"Aca-pantsless": How wooing should be done.

And it begins. Male final clubs haven’t been shy in the least about their initiation shenanigans this week. Initiated members could be found in public places doing very embarrassing things. Noice is on the lookout for you to capture and edify this week’s tomfoolery.

Shenanigan #1: Today, a little before the scandalous class Lit & Sex, Phoenix S.K.  gentlemen, posed as the “Aca-pantsless”, charmed (or blasphemed?) Sanders Theater with a special rendition of “Mr. Sandman.” Some claim Professor Kaiser sported an amused smirk throughout the performance.

Shenanigan #2: Gentlemen of the Fox shamelessly rock out in front of Memorial Church with Rock Band. Again, bow ties.

Fox band. Cute.

Shenanigan #3: Yesterday, gentlemen of the Fox again shamelessly participate in some good ol’ Harvard Square self-exhibition. Let’s see: an angel, a devil, and…the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Noice.

Go back to hell! Or, er, the sewer.

Shenanigan (?) #4: Noice was sent this excellent cell phone pic (and everyone knows how much we love those) of a dude with a Twilight lunchbox. Is this for an initiation? Not sure, but it’s awesome. So here it is.

Edward Cullen fanboy.

Got a tip? Report initiation tomfoolery and sketchy cellphone pics to thehvoicemail[at]gmail[dot]com.

Edward's watching you. While you sleep.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnNk2Al2yF8

Or not.

Produced by a group called Back of the Class. And yeah. We don’t really know much about this “LA-based group of comedy writer/director/performers”, but since DerrickComedy isn’t making videos about us we’ll settle for this. Also: the dudes are all Tufts grads. Hmmm.

Recently announced at a panel with various sociology and African-American Studies professors, Harvard plans to offer a course on the HBO series “The Wire,” a show about slum life in Baltimore. William J. Wilson, a self-admitted follower of the show and who will teach “Social Structure and culture in the Study of Race and Urban Poverty” this spring, will assume teaching responsibilities for the new course, which is already stirring up excitement among student fans. Sonja Sohn, who plays Kima Greggs, was also present at the panel.

To which we say… when are we going to see “The Theory of Arrested Development” on the course selection tool?

Side note: Check out the pretty sweet CS50 logo customized just in time for Halloween. Noice thinks Malan is a pretty cool guy.

On Saturday night, I ventured out of Harvard Square with three friends to a place Harvard students would not journey to if it weren’t for the prospect of free theater required by one of our classes. Two subway lines and one hour later we arrived in what felt like the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts, otherwise known as Brookline. I’m sure in the light of day Brookline is just another respectable and well-to-do suburb of Boston. However, on a cold night when you are holding a small slip of directions that more or less ends with, “Follow the small hard-to-find path up to the looming school building on your right. ” you are more than willing to huddle closer to those with whom you came. Once you finally find the Old Lincoln School Building (which is the name of the venue on your ticket), Cambridge already feels very far away. But incase you are not entirely out of your comfort zone yet, you are ushered through a black corridor and are forced to navigate your way to the Manderlay Bar, a night club signaling the other influence of the production, Alfred Hitchcocks 1940 film Rebecca. There are servants to greet you, music, and other patrons waiting with drinks in hand for their turn to enter the “show” portion of the night. About twenty minutes later my group was called and we finally entered into the world we had come to see.

I cannot narrate the rest of my night from here on out because it would defeat the purpose of the show in many different ways. Once inside the school building, you are quickly separated from your group and the journey you chose for yourself afterwards is completely your own. That is both the genius and the most overwhelming aspect of Sleep No More. As an audience member we are forced to make choices at every turn. Do you follow that woman who you think is Lady Macbeth? What is going on in that room with all of that music and dancing? Are you missing something important in the hallway? Should you explore every room or should you follow that group of people running downstairs to the basement? You are constantly battling with what parts are worth seeing and how you will manage to see everything.

Sleep No More throws you into a complete sensory experience, including smell and taste (one room smelled so foul I could not stay inside for more than a few minutes and I witnessed an actor give an audience member a shot of whiskey for no apparent reason). Every room is filled with meaning and symbolism and every actor has a story that can be followed for the entire night. The performance is… strange and you will wander into more than one room in which you ask yourself something like, “Did I miss the part of Macbeth that had pounds of hair on the floor?” My first impression was that the entire production was a literary haunted house with symbolism that was always above my level of comprehension. At times I found this frustrating, but I soon realized that I wasn’t meant to understand everything around me.

As I made my way through the maze of rooms and storylines, I realized what intrigued me the most about the production was the relationship created between audience and actor. In a production that encourages you to do as you please, go where you want, touch everything, or even just sit down do nothing at all and observe, I felt a surprising amount of tension when it came to interaction with the actual actors. In most cases, the actors ignored the audience. The masked audience figures become simply part of their set that the performers must act around. I recall in one particular room watching with a large crowd a particularly graphic scene between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in her bedroom. I remember looking at all of the spectators and thinking to myself how it felt almost voyeuristic for us all to simply gape at the actors in the way we were. We were watching something secret between a husband and wife, something taboo. We were invisible to them and yet our presence was almost oppressive in the room. At one point Lady Macbeth went to her closet and looked out at us through a glass window. Suddenly she made eye contact with us and began to press her hands against the glass in an attempt to reach out to us in agony.  I saw in the reflection of the glass the many masked faces that she was looking out upon. It dawned upon me that we were no longer invisible to her, we were acting as the demons haunting her consciousness and watching her every move.

In a strikingly different situation, I wandered down to the basement at one point and entered into an empty room. I thought I was alone while I was inspecting the contents of the room until I turned a corner and found an actor sitting at a desk cleaning instruments. I stood there for a few minutes watching him, hoping he would do something. At one point he turned around as though he had heard a sound, but then went back to his cleaning. After a few minutes I realized how absurd I felt watching this man completely by myself when he clearly was not going to recognize my presence. I finally left wondering if he ever left that desk the whole night. I went back a little while later and he was gone.

The fact is, there are rules in Sleep No More, but one is never completely certain what they are. Just when you think you are not supposed to make eye contact with the actors, one of them will pull you into a closet and speak to you for five minutes (this did not happen to me… but I shamelessly wish it had). After a few hours of wandering around, I was walking up the stairs when one of the actors tapped me on the shoulder and gestured me to follow her. I was excited by the prospect and followed along with a large group of audience members. What I hadn’t realized was that she was leading us all to the exit since the show was over. “Already?” I thought, “ I was only just beginning to understand this thing!”. While one would need more than several viewings of the show to in effect “see everything” you can benefit from having come with friends. Once we navigated our ways out of the world of Sleep No More and back to Harvard Square, we found it necessary to get a meal together and discuss our nights. Each experience brought a new understanding to the production and further proved how this many-layered production is one that can yield many different interpretations… that is if you are daring enough to interpret it at all.

Sleep No More runs until January at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline Massachusetts. Don’t let the trip keep you from missing the most interesting theater experience you may ever see… and that is not an overstatement.

Students dig in front of Matthews Hall

If you’ve passed through the Yard lately, you’ll probably have noticed a peculiar site: students digging wayyyy down deep into the earth. Is this even allowed?!

The answer is yes. Why you ask? Well, that’s the best part: all the digging is actually for a class, Anthropology 1130: Archaeology of Harvard Yard. Yes. There is a class at Harvard that allows you to dig in Harvard Yard. How awesome is that?

Today and yesterday, students from Anthropology 1130: Archaeology of Harvard Yard as well as Anthropology 1010: The Fundamentals of Archaeological Methods & Reasoning have been excavatin’ away to find remains of the Indian College at Harvard, one of Harvard’s first buildings, which stood from the 1650′s until 1698. Read more to see what kinds of stuff they found.

Noice went to check out the action and found it to be quite exciting, despite the gloomy weather and soon-to-be muddy earth. Students found things like pieces of brick, old rusty nails, buttons, lots of broken glass, and pieces of ceramic. All of these items will be examined by the students of Anthropology 1130 to further what little knowledge we have of that Indian College which came and went long ago.

Students sift through buckets of dirt to find artifacts that could give us some helpful clues regarding life at the College in the 17th century.

The results of excavations since the project’s first year in 2005 is on exhibit at the Peabody Museum, called Digging Veritas. From the website:

“Student archaeologists unearthed evidence of colonial Harvard as a landscape shaped by social and religious tensions, which affected everything from Native American and English settler relationships to the everyday routines of student life. As the students searched for meaning in the material remains of Harvard students of the past, three themes emerged: literacy and the Indian College; rule (breaking) and religion; and negotiations of social status. Who knew that small fragments buried below ground could reveal so much?”

More information on the current Harvard Yard Archaeology Project can be found here.

Photos by Sasha Mironov ’13.

Oh man. It's a night to remember for THIS lady.

Students in Diane Paulus and Marjorie Garber’s popular class titled Theater, Dream, Shakespeare got to have a little taste of the discotheque this past week. The class, which focuses on exactly what its title suggests, allows all students a free season pass to the A.R.T.’s Shakespeare Exploded festival. Sweet deal, right?

The first performance of the season students were able to attend was titled The Donkey Show. (And yes. It’s every bit of what you think it is. Well…okay, not really, but sort of.) The show is a disco adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Paulus (of Hair fame) herself, and is performed in Club Oberon — a disco-club-meets-theater-stage on 2 Arrow Street. In the spirit of audience-actor interaction, all students received “dancefloor tickets,” in which everyone got to boogie down with the actors of the show. After the show, the party continues into the night so everyone can break it down on the dancefloor (or on stage)!

Read on as Voice reporter Katie McNicol ’12 puts on her boogie shoes, gets down with glittery half-naked men, and loses herself in this dream-disco world which Paulus has created. Warning: Some semi-scandalous photos ahead — but you know you like it.

woke up this morning, covered in glitter, trying to remember what I loved so much about The Donkey Show. Was it the loud, pounding disco beats? The half-naked man fairies? The raining confetti, flashing lights, oh–and the full bar? Or maybe it was that, standing amidst the dancing people on the floor of Club Oberon, I realized just how right Diane Paulus had gotten it. I’ve seen many theatrical events in my life and after every one, I tend to walk out of the theater thinking to myself, “Those people get to do that for a living?” and “God, I wish I could be up there with them.” This summer, the only Broadway Musical I saw was Hair directed by Diane Paulus herself. My favorite and the most memorable part was at the very end of the show, after the curtain calls, the cast invited audience members onstage to dance. Of course my friends and I rushed onto the set and danced away looking out over the large standing crowd. For a few minutes we could pretend we were the long-haired, out of control, fun loving hippies on Broadway.

Complete with DJ, Oberon the clubmaster, and bouncer.

In The Donkey Show, Diane Paulus, the new artistic director of the A.R.T, took this feeling to a whole new level. Instead of getting to steal a few moments of show time, the audience members are as integral to show as any character or set piece. In effect, we were the set, a large mass of dancing people for the characters to act off of and play through. Not to mention the fact that the entire first half of the show is a disco party… for us to enjoy. But this is no cheap trick to get us in a good mood. Instead, I like to think that Paulus is immersing us into this “dream world” that is reminiscent of the source text of the show, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Throughout the disco, I began to see the brilliant comparison. After all, isn’t Midsummer really just that drunken night after which you wake up, can’t really remember anything and you ask your best friend, “Did that really happen last night?… Did I really do that?” One might even say they know the feeling of doing unmentionable things with someone that can only be referred to as an ass (in the donkey way at least).
The Donkey Show really isn’t about the plot, the characters, or the text (there isn’t a word of Shakespeare in it). It’s about losing yourself in a different world and forgetting about everything else. Until you do a few things you might regret the next morning, you haven’t really experienced the full extent of the show. Don’t let the disco fool you; the spirit of Shakespeare is alive and well at Club Oberon and I personally can’t wait to see what else Diane Paulus has up her sleeve.

Tickets for The Donkey Show are available for purchase until January. Friends and alcohol are highly recommended.

Katie's got a fever...for disco.

Hot glittery men! I mean, er, FAIRIES!