One of SANDBOX’s core missions is to develop opportunities for students to creatively engage with the environment. To that end, a request for proposals is issued each year. Students are asked to choose a faculty collaborator and must develop a full proposal and budget that is then submitted to the faculty board for consideration. Projects may occur during the semester or over the summer months, and are open to all students.
Last year’s winning proposal went to Val Dunn ‘ 15 and Professor Laura Eckelman for their project Space Place NonPlace.
Project Narrative
Space Place NonPlace is a subtly provocative meditation on humans’ relationships to our environment, as explored through the varied lenses of performance, visual art, and language. The project is conceived and organized around the ecocritical theory that environments can be categorized as:
Space – a natural environment with which an individual has no personal associations
Place – a space made personal through curation, cultivation, and/or experience
NonPlace – a manmade environment that feels transitory or generic
The project uses this construct to examine the many ways in which we describe, shape, explore, experience, and interact with the landscapes of our surroundings.
Space Place NonPlace began with a simple question: Can theatre be non-anthropocentric? This seemingly straightforward inquiry took us to three different locations—Westminster, MD, the Lakes District of England, and Southern Iceland, each of which offered a case study for one category of environment. Paradoxically, however, wherever we went, we found ourselves surrounded by elements of all three categories—demonstrating how Spaces, Places, and NonPlaces often exist in taut dissonance with one another.
The exhibit’s layout illustrates perhaps our most essential discovery: that Space, Place, and NonPlace are not distinguishable as mutually exclusive categories, but exist rather as a continuous spectrum that wraps around upon itself almost circularly. The items in this exhibit serve as evidence and illustration of the project’s conclusions; but they are not a “final product” of any kind. Space Place NonPlace is an ongoing intellectual and experiential inquiry that continues to evolve and provoke us in our artistic work and our everyday lives. We offer this exhibit as testimony—an illustration of where the project stands at this moment in time—with hopes that it will inspire you to do as we did: to feed wonder with wander.
— Val Dunn and Laura J. Eckelman
Artist Bios
Val Dunn ’15 graduated from Washington College summa cum laude with majors in Drama and English. While a student, she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Tau Delta, and the Cater Society. She received The Jude and Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize, The William W. Warner Prize, The Stewart Drama Award, was a co-recipient of The Mary Martin Prize for Drama and a finalist for the Sophie Kerr Prize. Val’s passion for observing human interaction with natural environments began with the Kiplin Hall program and deepened through a subsequent hiking and writing trip along England’s Coast to Coast trail; her plays and poems endeavor to make place in unexplored wildernesses. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she works with the Bearded Ladies Cabaret and the Foundry (a collective for emerging playwrights).
Laura J. Eckelman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance, where she teaches design, administration, collaboration, and other disciplines. Laura also serves as Resident Designer and Production Manager for the department, overseeing 10-15 productions per year. Her professional work as a lighting designer has been seen at theatre companies from NYC to Juneau, including Yale Repertory Theatre, Triad Stage, and Studio Theatre in DC. Laura’s abiding interest in intersections between the arts and sciences has led her both toward and beyond the field of theatrical lighting: Last year she collaborated with Prof. Heather Russell to create Knots+Light, a SANDBOX-sponsored art installation that explored the relationship between three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional projections. She also received a SANDBOX grant to develop a GRW course called “Dramatizing Discovery,” focused on science-based plays. She is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale School of Drama.
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