MILLENNIAL SYMPOSIUM OF THE ARTS PLANNED FOR MARCH

Shakespeare, Hugo, Tolstoy, Emerson and Goethe will shake things up with the celebrated David Parsons Dance Company in March during a week meant to provide an examination of the arts at the millennium.

The Millennial Symposium of the Arts, to be presented March 5-10 at Southeast, will reckon with the names placed high upon the facade of Southeast's Kent Library. Sometimes disparagingly referred to as "the 17 dead white males," the names represented the literary establishment near the midpoint of the century. At the symposium, their ideas will be portrayed by orators who will be followed by others presenting minority points of view.

For instance, excerpts from Tolstoy's "What is Art?" will present a Western view of the subject to be followed by someone speaking about Japanese aesthetics. "It's a completely different way of looking at art," says Dr. Marc Strauss, who recently was named to become associate dean for the River Campus.

He is coordinating the symposium along with David Reinheimer of the Department of English. Conversing with the Canon could be another name for the symposium, Strauss said.

"We're taking the established canon and interrogating it ... We want to traverse the 2,500 years since Homer first wrote and Mark Twain wrote."

Homer and Twain also are listed on the facade. Others are Whitman, Thoreau, Poe, John Cardinal Newman, Vergil, Ruskin, Eugene Field, Carlyle, Chaucer and Milton.

A roundtable discussion is planned in which members of the community will be invited to express their thoughts about the names on the library.

The 17 names chosen for the library frieze arose out of a 1939 dialogue between then-Southeast President W.W. Parker and the late Dr. Harold Grauel, professor of English. In his collection of essays, "The Inimitable Professor H.O. Grauel," the professor writes that Parker believed Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture" "contained most the world's useful wisdom."

Parker deemed Grauel's suggestion of T.S. Eliot "too modern." And Parker chose Eugene Field, even then a minor writer, largely because he was a Missourian.

Anyone who has anecdotes about Parker or Grauel from his time period is welcome to contribute to the symposium.

The counterpoint to this examination of the traditional will be provided by the Parsons Dance Company, a New York City-based company known for it athleticism and flaunting of conventions. "They are a very experimental yet accessible turn-of-the-century modern dance company," Strauss says. "They really push the envelope."

The company has given some 700 performances on five continents since 1987, including shows at the Spoleto festivals in Charleston, Italy and Melbourne and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Kennedy Center.

The Parsons Dance Company will tour Chile after the performance in Cape Girardeau.

A rock 'n' roll band will set Whitman's poem "I Sing the Body Electric" to music. Jeffrey Noonan, director of guitar studies at Southeast, also will perform.