Zoellner Arts Center is pleased to present performances, talks, exhibits and plays in celebration of 40 years of undergraduate women at Lehigh. Read more about the artistic commemoration:
Forty years ago the corner of East Packer Avenue and Polk Street was a different place—there were no buildings, no Zoellner Arts Center, no Cerulli sculpture—there was a patch of gridiron called Taylor Stadium where a football team named the Engineers went to battle every fall. Forty years ago Lehigh’s student body was different too—there were no women undergraduates—but like the turf that transformed into a performing arts center, that changed in the fall of 1971 when the first class of undergraduate women was admitted. In honor of that significant milestone, the university is in the midst of a campus-wide, year-long commemoration and many events being held at Zoellner Arts Center, the former end zone of Taylor Stadium, feature a powerful cast of ladies to celebrate the 40th anniversary, including pioneer photographers, radical playwrights and rebel rockers.
Singer-songwriter, entrepreneur-activist Ani DiFranco was born in 1970, the year before Lehigh went co-ed. DiFranco is a brave visionary. She founded the record company Righteous Babe in 1989, when most women musicians didn’t even think of releasing other people’s records, let alone their own. She writes songs that address many sensitive subjects, such as sexism, racism, poverty and poverty of spirit. Her foundation supports various causes from peace to ecological CD covers. She even gave birth at home, elevating her status as an earth mother.
Rita Jones, director of the Lehigh Women’s Center, indicates that DiFranco is a true-blue environmentalist, who tries to improve not only nature but human nature. She is a big fan of the artist’s talent and vision. The center, which happens to be celebrating its 20th anniversary, is hosting a reception for students at DiFranco’s concert.
Another DiFranco fan is Zoellner artistic director Deborah Sacarakis, who booked the musician at Jones’ request. Sacarakis believes that DiFranco is a spiritual sister of her teacher, the late Sekou Sundiata. Sundiata was also a Lehigh guest artist who wrote and performed musical plays about slavery and civil rights. She is a spiritual daughter of tennis hall of famer Billie Jean King, who co-founded a women’s league and inspired the Elton John hit Philadelphia Freedom. King is a member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame; DiFranco received a Woman of Courage Award from the National Organization for Women.
For Sacarakis, the co-ed celebration is a personal affair. She began programming arts events at Lehigh in 1974, shortly after the graduation of the university’s first class of women. Since then she’s booked a host of prominent female artists, from choreographer Alice Farley to Laurie Anderson, the multi-media avant gardist. This season she’s paired DiFranco with two other luminous ladies.
Jazz singer Judy Wexler is a shape-shifting storyteller with a dizzyingly wide resume (gigs at the Blue Note club and the Dubai Jazz Festival) and repertoire (Comes Love, Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright). She also shares DiFranco’s affinity for Nat King Cole. Wexler’s mother sang her Cole tunes as lullabies; DiFranco proved her bravery by recording Cole’s Unforgettable with Jackie Chan, a much better martial artist than singer.
Like DiFranco, poet Evie Shockley is a feminist universalist. An associate professor of English at Rutgers University, she links vastly different classes and eras in courses on African American literature and Victorian Gothic fiction. Her poetry forms range from prose to sonnet; her poetry subjects range from apartheid martyr Steven Biko to blackness. A former environmental lawyer, she’s acutely aware of the injustice of pollution.
Shockley, Wexler and DiFranco form a harmonious line-up because their voices are as dissimilar as their causes are similar. Poet and fiction writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers expresses her voice on a different platform, but comes across as equally powerful. Jeffers is a 2011 NEA Literature Fellow who has authored multiple books. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as MacDowell Company. Jeffers has had poems appear in the African American Review, Callaloo and The Gettysburg Review. “Control is so integral in various components of their professional lives and their professional lives are so broad,” says Sacarakis, herself a singer and poet. “They’re empowering because they take the time to take control.”
Control is a major force in the Lehigh theatre department’s season of time-tripping plays written by women in three centuries. The lineup opens with Cusi Cram’s Dusty and the Big Bad World, a 2007 political satire revolving around a fierce debate over a public-television show featuring a young girl with a magic-dustball friend and gay fathers. Cram, a former writer for a PBS children’s program, filtered material from a spinoff show, Postcards from Buster, that lost its federal funding after protests about the main character, a young girl with lesbian mothers.
“Dusty” is “a good vehicle for investigating issues about homosexuality, lesbianism, inclusion and exclusion,” says Pamela Pepper, the play’s director, the theatre department’s chairperson and the first woman in her family to graduate from college. “It asks crucial political questions: What role does public funding play in public television? What is appropriate for us to show on TV–and not?”
The theater season continues with works by two icons. Caryl Churchill, renowned for her imaginative polemics in America and her native England, is represented by the 1982 drama Top Girls, where a career woman in an employment agency is tutored by brilliant ladies both mythic (Dull Gret, who led an invasion of hell in a 16th-century painting) and mythical (Pope Joan, who disguised herself as a man to allegedly head the 9th-century Catholic Church). Lillian Hellman, the first successful, influential female American playwright, is represented by the 1939 drama The Little Foxes, where a Southern aristocrat battles her brothers and a patriarchal legal system for control of a family cotton mill.
The wild card may be Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem, a comedy of manners starring a woman who cunningly bends a reluctant suitor to her will. Premiered in London in 1780, the play established Cowley as a smart stage satirist. Her career flourished without the help of her husband, who left her and their children for a job in India and died 14 years later without returning home.
Pepper hopes the four plays will spur dialogues about the role of women in society and dramaturgy. Spectators may even discuss the history of role reversals on campus. “Imagine how the men at Lehigh must have felt 40 years ago,” says Pepper, “when they were told women were going to ‘invade’ their world.”
Women were invading other worlds too and the LU Art Galleries exhibit illustrates inroads made in rock ‘n roll with Girls on Film, Anastasia Pantsios’ photos of 44 female rock musicians, many of them trailblazers. Tina Turner escaped a violent husband to become a successful soul artist. Madonna set trends in choreography, fashion and creative control. The late Wendy O. Williams was a punk priestess with her banshee-like singing and chain-sawn guitars.
Girls on Film was organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Pantsios’ hometown. It was chosen to celebrate Lehigh’s co-ed anniversary by Denise Stangl, operations administrator for the university’s galleries. She liked the fact that Pantsios began photographing female rock musicians around the time that Lehigh admitted female students, and that the photographer was nearly as gutsy as her girls. Pantsios started photographing rockers largely because male editors wouldn’t let her write about rockers. She founded a photography firm with two female colleagues largely because she was tired of being written off as a groupie with a camera.
Stangl particularly admires the fierce ambition and fierce skills of Pantsios’ ladies. “Many of these women had a rough start,” says Stangl, who booked an upcoming March 29 lecture by Pantsios. “They didn’t have the same breaks as the men, who didn’t have to sing as well or work as hard because they had a built-in audience. I admire them for being three times as talented, and four times as sexy.”
Girls on Film enables Stangl to celebrate the growth of all Lehigh women, including herself. She believes that the university’s first female graduates guided her to become a museum professional with a certificate in project management. “They led the way for me, so I didn’t have to work as hard,” she says. “They were the trailblazers.” –Geoff Gehman
Geoff Gehman ’89 M.A. covered 12 of Zoellner Arts Center’s 15 seasons as an arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown, PA. A writer for the LU Alumni Bulletin, he is frequent contributor to area arts publications. He can be reached at geoffgehman@verizon.net.