Arts and entertainment editor Caela Murphy talked to three Dartmouth students about finding and developing their artistic passions and how Dartmouth has shaped their interests — from digital arts to jazz.
Jordan Craig ’15
Though Jordan Craig ’15 did not come to Dartmouth expecting to study art, she is now a studio art major planning to do an honors thesis and a designer for the Digital Arts, Leadership and Innovation lab. Craig’s foray into the arts at Dartmouth began when she took “Collage: Bridging the Gap” during her first term at the College.
“It was a special topics arts class in the studio art department, and it convinced me to continue to take art classes,” Craig said.
Since then, Craig has become more involved with the department, eventually narrowing her focus to painting. During her upcoming senior seminar, she plans to explore printmaking and collage as well.
Beyond the more traditional fine arts, Craig has found an artistic outlet in the growing realm of digital arts. She was a founding member of the DALI lab and has contributed to design projects for programs like Psych on Ice, an interactive program targeted at astronauts, and Growing Change. Her latest work, a redesigned website for the John Milton Reading Room that displays the writer’s prose and poetry, launched last week.
Craig said that her fine art and digital art pieces “feed off of each other.” The designs she creates digitally inspire pieces she works on in her art classes, she said, and she sometimes scans her drawings onto a computer to finish designing them.
“In my art there is an element of design, so I’ve been told,” Craig said. “I’m thinking about how design works in terms of how I lay out my compositions.”
Craig said that she is not sure what she wants to do after graduation, but knows she wants to work in a “highly creative space.” She is also interested in pursuing the intersection between her two majors, studio art and psychology.
She said she enjoyed engineering professor Peter Robbie’s design thinking class, which “really does combine all sorts of interdisciplinary subjects — psychology, art, design, engineering, anthropology,” Craig said. “It combines all of these different disciplines to focus on human-centered design.”
Chris Gallerani ’15
In high school, Chris Gallerani ’15 said he was predominantly “a music person.” He was a member of his school choir, chamber singers and concert band, and although he participated in musical theater, he said he focused more on singing than acting. He came to Dartmouth in the fall of 2011 set on becoming a music major.
That all changed during Gallerani’s Dartmouth Outing Club First-Year Trip, when an upperclassman on Lodj Croo recommended that he take Acting 1 with theater professor James Rice as his third class. He decided to give it a shot.
“I took it and really loved it,” Gallerani said, “so all the theater I’ve done really started that fall.”
By his freshman spring, Gallerani had already performed in a student production, Sarah Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” and declared a theater major. Since then, he has performed in major theater department productions including “The Liar,” “Big Love” and most recently, “Spring Awakening.”
While Gallerani discovered a passion for theater at Dartmouth, he has not abandoned his musical interests. A member of the Dartmouth Aires, Gallerani performs a cappella at shows throughout the term and has toured with the group to sing across the country, including at the White House.
Initially, his a cappella and theatrical training seemed “contradictory,” Gallerani said. Actors, he said, are taught to be authentic and to “strip back” any fixed ideas that they have of a character, whereas the Aires follow a “specific, stylized way of performing.”
“Now, going into my senior year, I’m seeing that what’s similar about both of those things is how the material — whether that’s the text you speak as an actor or the music that you sing as a group — can inform you and can help affect you to bring you toward something that’s more authentic in yourself, rather than trying to overlay that with some kind of preconceived notion,” Gallerani said. “It’s a delicate balance, but something that I think I understand a lot more now as time has gone by.”
Gallerani is currently working on an honors thesis in the theater department, for which he plans to create and perform a solo piece, and hopes to audition for the theater department’s mainstage productions, “In The Next Room” and “Romeo and Juliet,” this fall and winter.
“I’m not sure what’s in store for me after I graduate in terms of specifically what kinds of job or career I will have, but I know I want to work in performing arts — in theater, in music — somehow,” Gallerani said. “I know it will always have some sort of place in my life.”
Moises Silva ’16
Last spring, when drummer Moises Silva ’16 performed at Friday Night Rock’s Battle of the Bands, his band, The Euphemisms, took home the third prize of $100. It was a moment that showed how far Silva, an engineering major and percussionist in several musical groups on campus, has come since he first began playing the drums six years ago at his church.
Silva described the church setting, in which he learned to play by ear by listening to other musicians, as a “non-formal atmosphere,” and worried initially that his training would not prepare him to play in college.
“That was my learning foundation, so when I came to Dartmouth I was a little scared because I didn’t know if I would be able to play the drums,” Silva said. “It turns out the Hop is a great place for student artists who aren’t necessarily music majors but still want to play.”
Silva began his arts career at Dartmouth by joining the Dartmouth Marching Band. He subsequently joined the World Music Percussion Ensemble, for which he played on a drum kit, an instrument he said was “closer to home” for him. During his freshman spring, Silva was welcomed into the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, where he found a mentor in ensemble director Don Glasgo.
“Don Glasgo is a great teacher, and he really connects with musicians like me who didn’t have formal training,” Silva said.
During his freshman summer, Silva expended his repertoire beyond ensemble concerts when he and several other student musicians formed their own band, The Euphemisms. Performing in a band as opposed to a larger, more organized group can be challenging, Silva said, as individual band members must work together to plan practice times, decide on set lists and prepare for shows. However, with these responsibilities come rewards.
“In an ensemble, you have someone there telling you if you’ve done something wrong or if you’ve done something right,” Silva said. “When you’re on your own, you get to experiment more with what you’ve learned outside of the band.”
Silva said that he always wanted to be a drummer, and hopes to continue with percussion in the future even if he just performs part-time gigs.
As he has been exposed to different styles, Silva says his musical interests have shifted. Before he joined the Barbary Coast, for example, he had not considered playing jazz, a genre he said was “not cool, per se” in his neighborhood. He quickly developed an appreciation for jazz, he said, when he learned about its history as a foundation for modern hip-hop and rap.
“I’ve learned a lot of different techniques and learning styles that have slowly been integrated into the way I think about music,” Silva said.
The story has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction appended(Sept. 10, 2014):
This article previously misidentified the prize that The Euphemisms won at the Battle of the Bands contest.
