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Performer, scholar Claudia Stevens brings her one-woman show to St. Olaf

By Clare Kennedy '07
May 2, 2005

On May 4 St. Olaf College will host Claudia Stevens who performs part of her holocaust-related play, "An Evening with Madame F," at 10:10 a.m. in Boe Memorial Chapel. Stevens' adopts the persona of an elderly concentration camp musician who performed at Auschwitz.

Stevens, an established concert pianist, scholar and recording artist is also a nationally recognized performer and playwright, as well as a thinker and lecturer on ethics, the arts and public policy.

"An Evening with Madame F" is a musical drama created by Claudia Stevens for her own performance as pianist, singer, and actor. Stevens uses music actually played and sung by women inmates there, as well as first-hand accounts, to depict the struggle and moral dilemma of those who survived by prostituting their art. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she also meditates on the issue of treating the Holocaust as the subject for artistic expression.

Ellis Cose, contributing editor of Newsweek, calls hers "a body of works that is, in large measure, about memory, and the implications of remembering, and that derives its power, from the connection of her journey of self discovery to an infinitely larger quest."

At 2 p.m. in Buntrock Commons Viking Theater Stevens will discuss the play and the issues it raises.

One of the most honored Holocaust related performances, "An Evening with Madame F" has been presented in more than a dozen cities, including New York, Houston, Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Boston and Washington, DC, and at a number of universities including Cornell, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Brown, Michigan, Emory and at the LBJ Library of the University of Texas. Produced for television by the PBS affiliate WCVE, it also was broadcast over "Voice of America." Stevens was commissioned to create this work by the Richmond, Virginia Jewish Federation.

Stevens will be Artist-in-Residence in Judaic Studies and Theater at Carleton College, May 1-3. The St. Olaf event is sponsored by the Boldt Chair in the Humanities, the Lilly Grant Program on Lives of Worth and Service and the St. Olaf departments of history, music, philosophy, religion and theater.

Contact Carole Engblom at 507-646-3271 or leigh@stolaf.edu.