Stanford Report, April 15, 2009

Lively Arts invites students to 'curate' opening acts for upcoming season

Stanford students will get a chance to program an opening act for next season's world music, chamber or jazz events. Lively Arts will designate at least three of the 2009-10 season's events to have a student "curator." The deadline for undergraduate or graduate students to apply is April 21.

Each student curator will select and work with Stanford-based performers—such as instrumentalists, vocal ensembles, theater troupes and poetry collectives—to be showcased as the opening act of a scheduled Lively Arts performance. The participants will work with the Lively Arts staff and be given a programming budget of $500, which can be used as a fee for the student performers or to offset expenses deemed important to the group (for example, working with a supplementary artist, producing a recording or traveling to a festival). Beyond that, each curator will receive a $500 honorarium for his or her own work and will introduce the performance onstage.

"Increasingly, Lively Arts has partnered with groups comprised of, and run by, students and SiCa [the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts]," said Lively Arts' artistic and executive director, Jenny Bilfield. "By inviting students to program opening acts, in our case drawn from the campus community, we're tipping our hats to a long-established concert format in pop music and jazz."

Stanford students interested in applying for a curatorship should visit the Lively Arts website at http://livelyarts.stanford.edu for more information. The selected applicants will be able to program specific performances after the full 2009-10 season schedule is announced on April 27.