Columns

LORENZEN | Any Person, Any Study… Except for the Performing Arts

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But, when a high school applicant researches Cornell’s Performing and Media Arts Department, they first find Cornell’s history of gutting their funding. The major itself — encompassing film, theater and dance — was created after the Cornell administration slashed the department’s budget by a million dollars. Cornell took the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance and cut its budget so severely that it could not survive anymore. When I researched Cornell in high school, that is what I found. And that is why I initially didn’t see myself applying.

Arts & Culture

Inside the Cornell Dance Team

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CUDT represents Cornell on a national level at competitions and events across the college dance community. We straddle the line between a dance group and a varsity sport, as we perform at varsity sporting events and represent the school nationally, but are technically registered as a student club. The team was founded in 2017 with only five dancers. Since then, CUDT has expanded to 23 members.

Arts & Culture

How COVID Changed Cornell Dance Groups

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“The dances we taught had to be able to be done in a small space… It’s hard to judge a dancer on their abilities if we can’t see them fully execute a movement.”

Arts & Culture

Coming Soon to Cornell Cinema: Bronx Gothic

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How does a “little brown girl” feel power in a nation plagued by discrimination, privilege and bias? Bronx Gothic, which plays Wednesday at 7:15 p.m. at Cornell Cinema, follows Okwui Okpokwasili as she passionately examines this topic through drama, comedy and dance. Okpokwasili’s one-woman show follows the narrative of two young, black girls growing up in the Bronx, one innocent and the other’s life marked by sexual violence and abuse, who communicate on a deeply personal level through the passing of notes. For the first thirty minutes of the stage version of Bronx Gothic, Okpokwasili simply vibrates in the corner of the stage with the hope that people will be forced to stop asking what is going on and tune in to the frequency that she is emitting. The remainder of her narrative is laid out as a crude series of letters depicting a friendship’s rise and fall, sex, and bias, paired with movements that, at times, bring Okpokwasili to the stage floor.