Performances | Yale MacMillan Center European Union Studies

Vilnius 700 Symposium

October 12-13, 2023
This two-day symposium brings together thinkers and writers engaged in the history and life of Vilnius to reflect on the role, space, and place of the city and its peoples. Vilnius encompasses centuries-long historical, cultural, and political significance to many nations of Central and Eastern Europe including Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Belarusians, and others. The goal of the Vilnius 700 symposium at Yale is to reach for a better understanding of Vilnius both as a place and as an idea, a city with a multiplicity of peoples and voices – a wealth of polyphony.

Greece & Classical Music: In Myth and Tradition

Greece has a strong folk music culture and a tradition of Byzantine music (Greek Orthodox church music). These styles include musical features such as tropic modes and compound rhythms, musical elements that sound ‘exotic’ to the Western-trained ear. Furthermore, the music that is often associated with Greece around the world is an early 20th-century urban popular style known as rebetika (e.g. Zorba’s dance).

Voices of New Belarus

The Yale community is invited to hear the 2022 Yale World Fellows read and discuss the documentary play of Belarusian playwright and civil activist Andrei Kureichik. The play features 14 real monologues of Belarusians chosen from more than 700 stories of victims of Lukashenko’s repressive machine. In the play, politicians, journalists, activists, people of all ages and professions share their experience of political repression. This reading is an invitation to a broad discussion about the problem of political prisoners in the world and ways you can help.

Windham-Campbell Festival: Choral Performance: Intimate Strangers

A collaboration between Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma, drawing inspiration from Iduma’s book, A Stranger’s Pose, a unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry. In a combination of music, text, image, and field recordings collected by Iduma during his travels, Intimate Strangers explores such themes as of movement, home, grief, absence, and desire in what Iduma calls “an atlas of a borderless world.”

"Clepsydra and Other Poems" Book Discussion with Translator Adam Mahler

Join the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies and the Yale Translation Initiative to welcome alumnus Adam Mahler back to Yale for a discussion related to a forthcoming book - a new translation of the 1920 book of poems by Portuguese symbolist poet, Camilo Pessanha, who resided in Macau for the last part of his life (1894-1926). The session will feature a reading of a selection of the original poems in Portuguese with Adam’s new translations.