Bike to work

Friday, May 18 is National Bike to Work and School Day, with free breakfast, giveaways and prizes at select locations in Ithaca and Tompkins County for participants commuting by bike that day.

The event is a communitywide effort as part of National Bike Month to improve conditions for cyclists and awareness of bicycling as a viable means of transportation. Local activities are coordinated by Way2Go, a program of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County. Prizes are provided by sponsors including Cornell Transportation Services.

See “Black Panther”

Cornell Cinema screens one last film in Willard Straight Theatre this semester: “Black Panther.” Advance tickets are on sale for all four screenings, May 17 and 19 at 7:30 p.m., and May 18 at 7 and 9:45 p.m. To guarantee a seat, purchase online at CornellCinemaTickets.

Details of the annual “Cinema Under the Stars” series of outdoor screenings on Willard Straight Terrace will be announced in the coming weeks. The fall semester film schedule in the theater begins Sunday, Aug. 19.

Fighting for equal pay

Zoe Spencer discusses her ongoing lawsuit seeking pay equity with her male colleagues in academia in “When the Struggle Gets Real!” May 18 at 4 p.m. in 2B48 Kroch Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Spencer is an associate professor of sociology and chair of the Gender Equity Task Force at Virginia State University. Her talk will be accompanied by a display of items documenting the fight for women’s rights, selected from the Cornell Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

The event is cosponsored by Cornell University Library and the American Association of University Women.

Game design showcase

Students in the Game Design Initiative at Cornell will showcase their work May 18, 4-7 p.m. in Carpenter Hall’s ACCEL Labs. The public is invited to play the new games and vote for their favorite at the free event, which includes an award ceremony at 6:45 p.m.

Some of the projects featured this year include:

• Trino, a game designed for younger players, who use shape-shifting powers – morphing from baby dinosaur to brontosaurus to Tyrannosaurus rex – to get past predators and other hazards;
• Discarded, an innovative, tactical dungeon-crawl game for iOS that integrates card game mechanics;
• Arcane Tectonics, a puzzle/strategy game for iOS and Android, in which Bernette is trapped in a dreamland of unstable, shifting terrain and summons forces of nature to protect herself; and
• Beat Boss, a rhythm game for iOS, featuring Hertzcules, champion of Olympus, sent by Zeus to overcome seven mighty tasks while dancing to a beat.

The interdisciplinary Game Design Initiative is housed in the Department of Computer Science and offers a minor available to all Cornell undergraduates.

Spring means music

The Chiaroscuro Quartet, a European ensemble making a rare U.S. appearance, is headlining the Department of Music’s Mayfest, May 18-22. The annual spring festival of chamber music (and more) kicks off Friday, May 18 in Barnes Hall Auditorium at 8 p.m. with a free community concert of jazz and classical music performed by Ithaca-area student ensembles.

Under the artistic direction of pianists Miri Yampolsky and Xak Bjerken, Mayfest is entering its second decade and features a range of music, from classics on period instruments to modern jazz.

The Chiaroscuro Quartet’s first performance of three, May 19 at 8 p.m. in Barnes, features a Bach fugue, a Brahms violin sonata, a Fanny Mendelssohn string quartet and Bjerken and Dmitri Novgorodsky of Ithaca College playing a four-hand piano sonata by Stephen Hartke. Chiaroscuro also performs May 20 at 3 p.m. at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with fortepianist Roger Moseley.

Monday, May 21 brings jazz to the Carriage House Café in Collegetown, with Ithaca band i3 – bassist Nicholas Walker, drummer Greg Evans and pianist Nick Weiser. Yampolsky and Bjerken will join Chiaroscuro for a final concert in Barnes, May 22 at 8 p.m.

Visit Mayfest online for full festival passes, individual tickets and complete program details. Single tickets, also available at the door, are $25 for adults, $10 for students, and free for children and youths under 18 with an accompanying adult.

Fashion, film, fascination

Since the invention of cinema, onscreen fashion has maintained an intimate and complex relationship with “real” fashion. From the early 1950s into the 1980s, portrayals of fashion on film in post-colonial Sri Lanka fueled the fascination of moviegoers and had an influence on people’s clothing choices.

A new exhibition of archival film stills in Mann Library, “Fashion and Identity in Sri Lankan Cinema,” explores perceptions and representations of sociocultural identities across the latter half of the 20th century in Sri Lanka through cinematic portrayals of clothing fashion.

The display, open to the public until June 15 in the library’s Follett Information Commons, was created by film scholar and filmmaker Athula Samarakoon. A visiting scholar in the South Asia Program, he is a Fulbright professional development fellow.

Duff Ball benefit

Duff Ball 2018, Cornell’s senior prom, invites the Cornell community to dress up, dance and celebrate the end of the school year with friends, food and drink, May 22, 9 p.m.-1 a.m. in the Duffield Hall atrium.

Tickets are available at UniversityTickets for $50 each and include four drink tickets and food. The event is open to all Cornell seniors, graduate students, faculty, staff and guests, ages 21 and up.

The event also directly supports a local youth program. The Cornell Student United Way campaign is pledging all proceeds from ticket sales to Stephen E. Garner Summers of Service, a United Way of Tompkins County initiative providing paid annual internships to work with a United Way member organization in the county. The summer internships give local high school students an opportunity to learn firsthand about the local health and human services sector.