Syncopasian, a co-ed a cappella group at MIT, advanced to the final round of the new WGBH singing competition Sing That Thing! Syncopasian competed against high school, college and adult singing groups to make it to the finals, where they were crowned the college champions.
Kristin Toussaint reports for Boston.com on “A Shout Across Time,” an event organized by Professor David Kaiser that explains the theory of relativity through dance. “It’s all about objects moving through space and time,” says Kaiser. “What could be more natural than bodies in a dance for that?”
Artist Pawel Romanczuk, who performed at MIT last week, has been working with MIT students to make instruments from different materials. Romanczuk explains to Boston Globe reporter Kevin Hartnett that his work is about “finding a new way for making music, searching for new sources of sound.”
Cate McQuaid writes for The Boston Globe about “Reanimation,” a piece of performance art created by Professor Emeritus Joan Jonas. “This densely layered piece deploys drawing, video projection, and passages read aloud from the novel ‘Under the Glacier,’ by Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author,” writes McQuaid.
Three new works composed by MIT lecturer Elena Ruehr are premiering over the coming weeks, reports David Weininger for The Boston Globe. “The next two weeks constitute a sort of bicoastal mini-festival of new works by Ruehr,” he writes. “It’s an enviable burst of activity for any composer.”
Stav Ziv of Newsweek writes about the “Dance your Ph.D.” contest, which challenges Ph.D. students to explain their research through dance. MIT graduate student Hans Rinderknecht, winner of the physics category, submitted video of a live performance at MIT’s Simmons Hall in April, in which dancers depict how light is used to create nuclear fusion.
Boston Globe reporter Cate McQuaid writes about the growing popularity of performance art at Boston-area museums, highlighting the MIT List Visual Arts Center’s long tradition of presenting the medium. “But the List, at an institution as forward-thinking as MIT, is exceptional,” writes McQuaid.