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Around the QuadsMidnight’s Children, Humanities Festival Draw Large ResponseWhen University President Lee C. Bollinger announced in the fall that Columbia was teaming up with the University of Michigan and the Royal Shakespeare Company to bring Salman Rushdie’s allegorical novel, Midnight’s Children, to the American stage, it signaled a new Columbia commitment to the arts and a reaffirmation of the University’s commitment to its New York neighbors. In March, this project came to dramatic fruition with 12 Columbia-sponsored performances of Midnight’s Children at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre on West 125th Street and the month-long Humanities Festival on campus and around New York that accompanied them. The three-hour production, in which 20 members of the RSC’s troupe played 80 characters and the narrative was augmented with historical videos and fantasy sequences, received mixed reviews in the New York press, though Zubin Varla, who played the main character Saleem, received high marks. But the play did well with audiences. All of the performances were sold out, including the alumni performance on March 22. (The play was performed in London in January and February and on the Michigan campus in Ann Arbor earlier in March.) The accompanying Humanities Festival, which included panels, lectures and informal chats in which distinguished scholars — including two notable appearances by Rushdie — discussed, analyzed and contextualized the play. On March 22, Bollinger interviewed Rushdie in Altschul Auditorium about his work, the death threat that had kept him in hiding for several years, religion and freedom of speech. When Bollinger, an expert in the First Amendment, referred to freedom of speech as a “Western value,” Rushdie insisted that it should really be considered “a human value, not a culture-specific value.” Rushdie, who attended several performances of the play and mingled with threatre-goers in the lobby at one, returned to campus on March 29 to close out the festival with a sold-out, students-only discussion in Miller Theatre. Other Humanities Festival events included a dialogue with University Professor Edward Said; teach-ins on Indian and Pakistani history; a panel with Rushdie and dramaturge Simon Reade on the process of turning Midnight’s Children from a book into a play; and discussions on writers and repression, Rushdie and the media; and Muslim perspectives on Midnight’s Children. In a staff editorial published on March 31, Spectator declared: “While the play may have been theatrically scattered, it had a unifying intellectual effect on the Columbia community. Contemporary Civilization classes collectively purchased tickets to see the show. Other courses read and discussed the stage adaptation performed by the RSC, while many students picked up the play on their own to read over spring break.” The editorial concluded, “The variety of reactions to a unified intellectual experience is exactly what Columbia’s Core Curriculum-based philosophy strives for, and it’s refreshing to see the goal accomplished in a new and multidisciplinary way. While the performance certainly fit into the category of arts at Columbia, Midnight’s Children — and the events surrounding it — also addressed literary, historical, religious and political themes, giving most students something to find interest in. Columbia should not be discouraged by the perceived shortcomings of this particular performance but should continue to sponsor projects that generate such lively intellectual discussion.” As an example, a competition was held among undergraduates who were invited to write and submit essays about Midnight’s Children. The winning essay, by Andrew Liu ’03, was distributed at several Humanities Festival events and may be read at www.college.columbia.edu/aboutcc/news. The University used Midnight’s Children to expand its outreach to the community. The matinee performance on March 25 was reserved for local high school students, who studied the play and its themes in school workshops supported by the RSC’s Education Department, the School of the Arts and the Double Discovery Center. T.P.C., A.S.
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