CCE News

The world-renowned Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, in residence at Bard College this spring, gave a site-specific performance at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, on May 7. The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which operates one of its six academic programs at Fishkill, invited the Company to perform and meet with students. Bill T. Jones choreographed a new piece for the event, entitled Fishkill / Movements 1 Through 45.

The world-renowned Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, in residence at Bard College this spring, gave a site-specific performance at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, on May 7. The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which operates one of its six academic programs at Fishkill, invited the Company to perform and meet with students. Bill T. Jones choreographed a new piece for the event, entitled Fishkill / Movements 1 Through 45.

Hundreds of men incarcerated at Fishkill attended the performance, during which Jones also collaborated with a BPI student who sang duets of Down by the Riverside and We Shall Overcome with Rev. J. Edward Lewis, the prison's Protestant chaplain. Following the performance, Jones led a question and answer session, which included in-depth discussion about the role of the arts, and particularly dance, in American society.

In the program Jones wrote, "Movements 1 Through 45 is yet another opportunity to identify that important conversation that happens between the performers in the Company and a specific audience. In our life as a dance company, we travel a great deal and perform for many people we don’t really know. We are excited when we run into a situation such as this one, where we can create a dialogue and even the possibility of sharing the stage with members of the community."

This performance was made possible by the partnership between New York Live Arts and the Bard College Dance Program.

The Bard Prison Initiative has been offering college in prison since 1999, providing a life-changing, cost-effective model for other programs nationwide.

Professor Gaiman visits two refugee camps in Jordan run by the UN Refugee Agency and listens to the stories of Syrians who have fled violence in their home country.

In the wake of an attack on a Pakistani student studying in India, Bard alumnus Saim Saeed discusses the importance of academic exchange programs between the two nations.

Bard biology professors Brooke Jude and Amy Savage report on how the Citizen Science program gives Bard students a foundation in the scientific method while also engaging them in science education and community service activities.

Bard College finished in the top ten for electricity reduction in Campus Conservation Nationals (CCN) 2014, a contest in which more than 265,000 students at more than 100 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada worked to conserve electricity and water. Students collectively saved over 2.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and nearly 476,000 gallons of water in this year’s contest.

Roger Berkowitz and colleagues discuss the recent publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, which contain anti-Semitic passages. This article includes links to videos of conversations between Professor Berkowitz, Black Notebooks editor Peter Trawny, and Fordham University Professor Babette Babich.

Until recently Bard alumnus Dan Cline was teaching English language classes to young people in Haisyn, Ukraine, working on community projects, and even ending up in the local press for his efforts. That changed over the winter as political unrest in the country grew into a revolution and the Peace Corps evacuated all its volunteers from the country.

The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded Bard College a four-year, $400,000 Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment grant to increase and enhance the interdisciplinary study of environmental and sustainability issues in Asia across the undergraduate curricula at Bard’s campuses at Annandale-on-Hudson and Simon’s Rock, and in the M.S. programs at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy.