Performance: "A Table Before Me" May 3, 2005

Claudia Stevens, a performance artist, playwright and composer, will present two original one-woman shows titled ?A Table Before Me? at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 3 and ?An Evening with Madame F? at 8 p.m. on Thursday, May 5 at Carleton College?s Severance Great Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.

?A Table Before Me? depicts the terror experienced by Stevens? mother?s family during the Nazi takeover of Austria. Based on original documents from the Austrian State Archives, the performance uses period music to create an atmosphere of brutality and humiliation. It has been presented in New York, Atlanta, Daytona Beach and Philadelphia. ?An Evening with Madame F? is a musical drama exploring the musical performance of an elderly concentration camp survivor at Auschwitz. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Stevens depicts the struggle of camp inmates, featuring actual music played and sung at Auschwitz. ?An Evening with Madame F? has been produced for television by PBS affiliate WCVE and broadcast on ?Voice of America.? It was created through a commission of the Jewish Federation of Richmond, Virginia.

A native of California, Stevens began her professional career as a concert pianist and recording artist, performing at national venues including Carnegie Recital Hall. She was the featured artist on several broadcasts of ?Performance Today on NPR? and has recorded for and published compositions in ?Perspectives of New Music.? A scholar of Robert Schumann, she also has an extensive knowledge of 20th century American music. Stevens is the recipient of grants from the International Theater Institute, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, among others.

As a performance artist, Stevens has been involved in performances of original works at the Baltimore Theater Project, the Sandglass Theater in Vermont and venues in Houston, New York, Boston, Des Moines, Omaha and Washington, D.C. She has held positions at Williams College, the University of Richmond and the College of William and Mary and has spoken at many universities and colleges. In the fall of 2004, The Baltimore Sun selected her play, ?The Poisoner on the Train? as one of the top 15 events of the year, and her one-person musical theater works have been called ?wonderful, both as art and in its pathos? by Nobel Laureate Ronald Hoffman.

Stevens received her B.A. summa cum laude from Vassar College, her M.A. in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her doctor of musical arts from Boston University.

The presentations are part of the Forkosh Family Lectureship in Judaic Studies at Carleton College. Established in 1983, the Forkosh Family Lectureship seeks to bring leading scholars of Jewish studies to the Carleton campus each year.

For more information and disability accommodations, please contact the Carleton religion department at (507) 646-4232.