm)
Goodwin Theater (AAC)
Written by Kristen Greenidge
Directed by Godfrey Simmons
When a racially-charged incident divides her first-year students, reluctant resident advisor Shelby finds herself in the middle of a conversation she does not want to have. As pressure to address the controversy mounts from residents, the new dean, and even her best friend, Shelby must decide if she will enter the fray or watch her community come apart at the seams. Sharp, funny, and searing, Baltimore is a timely drama about racism on college campuses.
Baltimore is produced by special arrangement with Playscripts, Inc. www.playscripts.com.
DECEMBER 2024
Lessons Concert
Tues, Dec 3 (Common Hour)
Gruss Music Hall (GMC in AAC)
Jazz Concert
Tues, Dec 3 (7:30pm)
Goodwin Theater (AAC)
Samba & Steel Concert
Wed, Dec 4 (7:30pm)
Goodwin Theater (AAC)
Chamber Ensemble Concert
Thurs, Dec 5 (Common) Hour
Gruss Music Hall (GMC in AAC)
Bodies Becoming: Three Evenings of Choreographic Research
Brandon Coulotte—Marcus Rodriguez Live @ Trinity
Thurs, Dec 5 (7:30pm)
Performance Lab (Trinity Commons)
In Bodies Becoming: Three Evenings of Choreographic Research, a company of student dancers stretch their minds and bodies, engaging in three distinct models of choreographic inquiry over the course of the semester. Each evening combines embodied experimentation with discussion, highlighting the ongoing choreographic research of artists Rebecca Pappas (September 26), Sara Smith (October 24), and Brandon Couloute (December 5).
The series ends with Bradon Couloute’s Marcus Rodriguez Live @ Trinity (12/5), a live hip hop concert experience featuring singer Marcus Rodriguez and professional and student dancers in an unforgettable, high-energy evening.
Last Night
Mon, Dec 9 (5:30pm)
Performance Lab (Trinity Commons )
Trinity/LaMama Showcase
Tues, Dec 10 (4:30pm & 7:30pm)
Performance Lab (Trinity Commons)
