In-Person

The Chapel in the Hive

Sat Mar 1, 2025 7:00 p.m.—8:30 p.m.
Artwork of beehive
Free; no registration required
Sterling Divinity Quadrangle
409 Prospect Street New Haven, CT 06511
  • General Public

Come March 1 as we build a hive in Marquand Chapel with The Chapel in the Hive.

Performers:

Joseph Campana, poetry

Kurt Stallmann, music

Experience The Chapel in the Hive, a forty-minute live performance by poet/scholar Joseph Campana and composer/performer Kurt Stallmann, who draw from history and natural history and reflecting on them through literary and electro-eco-acoustic techniques. The audience will be immersed in sound, words, and images that evoke and render palpable the long history of human devotion to bees. Inspired by a multidisciplinary exploration of environmental issues with a specific focus on biodiversity and multispecies worlds, Campana and Stallmann consider the sacred character of nature through the powerful but diminutive figure of the honeybee. This collaborative work draws on stories, proverbs, and parables from different traditions to ask: if a chapel can really fit in a hive what would it sound like? What does Orpheus have to do with bees? Is anger like a honey-coated knife? And, in an age of environmental turmoil, can nature still be miraculous?

A post-concert panel discussion will follow the event.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the ISM’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative.

Contact: Eric Donnelly

Artist Bios

Joseph Campana

Joseph Campana (poetry) is a poet, arts writer, and scholar of the literature and culture of early modern England. Campana serves as the William Shakespeare Professor of English, the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies, the co-director of the ENST minor, and a co-PI on the Mellon Foundation-funded Diluvial Houston grant. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham UP, 2012), the co-editor of Renaissance Posthumanism (Fordham, 2016), and the co-editor of two volumes of essays on insect life: Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Insects and Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Concepts (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023). His monograph Speculations on Sovereignty: Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child is in press (UChicago, 2024). Campana is the author of three collections of poetry: The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Book of Life (Tupelo, 2019). Of late many projects emerge from attention to at a time in early modern history of climatic instability many refer to as the Little Ice Age. 

Kurt Stallman

Kurt Stallmann (music) is a composer whose approach integrates a broad range of materials from deterministic to aleatoric models, formal structures to spontaneous improvisations, acoustic sounds to electronic sounds, and environmental, outdoor soundscapes to instrumental, indoor concert works. His frequent collaborations with dance, experimental film, and other genres leads him to imagine complex structures that harmonize and coordinate the input from one’s interacting sense streams.