Hello All,
Welcome back to RIT! Main campus and Rochester have been blanketed in snow for much of these past few weeks. It makes me really grateful for the moments when the sun does break through. I learned a lovely new word the other day: apricity. It is an old word that refers to the warmth of the sun in winter.
I also learned of another story I wanted to share with you. Sir Tom Stoppard was a child refugee who became a prolific British playwright. You might be familiar with his plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Coast of Utopia, Leopoldstadt, or one of the films he co-wrote such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Shakespeare in Love. He passed away in November.
A week after his death, Professor Michael Baum wrote a letter to the Times of London about a remarkable experience he had as an audience member seeing Stoppard’s play Arcadia in 1993. Baum is a Professor Emeritus of Surgery and Visiting Professor of Medical Humanities at University College London with expertise in oncology. As a clinical scientist, he was “trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way.” Baum was struck by a question that the character Thomasina asks:
“If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?”
With these ideas and images, Thomasina (and Stoppard) describe chaos theory. Reflecting on this line during the intermission of the play, Professor Baum had a breakthrough that breast cancer cells might behave in a similar, non-linear way. The consequence of that hypothesis led to improvements in chemotherapy, which reduced mortality rates. As Baum says at the end of his letter, “Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.”
Performances can have their own kind of apricity, sparking unexpected awe, joy, connection, and inspiration whether you are on stage, behind the scenes, or in the audience. Please enjoy attending some of the many performances on-campus and in the community this semester. Your attendance may even help you solve problems in unexpected ways.
In the fall, I challenged you to consider how to be refreshingly human performing artists in an increasingly artificially intelligent world. What do you have to say? I want to hear from you! We would like to develop a new section of the Spotlight where we feature you and what you are up to as Performing Arts Scholars. You can share your story and images here or email me directly.
I am so excited to see what this new year and new semester will bring.
Good luck getting back to work!
Claire
