By Lara Ehrlich | Photo by Melody Komyerov

Fireworks rained over the ice at Agganis Arena as the Boston University Marching Band brought more than 3,000 alums, students, parents, and guests to their feet, waving light sticks and bellowing along to the Bruce Channel classic, “Hey! Baby.” This was not the conclusion of a Terriers hockey game, but the exultant finale of Celebration of BU. The event on September 22, 2012, highlighted more than a century and a half of triumphs and marked the formal announcement of the University’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign.

The campaign goal of $1 billion is designed to support research, facility improvements, faculty, and financial aid throughout BU, and a goal this ambitious requires collaboration from the entire University. “BU doesn’t really have a long tradition of getting together as a big group,” says campaign kickoff co-chair and BU Trustee SungEun Han-Andersen (’85). “Our alumni base hasn’t really pulled together before. This is the first time, so it’s a challenge. And an opportunity, of course.”

Alfre Woodard and Michael Chiklis co-emceed the Southern California Campaign Kickoff. Photo by Chris Bacarella

Celebration of BU initiated this spirit of collaboration with a spectacle highlighting the varied talents of students and alums from throughout the University. From the College of Fine Arts, the BU Symphonic Chorus accompanied the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” under the direction of Keith Lockhart (Hon.’04), who invited the School of Music alumni in his orchestra to stand. School of Visual Arts Professor Hugh O’Donnell’s commemorative film, Spirit of Greatness, was projected onto the ice, and School of Theatre Director Jim Petosa performed the voice-over for the campaign film. CFA brought the celebration home with a rainbow of lights along the façade of 855 Commonwealth Avenue.

On the opposite coast, Academy and Grammy Award-nominated actress Alfre Woodard (’74), winner of four Emmy Awards, and Michael Chiklis (’85), winner of a Golden Globe and an Emmy Award for his role on The Shield, co-emceed the Southern California Campaign Kickoff on February 6, 2013. This event was one of six kickoff celebrations around the world.

The campaign’s time line is projected to be a seven-year effort, to be completed by summer 2017. To date, CFA has raised 32 percent ($6,459,482.26) of the $20 million that will help strengthen the BU community through the arts. CFA is currently exploring new ways to transform 855 Commonwealth Avenue into a pioneering center for theatre, music, and visual arts that will position the College as the “art at the heart” of BU.

A proposed renovation to the building will “inspire collaboration among students from all of the artistic genres,” says Scott Wilson, the project’s principal architect. CFA aims to create new gathering locations throughout the building, “where you’ll be able to see visual arts as well as theatre and music students practicing and performing.” Upon entering CFA, visitors will experience “an eye-opening moment when they realize they’re being allowed into the University’s inner creative realm.”

To learn more about the campaign, click here.

By Andrew Thurston | Photo by Cydney Scott

Many composers have mixed art with “more socially conscious activities,” says Jerrold Pope, chair of the voice department, but Giuseppe Verdi “just may have done it better than most.”

The School of Music is celebrating the composer of Aida and Rigoletto in a yearlong series of master classes, recitals, and lectures. The Spirit of Verdi, which includes contributions from the Metropolitan Opera’s Jane Klaviter and Donald Palumbo (CAS’70), marks the 200th anniversary of the maestro’s birth.

“Verdi thought of himself as a farmer first, a citizen second, and a musician and composer third,” says Pope of the sometime politician famed for lacing his musical works with social commentary. Pope hopes students will be inspired to explore the ways Verdi juggled and blended the artistic and altruistic: “I am hard-pressed to think of any classical composer or performer in the twentieth or twenty-first century who was so selfless.”

The festival embodies Verdi’s commitment to good causes by inviting audience members to donate to charitable organizations. BU gave a portion of proceeds from the performance of La traviata to the Greater Boston Food Bank.

By Rachel Johnson

What is the root of resilience?

This question, underlined on a blackboard, opens Route, one of three entries for CFA’s new Box Project. Students from the Schools of Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts were thrown together in teams of four, provided with a box of miscellaneous items, and allowed six hours to create a short video inspired by the contents of their box. Each project revolved around two keywords: “resilience” and a word unique to each box—in Route’s case, “childhood.”

In the course of the whimsical video, the blackboard fills with a mathematical-like formula drawn in chalk by two theatre students, a visual artist, and a musician, who also composed the background music. All three Box Project groups included at least one student from each CFA school to encourage intra-school interaction and motivate different types of artists to work together toward a common goal. “Artists are not necessarily isolated,” says Jeannette Guillemin, assistant director of visual arts and creator of the Box Project. “You need people who can come together, despite differences, and work collaboratively.”

That’s what made the Box Project so “magical,” says Guillemin. “You had these people who are all really creative and working in the arts, who’ve never met each other, who are, for the first time, having these terrific conversations and working creatively together. It was inspiring. That’s what it’s going to be like as an artist in the twenty-first century.”

By Jessica Ullian | Photo by Kevin Berne

For the La Jolla Playhouse production of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, associate sound designer Walter Trarbach (’02) created a fight soundtrack for 4 live musicians and 18 light-up robots.

Erik Hansen (’01), a production carpenter, crafted more than 35 tons of scenery for the Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Fifty-seven thousand pounds of set and electric rigging hung from the grid; another 14,100 pounds waited in the wings.

Production designer Paul Tate dePoo III (’10) designed a set based on children’s pop-up books for The Music Man at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Florida. He’s currently awaiting word on his proposed design for Lady Gaga’s next tour.

Emily Walsh (’08), currently the assistant scenic charge artist at The Juilliard School, worked in Chicago, Mexico City, and Kuala Lumpur creating walk-through haunted houses for high-end theme parks.

By Rachel Johnson | Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

When did you last hear a woman give a rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech? Has a female ever come, not to praise Caesar, but to bury him? How many times has the graphic violence of Titus Andronicus played out in a cast devoid of men?

Femina Shakes, the all-female Shakespearian troupe and brainchild of Voice & Speech Assistant Professor Christine Hamel, exists precisely to let School of Theatre women take on the meaty parts traditionally reserved for men. Femina Shakes has staged Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and the fall 2012 production of Henry V.

“She is passionate about giving these young women a chance to speak this text,” says Lillian King (’14), director of Henry V. “These speeches that they’re not going to get to do for the rest of their lives—these really, really wonderful parts.”

King stresses that Femina Shakes is not about women masquerading as men. She set Henry V in post-World War II London, her cast rising from the ashes of a ruined city. “It made me think about the stories we tell,” she says, “about why women would want to tell this story. But you celebrate that they’re women, and then you forget it and focus on the story.”

Henry V culminated with an interdisciplinary performance at the School of Management for a Dynamics of Leading Organizations class, in which students were asked to consider the play as a live case study in conflict resolution.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ART, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS, ON NOVEMBER 14, 2012, AT 84.

For more than 40 years, celebrated still life painter Joseph Ablow inspired College of Fine Arts students to find the power in ordinary objects. He first turned to still life as a respite from epic scenes of Greek mythology—and this respite became his life’s work.

While his subjects were often simple objects like jars and pitchers, there is nothing simple about Ablow’s paintings. “Because the objects are inanimate does not mean they are still,” he said. “What was to have been for me a subject only for study, became an engulfing involvement with a world that, for all its stillness, was elusive, mysterious, and open.”

Ablow was represented by Boston’s Pucker Gallery, and his work was exhibited nationally and internationally from the Art Institute of Chicago to Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich, Switzerland, and his paintings can be found in numerous private and public collections.

A Boston native, Ablow studied at Bennington College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and received his MA in Art History from Harvard University. He came to BU in 1963 and, upon retiring in 1996, was conferred the honor of Professor Emeritus of Art. “At the School of Visual Arts we don’t forget those who have gone before us, who touched hundreds of students’ lives,” says Lynne Allen, director of the School of Visual Arts. “In this regard we honor Joseph Ablow’s contribution to our history.” — Lara Ehrlich

Anthony di Bonaventura

PROFESSOR OF MUSIC FOR THE SCHOOL OF MUSIC, ON NOVEMBER 12, 2012, AT 83.

Anthony di Bonaventura taught his students more than just the piano. He taught them to be at once humble and brave, to deepen their craft by participating in the world around them, and to enrich their world through music. “Virtuosity is a two-edged sword,” he once told The Boston Globe. “If you do not have cultural awareness and musical understanding, you have nothing. That is why I tell my students not to practice all the time. Instead they must go out and learn about other things.”

Bonaventura began playing the piano at age three, performed his first professional concert at four, won a scholarship to New York’s Music School Settlement at six, and was a soloist with the New York Philharmonic at thirteen. He studied with the celebrated teacher Madame Isabelle Vengerova, who allowed him to play only exercises for a year and a half, until he was worthy of his instrument. Bonaventura graduated from the Curtis Institute, and was selected by Otto Klemperer to perform at the London Beethoven Festival; his performances with the major orchestras and conductors of the world took him to 27 countries. In 1992, Bonaventura was awarded the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, BU’s highest award for excellence in teaching. “Adored and respected by his students, Professor Bonaventura achieved great heights as an artist and as a teacher and won the affection and admiration of his colleagues both at BU and in the wider world of music,” says Robert K. Dodson, director of the School of Music.—Lara Ehrlich

Bruce MacCombie

FORMER DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS, ON MAY 2, 2012, AT 69.
Bruce MacCombie, dynamic composer and former dean of the College of Fine Arts, is remembered for establishing programs that advanced CFA and integrated the College with the wider BU community. “We will remember his creative talent and hard work, his understated modesty, his equanimity, his humor, his concern for excellence in all things, and his care for others,” says Anne-Marie Soullière, president, Fidelity Foundation and former CFA Advisory Board member. During his tenure from 1992 to 2000, MacCombie developed residencies for theatre students in London, visual arts students in Venice, and music students in Dresden. He negotiated contracts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center to enhance BU’s programs at Tanglewood, and developed numerous alum and professional artist connections, including residencies and master classes. MacCombie also formed the first active Dean’s Advisory Board and initiated efforts to open CFA to students from the rest of the University, inviting nonmajors to participate in the arts through a variety of courses. His pioneering leadership resulted in a nearly 40 percent upswing in applications and a 23 percent enrollment growth.

A talented composer, MacCombie earned his BA and MM from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a PhD in music from the University of Iowa, and he studied with Wolfgang Fortner at the Freiburg Conservatory. His music was commissioned by numerous organizations and he performed at celebrated venues around the world. Among his many awards and honors, MacCombie received a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which noted that “Mr. MacCombie composes polished gems of musical understatement. Characterized by a fresh and penetrating wit, they sparkle and yet are clothed in mystery.”—Lara Ehrlich

John Silber

PRESIDENT EMERITUS, ON SEPTEMBER 27, 2012, AT 86.

When Boston University announced the death of President Emeritus John Silber (Hon.’95), one of the many BU faculty, alums, and friends who commented in the BU Today obituary was the Huntington Theatre Company’s managing director, Associate Professor Michael Maso. Without Silber, he wrote, there would be no Huntington, the professional theatre founded by BU in 1982. It was Silber’s “personal determination that the City of Boston have a world-class resident theatre. When asked why he would invest the University’s resources in what might be perceived as a risky proposition, he said, ‘If Boston University can support a football team, it can damn well support a theatre company!’”
Silber is widely credited with spearheading BU’s emergence as a leading research institution during his more than thirty-year tenure. Although often a controversial figure, he cemented the arts as a central part of campus life. And that included opera, according to William Lumpkin, acting director of the BU Opera Institute, who says, “Our students are direct beneficiaries of his generosity, philosophically and financially.” Silber, who first brought Dean Emerita Phyllis Curtin to CFA, established a $1 million annuity to fund Opera Institute tuition.
The institute honored that patronage in April 2013, dedicating its season opener, a staging of Verdi’s La traviata, to Silber. The opera was chosen because it cast students from almost every CFA program, from opera to set design.
“He really believed that arts play an integral role in the university system, in education, and in life in general,” says Lumpkin. “No one can neglect the fact of John’s fostering of CFA though all three schools, but particularly the opera programs. We owe him a great deal for that.”—Andrew Thurston

READ JOHN SILBER’S full obituary @ www.bu.edu/bostonia.

By Patrick L. Kennedy and Amy Laskowski | Photo by Chris Smirnoff

Abraham Higginbotham (’92) is a writer and co–executive producer of Modern Family, which won an Emmy Award in 2012 for Outstanding Comedy Series. About 12 million viewers tune in each week for the misadventures of an extended family, played by an ensemble cast featuring Ed O’Neill and Sofía Vergara. Higginbotham usually works behind the scenes, but Esprit draws him out of the writers’ room and into the spotlight.

The writer started as an actor. Higginbotham took his BU acting degree to New York, where he worked in theatre as well as in political fundraising and gay-issues advocacy, before moving to Los Angeles. “I got a couple of jobs as ambiguously ethnic bad guys on Aaron Spelling shows, like 7th Heaven and 90210, where I played ‘Gangbanger #2.’ You know you’ve got a long way to go when your character’s name is an idea and a number.”

Acting taught him to live. At BU, Higginbotham learned the craft of acting, but more important, how “to live—to feel, to fail, to take risks, to trust myself, to play. I was pretty shut down when I got to college, a closeted gay kid from a small town. So, to run around a room and jump and crawl on the floor and indulge my feelings and let go of inhibition and discover the truth of who I was and how I fit into the world—that was the most priceless lesson I learned.”

He almost didn’t graduate from CFA. “I was actually almost cut from the acting program,” says Higginbotham. But his fellow students and his professors petitioned on his behalf, and he was reinstated a few days later.

Photo by Hopper Stone

He is a disgruntled old man at 42. “I love writing Jay,” the Modern Family patriarch played by O’Neill. “So much of my personality resides in that disgruntled old man place—somehow I got there at 42. I love his reluctance to do anything, his misanthropic tendencies.”

Art does imitate life. In Higginbotham’s episode “Aunt Mommy,” gay parents Mitchell and Cameron consider Mitchell’s sister’s offer to be the surrogate mother to carry their child. The writer’s sister made the same offer to Higginbotham and his partner. The quandary was “tough and difficult in life, but fun and interesting on camera.” This episode won a 2012 Humanitas Prize for exploring the human condition in a nuanced, meaningful way.

Click here to read the full Q & A with Abraham Higginbotham in BU Today.

By Lara Ehrlich | Photos by Vernon Doucette, Kalman Zabarsky, and Cydney Scott

The 2012–2013 “keyword” for the College of Fine Arts was RESILIENCE, a term that readily applies to CFA students and their daring works. Established by CFA Dean Benjamín Juárez, the Keyword Initiative encourages the Schools of Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts to focus their varied programming on a unifying theme and collaborate across genres. “Resilience has a positive energy to it—the notion that the human spirit conjures something better than survival,” says Jim Petosa, director of the School of Theatre. “Resilience is survival with panache.”

The School of Theatre Keyword productions ranged from Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, in which a self-destructive mother vents her unhappiness on her daughters, portrayed by Celia Pain and Casey Tucker (’14), to Howard Brenton’s sweeping Anne Boleyn, with Chloe Fuller in the title role.

In Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave, a young pacifist, played in alternating performances by Nickoli Strommer and Isaac Bray (’14), must decide where his loyalty lies when his military family challenges his convictions. And in Jules Massenet’s Le Portrait de Manon, a nobleman, portrayed by Benjamin Taylor, tries to save his nephew from making the same mistakes he did.

The Initiative reinforces the School of Music’s and School of Theatre’s long-standing emphasis on collaboration to produce the College’s operas. William Lumpkin, acting director of the Opera Institute, explains: “The musicians prepare the roles while the School of Theatre students design sets, costumes, and lighting, and stage-manage the productions.”

CFA also promoted cross-genre collaboration with symphony performances and events hosted by the School of Visual Arts.

The Boston University Symphony Orchestra & Symphonic Chorus, Boston Children’s Chorus, and three soloists joined forces in the highlight of the Symphony’s Resilience season: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, conducted by Director of Orchestral Activities David Hoose at Symphony Hall on November 19, 2012. A lusty cantata based on medieval texts that mingle Christianity and bawdy celebration for the pleasures of life and love, Carmina Burana opens and closes with a litany to fickle fortune.

Through the Alternative Visions / Sustainable Futures exhibition and event series, the School of Visual Arts invited the wider BU community to consider how critical dialogue and innovative eco-artistic practices can bring about change. The series featured an exhibition at 808 Gallery, lectures with visiting artists like the multimedia art collaborative Futurefarmers, and a host of ancillary events. (Intrigued? Click here to read more about Alternative Visions / Sustainable Futures.)

Flatbread Society by Amy Franceschini, Stijn Schiffeleers, and Erik Sjödin of Futerefarmers. Photo by Amy Franceschini/Futurefarmers

Across all three schools, CFA students embody the spirit of resilience in their practice and their public work. “Today, more than ever, the world needs leaders educated with a sense of inspiration, imagination, and vision,” says Juárez. “CFA is defining the role of the artist in the twenty-first century: an artist able to thrive in difficult times—a citizen artist, resilient in the face of uncertainty and determined to make the world a better place.”

The Keyword Initiative is funded in part by Nancy Livingston (COM’69) and her husband, Fred Levin, through the Shenson Foundation in memory of Ben and A. Jess Shenson.

I have always believed that the arts community comes together during times of tragedy, and in the days immediately following the marathon, I witnessed this union first-hand. Students from the Schools of Music and Theatre responded to the devastation, performing for patients injured at the marathon and BU Medical Campus staff. Students from the School of Visual Arts launched Still Running: An Art Marathon for Boston, an open call for art that celebrates strength and raises money. And in a remarkable spirit of community, the alternating casts of the Opera Institute’s production of La Clemenza di Tito shared the final performance, with each cast performing an act.

And you, compassionate alumni, offered your strength. Brian August (CFA’10) appealed to his classmates to “come together as a class to do whatever we can” to ease the pain of those affected by the tragedy. You sent messages of remembrance and hope via social networking, and you joined together throughout the world to participate in BU’s Global Days of Service the following weekend.

Even as our great city—the birthplace of America—mourned, it grew stronger and more resilient. I am proud that our CFA community of citizen artists did the same. You asked the question, “What can art do for society?” and you responded with a message of hope. You, CFA graduates and citizen artists, are proof of the power of art; you are changing the world.

Please join us in continuing to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and the power of art by visiting us on campus, attending student performances and exhibitions, and supporting CFA’s campaign. Stay close and be strong.

—Benjamín E. Juárez

By Lara Ehrlich

Fran Brill (‘68) was living the dream. She was fresh out of Boston University when her play with Theatre Atlanta was transferred to Broadway. Everyone had said it would be hard to make it as an actress, and she thought, “Wow, this is a piece of cake!” Then there was a blizzard on opening night, the show flopped, and she was out of work.

Brill trekked to open casting calls with hundreds of other actresses and took all the voice-over work she could get, including the tagline for Pan Am airline. At the end of each long day, she would return to her room at the notoriously seedy Hotel Dixie on 42nd Street and watch Sesame Street, then in its first season, because the Muppets made her laugh. On those dreary afternoons, she never imagined she’d find herself in an audition with Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and “a trunkful of puppets.”

Henson was casting puppeteers for an upcoming Christmas special, and Brill auditioned, though “I’d never held a puppet in my life. I stuck my hand in the trunk and pulled out a puppet. Jim asked me to try different things, and we all enjoyed each other and laughed and improvised.”

Henson invited Brill to participate in a two-week workshop on the fundamentals of puppeteering, a craft he had revolutionized by constructing the puppets out of foam rubber for a wider range of expressions, and techniques like aligning their mouth movements with the dialogue. With her professional training and her idiosyncratic voice, Brill was a natural puppeteer. Her work was so inspired during the workshop and the subsequent Christmas special that Henson invited her to join Sesame Street. “That’s how I ended up becoming the first female performer on the show,” she says. “Crazy things happen when you least expect it, and your whole life is led into a different area than you had planned.”

At first, Brill performed basic “anything puppets” that puppeteers could transform into a range of characters by switching out the features, costumes, and wigs. “The puppets are all lying on a table, and you pick one and come up with a character on the spot.” A particularly charismatic “anything puppet” might become a principle character—like Brill’s character Prairie Dawn, a seven-year-old, hot-pink Muppet who aspires to be a journalist. Prairie Dawn was the first female Muppet performed by a female actress.

Brill developed her most famous character Zoe, a three-year-old orange “monster,” as a best friend for Elmo in season 25. The producers wanted a spunky female to round out the predominantly male cast, and charged Brill with creating a character that would connect with the show’s female audience.

Fran Brill, Zoe, and friends accept the Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images

“Zoe had a very wide, almost Carol Channing mouth, and that drove how I spoke with her,” Brill says. “Then I heard a friend’s little son say, ‘Don’t joke me,’ which I thought was real cute, so that became Zoe’s handle. You just have to relax and let the character happen.”

Brill also performs part time as Kami, a five-year-old, HIV-positive Muppet who was created for Takalani Sesame, the show’s South African co-production. Developed in response to the AIDS epidemic that affects nearly one in nine South Africans, Kami is performed by a South African puppeteer on Takalani Sesame, while Brill performs the character for U.S. appearances. She has performed Kami at UNICEF events, the Peabody Awards, the United Nations for World AIDS Day, and in numerous public service messages with figures such as former President Bill Clinton, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and Oprah Winfrey. “I just love performing Kami because it’s for such an extraordinarily wonderful cause,” she says.

The same could be said for all of Brill’s work on the beloved show that has been educating, inspiring, and entertaining children throughout the world for more than forty years. When Brill tells a new acquaintance what she does for a living, “they just light up like a Christmas tree! I get nothing but warmth from people when I tell them what I do. I believe in the worth of this show and its effect on children. It’s a lot of fun to be a part of it, and even after all these years, I keep learning.”