Last week, Grounds was filled with events exploring what it means to be human as part of the University’s annual Humanities Week. This year, after the University’s tumultuous fall semester, the week was centered around the theme of renewal.
“We wanted to engage with some of the tough subjects that make you need [renewal and growth],” said Angela Nemecek, Program Administrator for the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures. “We wanted to alternate between engaging with difficult subject matter and then coming back to how do we grow, how do we heal and how do we play.”
A committee of the Institute joined students taking a four-week class called “Garden as Metaphor” to plan the week’s events. In the class, which was designed to bring students together after the fall semester, students were given plants to represent planting their dreams for the University. The opening event for Humanities Week, “Plant your dreams,” was modeled after the class.
“Some people arrived and thought they were going to be lectured about how the garden is metaphor, but instead we planted things and they took home herbs,” said third-year College student Katie Abbott, intern at the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures. “The point is regeneration, regrowth and a lot of people do that just by doing things, not letting themselves sit idle and stew and reminisce.”
The rest of the week’s events included a talk by autistic self-advocate Lydia Brown, a “Humanitea Party,” a reading of the entire Ulysses, a night of spoken word poetry and much more. The events ranged from serious to playful and touched on ideas of healing and renewal, Nemecek said.
One of the week’s most popular events, the “Humanitea party,” brought students together to read the children’s books they loved as a child. The event encouraged students to think about how these books helped them grow into who they are today.
Other events related to the theme of growth and renewal more loosely. The slam poetry event was designed to center around recovery, but sticking too closely to the theme would have hindered the poets’ creative process, Abbott said.
“The goal of spoken word is to speak your truth, or the truth that you see, and that’s not limited by a theme and so I didn’t want to limit them,” Abbott said.
When Abbott planned the spoken word event, one of her main goals was to increase minority involvement, which she noticed had been lacking in previous events. The spoken word poetry, which took place on Thursday night, drew a crowd of 100 people at one point, although people came and went throughout the event.
“[Humanities Week] is both a time of celebration and a time of reflection because not everything that humans do is good,” Nemecek said. “[Humanities] isn’t necessarily taking a literature class. It could mean sitting on the Lawn and playing with Legos to bring humanities to people in a fresher way and make it more approachable.”
The week culminated with acrobatic performances in Nameless Field by the University’s acrobatics team and “Moonlight-Circus,” an acrobat troupe which travels across Virginia. The event included aerial performances, LED hula-hooping, stilt walking and carnival food for attendees to enjoy.
“In my opinion, what makes us human or what defines us as human is our ability to emphasize, our ability to connect with another human being,” Abbott said. “I feel like circus people are often viewed as a group of people who are hard to empathize with... I feel like you need to be there and talk to those people and empathize with them.”
Moving forward, organizers of Humanities Week want to increase student participation, as the week’s ideas and events are largely student-driven.
“I hope that other people join in next year for the [Undergraduate Humanities Initiative] meetings leading up to Humanities Week because students like me are the main people doing all of this,” Abbott said. “If they have an idea for something they want to see happen, they can see it happen — they just have to [do it themselves]."
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