Things to Do, April 10-17

Ben Russell in a canoe
Visiting filmmaker Ben Russell shows his experimental feature documentary “Let Each One Go Where He May,” April 15 at Cornell Cinema.

Last Call anniversary

Alumni of Cornell’s Last Call all-male a cappella group welcome old and new fans to join them in celebrating the 20th anniversary of Last Call’s spring show, Straight Up, April 11 at 7:30 p.m. in Statler Auditorium. Open to the public.

More than 50 alumni will return to campus to perform in the show, which also features songs and skits by the current group. A finale performance of the full membership will put an unprecedented number of singers – spanning the Classes of 1994 through 2018 – on the stage.

Tickets for Straight Up XX are $10, available at menoflastcall.com, from members and at the door.

Threatened species

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology will preview its new documentary “The Sagebrush Sea” as part of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, April 12 at 4 p.m. at Cinemapolis, 120 E. Green St., Ithaca. Tickets are available at the theater and at cinemapolis.org.

Produced by the lab’s multimedia group, the film tells the story of the greater sage-grouse, its wild neighbors and the cold desert landscape on which they depend. Over the past 200 hundred years, the sage-grouse population has fallen from 16 million to fewer than 500,000 as humans continue to develop the sagebrush region.

Members of the production team will be on hand to answer questions about how the film was made and the factors that threaten the survival of the bird. “The Sagebrush Sea” will have its U.S. broadcast premiere on the PBS series “Nature” on Wednesday, May 20, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

Lincoln documents on display

Cornell University Library will show all three of its collection’s unique documents from Abraham Lincoln’s presidency – the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment – in a one-day-only flash exhibition Saturday, April 11, 1 to 5 p.m. in Kroch Library’s Hirshland Gallery. Free and open to the public.

The display commemorates the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in April 1865. The copy of the Gettysburg Address is written in Lincoln’s hand; the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is signed by Lincoln and the commemorative copy of the 13th Amendment is signed by Lincoln and the members of Congress who voted to end slavery in America.

The documents will be on view alongside the library’s related exhibitions, “Lincoln’s Unfinished Work” and “150 Ways to Say Cornell.”

Music from conflict

The Department of Music presents “They that sow in tears,” a concert with music and text exploring doubt, fear and faith in the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe (1618-48), Sunday, April 12, at 8 p.m. in Anabel Taylor Chapel. Free and open to the public.

Organized by doctoral student David Miller, the concert highlights the music of Heinrich Schutz (1585-1682) and his contemporaries, along with spoken prose and poetry and organ meditations performed by Jonathan Schakel on the chapel’s baroque organ

The intimate and immersive event features guest vocalists Claire Raphaelson, Julia Cavallaro, Scott Mello and David Tinervia, with instrumentalists Miller and Zoe Weiss on viols, Matthew Hall on harpsichord, and guest artists Anna Marsh on bassoon and Ryaan Ahmed on theorbo, a plucked stringed instrument in the lute family.

The concert is funded in part by the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Institute for German Cultural Studies.

Regarding Sontag

Cornell Cinema will present the documentary “Regarding Susan Sontag,” April 14 at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre, as part of the LGBT Studies Film Series.

Directed by Nancy Kates, the film is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of an important literary, political and feminist icon. Sontag was endlessly curious, passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, and her works on photography, war, illness and terrorism continue to resonate today.

Kates tracks Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, and accounts from friends, family, colleagues and lovers – as well as the subject’s own words, read by actress Patricia Clarkson. The film received a Special Jury Mention at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Also screening: “Let Each One Go Where He May,” April 15 at 7 p.m., with visiting filmmaker Ben Russell.

Russell’s feature debut (2009) follows the journey of two unidentified brothers to a village on the Upper Suriname River, tracing a voyage undertaken by their ancestors who escaped from slavery 300 years earlier. The 135-minute experimental film is a personal work of ethnography consisting of 13 extended tracking shots, filmed with a 16mm Steadicam rig.

Home ergonomics

Cornell has a long history in the field of ergonomics, with notable collaborations between the former College of Home Economics and the Cornell Center for Housing and Environmental Studies, under founding director Professor Glenn Beyer.

Learn about Cornell’s efforts to improve home life in a Chats in the Stacks book talk with Barbara Penner, “Ergonomics in the Postwar Home,” April 16 at 4:30 p.m. in the Stern Seminar Room, 160 Mann Library.

Penner is a 2014 fellow in the history of home economics at Cornell. Her talk is presented by the College of Human Ecology and Mann Library.

Chats in the Stacks are free and open to the public, with light refreshments served and books available for purchase and signing.

Learning by doing

Two Weill Cornell Medical College professors share their secrets for meaningful class discussion and increased student engagement at “Getting Started with Active Learning: Ten Things to Try Tomorrow,” Friday, April 17, at 2 p.m. in G71 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall.

Dr. Susan Bostwick, professor of clinical pediatrics, and Dr. Jennifer DiPace, associate professor of clinical pediatrics, lead an interactive workshop open to Cornell faculty and staff exploring active learning, teaching techniques that prompt students go beyond note-taking and observation. The workshop is sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence and the College of Human Ecology.

Media Contact

Joe Schwartz