Tickets on sale Nov. 2 for annual WCU madrigal dinners
Tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 2, for the annual Madrigal Christmas Dinners at Western Carolina University.
Tickets for the 2010 Madrigal Christmas Dinners at Western Carolina University will go on sale at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 2.
The dinners are re-creations of the pageantry, music and food of 16th-century England, with authentic madrigal entertainment and costumes. An annual event at WCU, they will be held this year at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 3, and Saturday, Dec. 4, in the Grandroom of the A.K. Hinds University Center. The menu will include a choice of three entrees (including a vegetarian option), side dishes and beverages; tables seat eight apiece.
This will be the final year that Robert Holquist of the School of Music will take a lead role in organizing the dinners. Holquist, who has been active in the madrigal dinners since he joined the WCU faculty in 1979, conducts the Early Music Ensemble, a chorus that performs at the dinners. This year marks the introduction of a new lord and lady, Boyd and Lynda Sossamon, owners of Radio Shack in Sylva and both alumni of WCU.
Tickets for the dinners can be purchased in the University Center administrative offices (on the second floor of the U.C.) or by calling 828.227.7206 for credit card orders.
WCU to exhibit contemporary photos of Appalachia
The changing face of Appalachia is the subject of an upcoming photography exhibit at the Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University.
“Seeing Rural Appalachia,” large-format photographs by Mike Smith, will run Sunday, Oct. 24, through Friday, Dec. 17. The public is invited to a free reception beginning at 2 p.m. Oct. 24.
Smith’s photographs expose the human impact on the landscape, from aged, weather-softened farm buildings that seem to be an organic part of the landscape to the jarring reality of big, bright, new gas stations. His photographs of rural Tennessee show the lush beauty of the land while they reveal the suburban encroachment that threatens much of rural Appalachia. This exhibit collects Smith’s work from the past five years.
“The natural mountain landscape immediately made a profound impression on me when I arrived in East Tennessee in 1981. So did the rural lifestyle of the population,” Smith said. “Weeks after I arrived, I began my attempt to define both with my camera. I continue that effort today.”
Smith is a professor of art at East Tennessee State University, a Guggenheim Fellow and a founding member of the Appalachian Photographers Project. His works have been acquired by major U.S. museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum. His monograph “You’re Not from Around Here: Photographs of East Tennessee” was published in 2004, and he’s exhibited work at the Whitney Museum and San Francisco MoMA.
The Fine Art Museum’s hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. The museum also is open one hour before Fine and Performing Arts Center Galaxy of Stars performances and selected Saturday “Family Art Days.”
For more information, contact Denise Drury, curatorial assistant, at 828.227.3591 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Visit the museum online at fineartmuseum.wcu.edu.
FPAC marks five years with Oct. 22 gala
Western Carolina University will mark five years of art and entertainment beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 22, at the Fine and Performing Arts Center with a gala featuring art, music and a theatrical revue of songs by George and Ira Gershwin.
Festivities move indoors at 7 p.m. for a performance by WCU’s resident Smoky Mountain Brass Quintet, followed by a 7:30 p.m. curtain time for “’S Wonderful.” The new off-Broadway revue transports the audience to different places in different decades with scenes set in New York in the ’20s, Paris in the ’30s, Hollywood in the ’40s and New Orleans in the ’50s. Musical numbers include classics such as “Swanee,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “Nice Work if you Can Get It,” “Summertime,” “I’ve Got Rhythm” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
“It is time to celebrate and reaffirm the magic of this facility,” said Robert Kehrberg, founding dean of the College of Fine and Performing Arts at WCU and member of the committee that began planning the facility.
The gala, recognition of past FAPAC achievements as well as a look ahead, will begin with an outdoor cocktail reception held under tents in the FAPAC courtyard. Reception guests will experience the unveiling of WCU’s new outdoor sculpture exhibition and have the opportunity to preview a Fine Art Museum exhibit of contemporary images of Appalachia by photographer Mike Smith.
Tickets to the Gershwin revue plus entry to the cocktail reception $100. Orchestra seats for only “’S Wonderful” $50; club seating $35; and balcony seat tickets $25.
To buy tickets or for information call 828.227.2479 or fapac.wcu.edu.
WCU’s ‘Rooted in the Mountains' features regional music and speakers
A concert and free symposium to raise awareness of the intersection of environmental, health and indigenous issues related to mountain destruction will be held Thursday and Friday, Oct. 21-22, in the theater of the A.K. Hinds University Center at Western Carolina University.
WCU’s Division of Educational Outreach and Cherokee Studies Program are sponsoring the first “Rooted in the Mountains: Valuing Our Common Ground” with the Center for Native Health, which initiated the project.
The concert will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday and will feature entertainment by Sheila Kay Adams, Tawodi Brown, John John Grant, Kate Larken, Sue Massek, Paula Nelson and the WCU Porch Music Club. Tickets are $5 in advance and $7.50 at the door, with proceeds benefiting iLoveMountains.org.
The symposium, free and open to the public, will be held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday. Keynote speaker, Silas House, an acclaimed writer and National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College, and other presenters, including Clara Sue Kidwell (enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa tribe), director, American Indian Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Evelyn Conley (Keetoowah), chair, Indigenous Education Institute; Tom Belt (Cherokee), WCU Cherokee language instructor; Heidi Altman, associate professor of anthropology, Georgia Southern University; Marilou Awiakta (Cherokee), author; ethnobotanist David Cozzo, a WCU faculty member and director of the Revitalization of Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources; and Brian Byrd, WCU assistant professor of environmental health will be present.
Other sponsors include WCU’s Mountain Heritage Center, Watershed Association of the Tuckasegee River, the Canary Coalition and the Tuckasegee Community Alliance.
Preregister online at www.wcu.edu/27734.asp; for information, contact Pamela Duncan, symposium co-chair, at 828.227.3926.
Brazilian energy company to set up shop on WCU campus
A partnership between Western Carolina University and a Brazilian-based company could eventually result in up to 300 new jobs for the region — if Vale Soluções em Energia, as hoped, agrees to build its yet-to-be-designed turbines here.
Search for new chancellor could be silent process
A national search for a new Western Carolina University chancellor will start immediately following longtime leader John Bardo’s announcement this week he would leave the institution’s top post and join the faculty.
WCU chancellor to retire
John Bardo, chancellor of Western North Carolina since 1995, announced this week he would step down. It’s been an extraordinarily long tenure for a university chancellor, and Bardo simply said it is time for a change at the top.
Late-night shuttle to keep drunken WCU students off the road
The “buzz bus” soon will be ferrying students from bars in Sylva back to the Western Carolina University campus.
Western caught in crosshairs of First Amendment battle
A First Amendment battle is not what Western Carolina University senior Justin Caudell expected when he returned to campus this fall. But Caudell, who is editor-in-chief of the school’s student newspaper, the Western Carolinian, found himself on the other side of the interview more than once in recent weeks.
University administrators shuttered the publication for five days in late September as part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of plagiarism by three of its writers, including Caudell. Fellow college publications and other student media advocates rallied in defense of Western’s student paper.
WCU student paper accused of plagiarism
Though The Sylva Herald and the Western Carolinian are still at odds about whether plagiarism occurred this summer, The Smoky Mountain News conducted its own investigation into the claims that led university officials to open the inquiry that temporarily closed the paper.
