New beginnings should be celebrated—and celebrations at Bennington are marked by a particularly playful kind of joy. Hence the exuberant performance that kicked off Bennington College’s Convocation 2007, the official launch of the academic year, in which a drummer (music faculty member Milford Graves) and a saxophonist on stilts (music faculty member Bruce Williamson) both riffed along to the amplified bass line of a human heartbeat.

Welcoming the incoming class is the main reason for this annual celebration, but the fact that Bennington College is marking its 75th anniversary injected an additional note of festivity. After opening remarks by President Elizabeth Coleman, student Adam Freed, staff member Suzanne Jones, and Provost and Dean Elissa Tenny, the College community was treated to some observations from Media Arts/Design/Sculpture faculty member Sue Rees. Rees has exhibited her installations and video works in the U.S., Europe, Africa, India, and Australia, and has worked collaboratively with choreographers, directors, and musicians in the United States and Europe.

After mentioning a few of the events that took place in 1932, the year the College was founded—the births of Johnny Cash, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath; the writing of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; the Atlantic being crossed by Amelia Earhart; Gandhi’s “fast unto death”; and the splitting of the atom, among many others—Rees went on to muse about the landmark events that the incoming class might experience by the time they graduate in 2011.

I do and teach set design for theater and dance, and make animations, and have over the last few years been working with a theatre company in Tamil Nadu Southern India, where there is a school and adult company specializing in Kuttu, a form of theatre performed by and for rural communities. This has involved documenting the performances, producing animations for the company, and establishing a video record of the students by interviews.

In all of the work there is the element of telling a story by visual means over time, usually another’s story, via sets and projections or animation. And in all cases there is the necessity to react to and embrace unpredictable situations, often on the fly.

For you, you will be writing your stories over the next four years at Bennington, and constantly managing changes.

There will be some absolute disasters, choices made will be questionable, and brilliant ideas will with hindsight look remarkably stupid. And then there will be surprising moments of insight and ideas which will stay with you and get further developed into more sustained work.

"There will be surprising moments of insight and ideas which will stay with you..."

Some will work in collaboration, and some will work behind the scenes doing designs for productions. Others will want to be in front of the limelights, on stage as performers; others, behind the camera documenting or recording life. Some will want to work independently and isolated in a studio creating paintings, or poetry, or writing stories, scores, or scripts; others will want to work with the web reaching out to the wide world, or by designing buildings; others will work together on science experiments, and others will want to look at how the world thinks or acts in philosophy or psychology or language, how the world works economically, or look historically at the past or at other cultures to make more sense of how we have arrived at where we are.

Some of you will potentially go on to public acclaim, and others will succeed in small arenas.

In all there will be searches, which W.H. Auden wrote about in 1938. His search was love, but one can substitute other things one is searching for. (This is a short extract from a longer poem):

When it comes, will it come without warning

Just as I’m picking my nose,

Will it knock on my door in the morning

Or tread in the bus on my toes,

Will it come like a change in the weather,

Will its greeting be courteous or bluff,

Will it alter my life altogether?

O tell me the truth about love.

The English playwright Harold Pinter also in his Nobel Lecture talked about his search, the search for truth or falsehood, in life and in art. To quote:

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seams to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost....

"More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape..."

How one works here in tandem with your fellow students, staff and faculty becomes a test for the world beyond this ground, whether the town of Bennington, state of VT, USA or further afield....

As part of this community you will learn to take responsibility for your actions, taking care of your friends and others you do not know; learn how to take care of your environment, attempt to make a difference to injustices, tackle a difficult problem and arrive at a solution to solve the problem; develop a new way of looking at something and follow through on research.

But at the same time, our good intentions are sometimes at variance with our human frailties, which is succinctly described by Ian McEwan, the English novelist, in his observations at Cape Farewell, a centre where scientists and artists meet to study global change in the Arctic. The essay is entitled A Boot Room in the Frozen North, and at the beginning he states:

The whole world's population is to the south of us, and up here we are our species’ representatives, making in the wilderness, a temporary society, a social microcosm in the vastness of the Arctic.

The participants stay on a boat and visit the landscape with skidoos, getting into their cold weather gear “skidoo suits,” resembling a toddler’s splash suit. Helmets, gloves, and the liners of the gloves, and frosted goggles and frozen-mouthed balaclavas gape up from the floor in astonishment—but chaos eventually ensues in the boot room as after a few days of mishaps [and] misplaced gear....For you, Bennington is your boot room, a place where you will lose and misplace things, create unbeknownst chaos, and ultimately it will all be replaced and set in order again by the time you leave—you leaving with, hopefully, your dreams realized.

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