Location: Divinity School SG58 (Back Building)
409 Prospect Street
New Haven
Open To: General Public
Admission: Free
Description: T.S. Eliot: A Soul Stretched Tight, performers: Mary Barnett ~ Yue Huang ~ Nicole Klosterman ~ Ruth Meteer ~ Aaron Wegner
A group of students has been working with the poetry of T.S.Eliot in order to enact texts that usually are only studied. Poems are turned into scripts and literary analysis into performance. The class has been led by Peter Hawkins, Professor of religion and literature at YDS/ISM, and Karin Coonrod, a lecturer in directing at the Yale Drama School and founder of the international and New York-based theater group Compagnia de’ Colombari. The evening builds on interpretive work done week by week over the spring semester, ranging from very early poems to Eliot’s crowning achievement in the Four Quartets. Because of his notorious difficulty, Eliot is often treated as a complex puzzle to be solved. Performance, however, turns it into a world to be explored as silent texts are vocalized, embodied, and shared with an audience.