Author Archives: Helen Rouner

“Practice: Yale Undergraduate Senior Projects in Art 2013” presents the senior theses of the 23 art majors graduating this year.

Yale’s stages have recently been home to singing pirates, vibrators and a 45-year-old Hollywood star as Hamlet. This week, it’s on to singing, dancing, cursing and lovemaking puppets.

For our generation, the ambiguity of “pilot” and “pirate” in British pronunciation might spark an Internet meme; for W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, it’s the beginning of an opera.

“When you play music, you can’t offend anyone or hurt people, but you can make people feel your passion,” said Siwar Mansour, an 18-year-old Palestinian violinist and ukulele player in Heartbeat: The Israeli-Palestinian Youth Music Movement.

This weekend, the Yale Dramatic Association will stage its annual Freshman Show featuring an all-freshman cast and crew.

On Tuesday, the Arts Council announced that it will give $10,000 to each of seven Connecticut-based teams of artists and scientists to conduct collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects.

Star Wars was about good and evil. It was about growing up thinking you’re alone, but realizing you have the ability to fight for what matters. And now, Star Wars has fallen to the dark side — a money-making scheme that takes our story’s heroes and puts their heads on PEZ dispensers.

“But no one does that!” English and Theater Studies professor Joseph Roach, playing the character of Judge Brack, exclaimed.

Although President Barack Obama’s re-election dominated media coverage Tuesday night, several states around the country also made news by voting on particularly divisive social justice issues — and moved in a largely progressive direction. Maine, Maryland and Washington legalized same-sex marriage after long and bitter battles, and Minnesota voted not to define marriage as a »