Free summer events and info phone line invite public to Vassar

Vassar College has kicked off its summer season of free public campus events for all ages, ranging from outdoor Shakespeare performances, to guided tours of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and classical music concerts. These events are scheduled throughout the summer to provide entertainment and enjoyment for the Poughkeepsie community, without putting a strain on the wallet. To help the public keep track of these numerous campus events, Vassar has also launched a 24-hour "Summer Arts Information" phone line (845-437-7645), which provides show times and details on the college's summer offerings.

Vassar's sixth annual classical music concert series runs through June and July in the air-conditioned Mary Ann Fox Martel Recital Hall of the Skinner Hall of Music. Upcoming shows feature pianist Todd Crow, violinist Stephanie Chase, cellist Mark Shuman, and counter-tenor Drew Minter, performing Handel and Caldara, Mendelssohn, and Scottish folk melodies (Friday 6/27, 8:00 p.m.); a recital by Vassar organist Merellyn Gallagher, on the college's brand new 2,418-pipe Paul Fritts organ (Sunday 6/29, 8:00 pm); a "Meet the Music" interactive event with composer and music writer David Schiff (New York Times, Atlantic Magazine) (Thursday 7/24, 7:30 pm); three ensembles from the Chamber Music Festival of the East, including violinist Shem Guibbory, clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt, cellist Kermit Moore, and pianist Sonia Rubinsky, flutist Zizi Mueller, cellist Edward Arron, pianist Sonia Rubinsky, and percussionist James Lee Preiss, and violinists Reneé Jolles and Sheila Reinhold, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Edward Arron (Saturday 7/26, 8:00 p.m.)

Every night at 6:30 pm from July 9-20, on the sprawling lawn in front of Vassar's Rockefeller Hall, the apprentice company of the Powerhouse Summer Theater Program will perform in abbreviated versions of well-known Shakespeare plays, including As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Perdita Gracia, an adaptation by Caridad Svich of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. The Powerhouse apprentice program is run by Vassar and New York Stage and Film to provide pre-professional actors, directors, playwrights, and set designers eight weeks of rigorous training. Audiences are invited to bring a blanket, picnic dinner, and the whole family to share in the apprentices' renditions of Shakespeare's classics.

Vassar's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (FLLAC) always offers free admission, and opens its new special exhibition Histories of Photography on Saturday July 5, to run through September 21. Sequences of three to ten photographs newly acquired for the Art Center's permanent collection will be used to illuminate such lively topics as news and sensationalism, privacy and publicity, exploration and tourism, the aesthetics of painting, the technology of image reproduction, and the Moon. The exhibition also includes twenty aerial landscapes by contemporary photographer Emmet Gowin, beautiful and harrowing documents that reveal the earth's surface as an evolving index of human activity.

The Art Center is adding guided lunchtime tours as a special summer offering, free to the public, at noon on Wednesdays June 25, July 9, and 12. Also free is the

FLLAC's new "Fridays with Nathan" program from 5:00-7:30 pm on Fridays July 11, 18, and 25, which will combine guided tours by student docent Nathan Hall with an hors d'oeuvres reception.

Vassar College is a highly selective, co-educational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2003.