Though the fall semester is in full swing, TIMARtians are still reflecting on the lessons learned and connections built during their busy summers spent engaging in a broad range of artistic and professional experiences around the world.
Kyra Lopez, a third-year TIMARA and dance double-degree student, spent her summer on the move. Lopez first attended a three-and-a-half week session at the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, followed by another three-week session at the Bates Dance Festival at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
While dance was the focus of Lopez’s experiences, musical opportunities and artistic connections naturally arose.
“I got to meet a bunch of awesome dancers who are turning out to be collaborators for the future,” Lopez said. “I have a bunch of people I met who I got to dance with and make really good friends with, but now I’m also getting to compose for their dance projects at their own universities, which is really awesome.”
Lopez found that her time at Oberlin prepared her well for the festivals by teaching her to approach every experience with openness and curiosity.
“Obviously I was worried about learning and dancing the best I can, but I wasn’t walking into a room feeling the need to prove myself,” Lopez said. “I was walking into a room excited to meet everyone, and excited to learn from them rather than comparing myself to others.”
Willa MacFarlane, a fourth-year TIMARA major, spent part of their summer back in the TIMARA basement as an instructor for Sonic Arts Workshop (SAW), TIMARA’s summer program for high schoolers interested in electroacoustic music production and composition.
“[SAW] is different than other music camps,” MacFarlane said. “It’s a broadening of musical perspectives.”
MacFarlane’s own experience as a SAW participant for two years in high school illustrates the influence of SAW’s curriculum on young artists.
“A lot of SAW attendees who later came to TIMARA have said that SAW was really important to them in terms of expanding their idea of what music is,” MacFarlane said. “For me, I already had a foot in the door of experimentalism, and so I was already interested in that kind of stuff. SAW accelerated that track and gave me a sense that there was a community of people who were into weird music.”
Shifting into the role of SAW instructor has provided MacFarlane the opportunity to be both a learner and a teacher.
“I really deepened my understanding of parts of the TIMARA core curriculum because I had to revisit and study things in depth again to create lectures and to teach them to other people,” MacFarlane said. “Not only does [being a SAW instructor] make you a better teacher, but it makes you a better musician.”
Josif Collazo, a fifth-year studio art and TIMARA individual major, also spent his summer seeing both sides of the summer camp coin, first welding and making metal sculptures as a participant at Ox-bow Arts Camp, then serving as a counselor and lifeguard at Kinhaven Music School, a summer music program in Weston, Vermont.
Both experiences opened Collazo’s eyes to the power of connection through art.
“Community can be anywhere; I especially found it in the arts at the arts camp. I met a lot of really nice people and artists, and at this music camp, the kids were really great, and there was a very, very loving faculty,” Collazo said.
Sarai Juarez Osorio, a fourth-year TIMARA and economics double-degree student, spent her summer spreading the TIMARA spirit around the world at the Screen Music Program in Belluno, Italy, where she attended master classes and workshops on film and game scoring taught by industry professionals, and was given the opportunity to conduct and record her compositions with a professional string quartet for the first time.
“It was really awesome to kind of not only focus on the technical aspect of composing for film, or for picture, but also on the workflow behind being comfortable with writing a lot of material in a short amount of time, because that is the very important thing to develop over time,” Juarez Osorio said. “One of the biggest things I learned was just to focus on my state of flow and how I achieve that as I continue to grow.”
Sam Sentivan, a second-year TIMARA major, spent his summer on the road with fellow Oberlin student Finn Curran, working on a multimedia project exploring the physical infrastructure hidden behind the language of “the cloud.”
Sentivan and Curran spent the majority of their time interviewing residents and shooting footage in Vineland, New Jersey, and Ashburn, Virginia, two communities surrounding data centers.
“The final piece will take the form of a three-channel video, and then have an undisclosed number of audio channels,” Sentivan said. “I’m basing the score of the short film on samples of data centers recorded using a mic that picks up subaudible frequencies.”
The project was funded with support from Oberlin’s XARTs Fund, which awards grants to Oberlin students working on collaborative, multi-disciplinary, artistic projects.
“We used the money to rent out Canon’s most recent model of cinema camera,” Sentivan said. “We got to shoot in 7K raw, 3×2, and I think it’ll translate really well to life-size scale, which is sort of the end goal.”
With everyone back in the basement, these summer experiences and the countless others undertaken by TIMARA majors, minors, faculty members, and friends have already begun to enrich the TIMARA community.
