Arts & Culture

Not Quite Spring Weekend, a virtual benefit concert organized by a group of University students, rocked the screens of many via BeLive and Facebook on May 30. The festival comprised 12 student performers and 10 professional acts, which altogether provided students and the public with over 10 hours of original music. 

Amongst the thousands of diaries, essays and film scripts in the University of California at Los Angeles’ archive of the late literary giant Susan Sontag, there is a photo of Sontag’s mother and grandmother  posing during an early Hollywood production about the Armenian Genocide.

For the first time since Brown’s annual music festival was born in 1950, Brown Concert Agency’s highly anticipated Spring Weekend was canceled completely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving students wondering what their experience might have been. 

Writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ directorial debut, the psychological-thriller “Swallow,” reveals the horrors of a woman’s alienation from her marriage, struggles with mental illness and battles with an eating disorder. 

When Esther Shapiro, known as Esty, jumps in the taxi for the first time, she can’t help but gaze out at the sky through the window as tears begin streaming down her face. She has escaped her past and is ready to start anew.

How do you execute the world’s largest student-run film festival amidst a global pandemic? Like many things these days: Move online. The Ivy Film Festival announced Monday that this year’s festival will take place digitally from April 24 to April 30.

Since its March 20 debut, Netflix’s “Tiger King” has taken the United States by storm. Receiving over 34 million views within its first ten days on the streaming platform, the seven-part documentary series tells the story of three eccentric private zookeepers and their dangerous, alleged secrets and crimes.

“It’s important to lean on friends, lean on music and lean on us for once a day,” said Tucker Halpern ’14 before he turned toward his DJ set to perform a remix of “Lean on Me,” originally by Bill Withers, with musical partner Sophie Hawley-Weld ’14 on an Instagram Live stream April 8.

On March 30, the Brown Arts Initiative announced the roll-out of a new “Bring Art In” initiative, which hopes to further the BAI’s mission of fostering creative expression and art across and between interdisciplinary faculty and students. 

By constructing a scaled Minecraft replica of the University, Brown Esports and Geopipe — an alum-founded virtual modeling company — have kickstarted a novel way to experience College Hill during the COVID-19 pandemic.