John Waters Wanders Over to the Politically Correct Capital

ARTS & CULTURE

October 29, 2021 Established 1874 Volume 151, Number 4

Celebrating Oberlin Pianists’ Success in International Chopin Piano Competition

Yuhki Ueda

Production Editor

This past month, three Oberlin pianists participated in the 18th Chopin Piano Competition, an international competition held this year from Oct. 2–23 in Warsaw, Poland. Among the participants and prizewinners of the competition were Oberlin-Como Fellow Bruce (Xiaoyu) Liu, who won first prize; Conservatory second-year JJ Jun Li Bui, and Conservatory thirdyear Kai-Min Chang, all of whom are students of Oberlin Professor of Piano Dang Thai Son.

The competition, organized by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, was originally scheduled for 2020 but was postponed until this year due to COVID-19. In all rounds of the competition, participants were required to prepare repertoire solely by Fryderyk Chopin. Participants who passed the preliminary round in July of this year moved on to stage 1, which took place in early October. People who passed the second and third stages were able to progress to the final round. The pool of candidates progressively dwindled throughout the course of the competition. Last week, the select few who reached the final round had the chance to perform either Chopin’s Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 or the Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra at the National Philharmonic concert hall in Warsaw.

Among the 17-member competition jury was Dang Thai Son, a Vietnamese-Canadian pianist and Oberlin piano professor. Dang participated in the 10th Chopin Piano Competition and won first prize and a gold medal in 1980, the first time that a major international competition was won by an Asian pianist. He explained that his love for Chopin was inspired by his mother, who is a pianist herself. He remembers hearing her play some pieces by Chopin one night, after which he fell in love with the music.

“In the silence of the night, she played a bit of Chopin, a Nocturne and Mazurka, and I fell in love with this music when I was about 8, 9 years old,” Left to right: Oberlin-Como Fellow Bruce (Xiaoyu) Liu, Professor of Piano Dang Thai Son, and Conservatory second-year JJ Jun Li Bui pose for a picture taken after the Gala Award Concert ahead of their debut at the 18th Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Kai-Min Chang also participated in the competition but isn’t featured in the photo.

Courtesy of Dang Thai Son

Dang said. “And then in 1970, she was invited to the Warsaw Chopin Competition [as] a guest. And then after this, she brought back complete music scores, recordings, and talked about the competition. So I, day and night, had Chopin, and I had nothing else. I had no Mozart, no Beethoven, no Bach. I had only Chopin. And I loved this music. I was passionate about this music.”

As the youngest finalist in the competition, sixth-prize winner Bui sometimes felt overwhelmed by the large scale of the event.

“Of course, it’s a really big moment in my life,” Bui said. “It takes a lot of work to get there, and of course, luck, too. [It’s] such a big competition that feels kind of overwhelming at times. And I think that it’s good to try to be humble and not to let it get too much to your head. And … focusing on music during [the] competition is very important, because a lot of people might get too distracted with the publicity and all the cameras. I think relaxing and focusing on your music is so important.”

Bui hopes to take a break from competing and plans to focus on his studies now that the competition is over.

“I just kind of want to focus on my studies a bit, because I’ve been away for such a long time,” he said. “It’s a good thing to relax and not [do] competitions for your whole life. It’s because I think sometimes competitions can kind of get to your head and then music kind of just becomes like a competition. … I think music competitions are just a way to open doors for your career and as a musician, as a pianist, but I don’t think [they should be] your whole life.”

The success of these Oberlin pianists in the competition has been a source of inspiration and celebration among Conservatory faculty and students alike. Professor of Piano Robert Shannon followed the three Oberlin participants very closely during the competition, along with several other pianists he already knew, and named the competition as a historical moment for the Piano Department.

“I think it’s a really important event [for] the Oberlin Piano Department,” Shannon said. “I’ve been around the Oberlin Piano Department since 1967, and we’ve never had this kind of representation in the Chopin Competition. We never had a faculty member whose student won first prize. And this event was watched by literally millions of people. It’s an unprecedented kind of exposure … certainly for Xiaoyu and JJ, and especially [for] Professor Dang. I really congratulate Professor Dang for his incredible teaching.”

Double-degree third-year Allison To also noted the inspiration and positive influence watching the competition has had on her.

“Watching the competition was extremely inspiring,” she said. “All the pianists’ dedication and hard work really shined through [in] their performances. It was such an amazing experience to be able to listen to the competition virtually and to hear the beautiful music of Chopin being performed by people all over the world.”

AMAM Acknowledges Histories of Displacement

Kushagra Kar Editor-in-Chief

Editor’s note: An article on this topic was initially published in the Review on Oct. 15 and erroneously included several inaccuracies. This article has been rewritten to reflect these corrections. The Review deeply regrets this error.

On Sept. 15, the Allen Memorial Art Museum launched its Dis/Possession project, which explores the way that museums interact with Indigenous histories, art, and communities. The yearlong project began with its first set of installations, which investigated the ways that canonical American art propagates harmful settler-colonial myths.

Assistant Curator of European and American Art Alexandra Letvin and Assistant Curator of Academic Programs Hannah Wirta Kinney created the project as an introspective look into the AMAM itself, examining the inherently exploitative nature of modern museums.

“The fall semester focuses on an American context,” Letvin said. “So for those works, we’re really asking the question of, ‘What role does canonical American art play in histories of dispossession?’ Then in the spring, we turn to a more global context and think more broadly.”

Dis/Possession operates on a statement of guiding principles written by the AMAM staff in 2020 that analyzes the role of museums in the problematic telling of Indigenous peoples and their stories.

“The AMAM exists — and has been able to grow and thrive — as a direct result of histories of dispossession,” the statement reads. “We recognize the role that images and museums have played in the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their stories, and seek to counteract this through our work.”

According to Letvin, this acknowledgement impacted the curation of Dis/ Possession.

“For us, the plural ‘histories’ was very important because for museums, it’s not just about one type of material,” Letvin said. “We wanted to probe more deeply into our institutional history and our collecting practices and our curatorial practices and educational practices.”

Letvin and Kinney deliberately chose the three works currently on display for their inadvertent erasure and dissociation from Indigenous history.

Arguably, the most famous work currently on display for Dis/Possession is Andy Warhol’s screenprint “Sitting Bull,” from his 1986 Cowboys and Indians series. The piece takes a photograph of Hunkpapa Lakota leader Tatanka Iyotake “Sitting Bull” and reimagines him through layers of bright colors and emboldened contrasting lines — typical Warhol fare. The original photograph of Sitting Bull was taken sometime in the 1880s, when he was best known for his victory over General George Custer at Little Bighorn.

According to Kinney, Warhol’s depiction strips Sitting Bull of his importance to Lakota history and portrays a main-

On the Record with Creative Writing Professors Lynn Powell and Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

Lynn Powell

Photo Courtesy of Lynn Powell

Director of Oberlin Writers in the Schools and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Lynn Powell has published three books of poetry: Old & New Testaments, The Zones of Paradise, and, most recently, Season of the Second Thought, as well as a book of nonfiction, Framing Innocence. Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, OC ’07, is the author of two poetry collections: The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons, one of The Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2020; and Chord Box, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. When Rogers was a student at Oberlin, she took a nonfiction workshop class with Powell that quickly spurred a mentor-mentee relationship. Now, the two are close friends and colleagues. This past Monday, the two professors gave the Creative Writing Program’s first reading and Q&A at Dye Lecture Hall.

Professor Rogers, you were in Professor Powell’s nonfiction workshop when you were a student at Oberlin. I was wondering if the both of you could speak on your experience as student and teacher and how that evolved into a friendship and a professional relationship.

ER: If I’m remembering correctly, we actually met at a poetry reading in late 2005 called Poets Against the War that was held at the Cat in the Cream. Lynn read something and I read something, and afterward Lynn came up to me and said, “I don’t know you and you’re Southern.” People from the South at Oberlin have a way of hearing one another’s accents and sort of finding one another. I had been hearing wonderful things about Lynn from other people, and it just turned out I had one more 300-level workshop to take — this would have been the spring of my junior year. I was hoping to take nonfiction anyway, so it was great that we’d already made a connection before I even came into her class. After that, I just found myself inspired to work really hard in her class. She was so attentive to everyone and brought so much energy into the classroom. I thought, “Wow, this person is really giving it her all.” So that’s kind of how things started. In some ways I think we were drawn to one another by virtue by having grown up in similar places — me in North Carolina, Lynn in Tennessee.

LP: I vividly remember Elizabeth as a student because she, too, was giving it her all. We had a great workshop group, but even within a great workshop group, there are people who, you know, it’s a priority but it’s not their highest priority. But I felt with Elizabeth, writing was her passion. The students all had to enlarge one of their essays at the end of the class into a 25 page essay. Maybe the earlier draft had been ten pages and they had to deepen it, open it up, and make some discoveries. Pretty soon, Elizabeth had already done that. She could have turned in her portfolio two weeks early, but she used that extra time as an opportunity to rewrite the whole thing, starting from scratch.

ER: Lynn wasn’t here my senior year because she was in the Netherlands, and after I graduated, I went to China on a Shansi fellowship. I think in some ways that distance was good. We stayed in touch and we started to become friends.

LP: Over Elizabeth’s senior year and the next two years, I don’t remember really being in touch except when Elizabeth was getting ready to apply for MFA programs and started writing to me from China. Elizabeth ended up going to the same university I had gone to, just out of total coincidence, but it gave us things to connect around. And then I think the friendship started building from there.

Professor Rogers, could you speak on Professor Powell’s mentorship during the writing process of your second book?

ER: With my second book, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons, I had a difficult publication process. I had the book chosen from a contest and then taken by a publisher who turned out to be really difficult to work with. The editor-in-chief did some things that were unethical, and I began to worry about trusting my book with this particular press. I made the decision to pull the book when it was under contract, which is not something that people often do. I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to start sending off this book again because I need to find a different publisher. I need to do something to this manuscript to make it new so I have the energy to send it out.” Lynn helped me come up with a new structure for the book based on some echoes See OTR, page 13

Students Celebrate Halloween with Giant Mechanical Pumpkin Ride

Gigi Ewing

Managing Editor

Ella Moxley

News Editor

Students got into the Halloween spirit this Wednesday with Program Board’s Get Wilder Halloween night. The event included a giant mechanical pumpkin ride, cupcake decorating, a costume contest, and more.

“It’s lovely,” College fourth-year Chris Schmucki said. “It’s everything I expected and more — everything I expected and less, actually.”

The highlight of the evening was the mechanical pumpkin set up in Wilder Hall Main. Students got in line for a chance to ride the moving pumpkin and many competed to see how long they could stay on as operators increased the speed of the ride.

“I think I lasted 20 seconds,” Schmucki said. “It’s not about balance. It’s about your hands, ’cause [the pumpkin has] this stem, and it really hurts your hands, and I feel like that’s when people give up.”

Many first-years in costumes ranging from devils to cheerleaders attended the event ahead of their first Halloween ’Sco event — Halloween Splitchers — which took place immediately following the Get Wilder Halloween night.

In addition to Oberlin Halloween first-timers, many fourth-year students who were not on campus last fall due to the College’s three-semester plan also attended the Program Board’s celebration. Many of these students were excited to experience their first — and last — Halloween on campus since 2019.

“I always love when we have mechanical things to ride on campus,” said College fourth-year Harper Ross. “That’s super fun. It’s great just to be able to all be together again and wear costumes out. It doesn’t really matter that people have masks. Just seeing that people are all dressed up and able to be together after the last, separated Halloween and not being on campus... just feels like a really great way, as a fourth-year, to end my Halloween experiences.”

John Waters Wanders Over to the “Politically Correct Capital of the World”

This past Thursday, the Oberlin Film Co-op invited writer and filmmaker John Waters for a performance of his live show False Negative and a screening of his 1988 film Hairspray at the Apollo Theatre.

Courtesy of Sam Blieden

Kathleen Kelleher Production Editor

On Thursday night, the Oberlin Film Cooperative hosted writer and filmmaker John Waters at the Apollo Theatre. Waters performed his oneman show False Negative prior to a screening of his 1988 commercial hit film Hairspray. The event was open only to the Oberlin student body and was completely free to attend.

Waters, known for his transgressive, cult-status comedy films, is also an actor, visual artist, and more recently an author. In the ’70s, Waters wrote and directed Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, which became known as his “Trash Trilogy,” featuring postmodern comedy, surrealism, and “campy” characters, including drag queen Divine. Waters’ 1988 film Hairspray was his runaway hit and was developed into a Broadway play.

“I’m excited,” Waters said. “I haven’t been to a college in two years, I don’t think.”

Waters described fitting in Oberlin on his current tour.

“I just got back from … Pittsburgh, where I did a Halloween show, and I was in Brooklyn where I did a podcast,” he said. “And then this coming week, I’m coming to see you. And then I go to two Halloween shows in Minneapolis … and then 17 Christmas cities. So yes, I’m back on the road in the middle of a pandemic.”

Waters’ appearance at the Apollo was organized by College fourthyear Sam Blieden, a Film Co-op board member and self-described fan who describes Waters’ talk as her “dream event.”

“John Waters is one of my favorite directors,” Blieden said. “I absolutely adore his movies and who he is as a person. I was talking to [Professor of English and Cinema Studies] William Patrick Day, … and he had mentioned to me that John Waters came to Oberlin in the ’90s — someone just wrote him a letter, and was like, ‘Hey John, you wanna come?’ As a member of the Film Co-op, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re trying to book new people; what if I try to get John Waters to come?’ So I do some research, and I find his booking agent, and it was a slow process from April to August, when things started to go rapid fire. At first we weren’t sure if we were gonna be able to get the money, and then we got the money!”

Day attended Waters’ talk at Oberlin back in the ’90s and described it as remarkably personal.

“It was actually completely organized by students,” Day said. “It was not a College-sponsored event. … He came in and he did a talk in the ’Sco because that was the only place they could put him; they couldn’t get any of the other College places for him. I don’t think the College fully understood who John Waters was. He did a really fantastic speech, and he went on for about an hour. It was smart and funny and all that stuff. What was really striking to me about that — it was a long time ago now — he really engaged with the students. Not only the people in the ’Sco during the question and answer period, but the people who brought him; he was really responsive to them — really paid a lot of attention to them. I’m really glad he’s coming back.”

As the primary organizer, Blieden was responsible for everything from driving Waters to and from the Cleveland airport to arranging and publicizing the event.

“Obviously I’m a big fan, but I’m a chauffeur for the evening,” Blieden said. “Just making sure it all goes smoothly, which is my main goal as the showrunner of the event. You just want it to work out and everything to be in order.”

While Waters has not directed since his 2004 film A Dirty Shame, he certainly hasn’t slowed down. Instead, he’s been working on personal projects and has developed a prolific career as an author with such works as Carsick, which details his experience hitchhiking across America, and Role Models, an autobiography told through descriptions of some of Waters’ favorite personalities.

“I feel really excited about seeing him,” Day said. “But I kind of wonder — he had moved into his more commercial phase in the ’90s and we all saw that stuff, and I keep wondering how students understand John Waters, because he’s a writer now — much more than a filmmaker.”

Blieden says her personal favorite of his films is Cecil B. Demented, a satirical film about “cinema terrorism” that pokes fun at Hollywood as an industry. Waters said that part of False Negative imagines what “cinema terrorism” might look like today.

“I think the first film I saw of his was Pink Flamingos, and I love a lot of schlocky movies, and the comedy and absurdity and the satire of his films, I just really fell in love with,” Blieden said. “None of his movies are longer than 90 minutes, … and they’re kind of transgressive in what they do, and I can rewatch them endlessly because they’re just so fun.”

In his return to Oberlin, Waters hopes students are ready to engage with him. When asked why they should come to the show, Waters took a moment to respond.

“Maybe they need a laugh at something that they’re nervous about laughing about,” he said.

Dis/Possession Reflects on AMAM’s Curatorial Practices

Continued from page 10 stream and popularized version of Indigenous figures.

“The Warhol transposes this image of Sitting Bull, who was a revolutionary leader for the Lakota and was very aware of his image and how it worked in the American press,” Kinney said. “And he had a lot of agency in how his image was reproduced, but Warhol then appropriates it and turns [him] into this pop [art] icon — in the same style that he does soup cans and Mickey Mouse and all of these kinds of things. So, how does this really take away from the agency that Sitting Bull had as an individual and as a leader?”

Questions and critiques like these, however, are rarely asked by museum staff and patrons; works of art are rarely placed in the limelight for their problematic connotations. To that end, the curatorial process was unusual for Letvin and Kinney.

“We are approaching works in a way that’s very unusual for curators, and we’ve been struggling with that a lot,” Letvin said. “Usually when you go to a museum and you read a label, the label starts by telling you what you’re looking at, and it encourages you to look at something. It suggests, in a sense, that what you see is what you get: ‘If you look really closely, you will understand.’ What we have been trying to do in this installation is to push beyond that and say, ‘These images present one version of history; what were the choices that were made by the artist in presenting that history?’ We can now recognize [these choices] as being quite violent, they can be very harmful. So how can we adjust our practice and how we talk about these works, how we write about them in labels to encourage visitors; to not just think about what you see, but also what you don’t see?”

This process also involved a lot of introspection for Letvin and Kinney, who found that learning about personal limitations and naming them became integral to the process.

“I would say the other thing that I’ve been coming to realize with this is when I talk about it, and I say the things that I don’t see, or the things that I haven’t seen, really comes from my perspective as a white woman who has been trained in Western art history,” Kinney said. “I don’t see particular things because I was never taught how to see those, but other viewers might come in and see these works in a very different way. So coming to terms with my own blindness to these issues, I think has been a really important part of the process.”

A project like “Dis/Possession” also serves as an investment in a dynamic historical conversation. For the AMAM, this meant developing a series of public programs and dialogues. The deliberate inclusion of a chorus of voices to develop this project really demonstrates the inherently conversational and ongoing nature of land acknowledgement.

According to Kinney, there is an implicit finality in museum installation — curators get the final word; the final interpretation. “Dis/Possession” is unique in that it relies on the viewer’s voice, and the conversation is ongoing.

“I would say that often exhibitions are planned and presented as the final idea, right?” she said. “So we are taking a different model, which is we don’t have it all figured out. This installation [is about] the conversations that we have with students in classes, in the dialogue groups, and we’ve been connecting with academic departments and offices around campus who are interested in land acknowledgements. The installation serves not to be the final statement, but to be the reason for a conversation —it’s the provocation.”

“Dis/Possession” will be on display in the Northwest Ambulatory of the AMAM till Aug. 7, 2022; however, the works currently installed are expected to change by spring.