A German Jewish heroine of the French resistance to the Nazis will be honored with a cabaret-style performance at Vanderbilt University on March 19. The presentation, The Red Scarf and the Black Briefcase, is based on a poem by Vanderbilt poet Rick Hilles.
The Red Scarf and the Black Briefcase combines Hilles’ poetry with music by Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil and Henry Purcell. Performances will be at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. in the rotunda of the Faye and Joe Wyatt Center for Education on the southeast portion of the Vanderbilt campus, and are free and open to members of the public who register in advance. The 5 p.m. performance is nearly full. Tickets remain for the 8 p.m. show.
To register, contact Janis May at janis.l.may@vanderbilt.edu.
The Red Scarf and the Black Briefcase is a tribute to Lisa Fittko, a Hungarian Jew who led many intellectuals and members of the anti-Hitler resistance from Nazi-occupied France into Spain. She wrote two memoirs about her wartime experiences.
Actress Kimberly Jannarone, associate professor of theater at UC Santa Cruz, will portray Fittko, and Kate Soper, doctoral candidate in composition at Columbia University, will be chanteuse and pianist.
The Red Scarf and the Black Briefcase, conceived and written in the Fall of 2009 while Hilles, Soper, and Jannarone were fellows of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, debuted last December at Camargo’s La Batterie.
Hilles, assistant professor of English, is the author of Brother Salvage, the winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and named 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine, for which Hilles also received a 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award given for “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.”
One of the performances will be taped for a video podcast and posted on VUCast, the website of Vanderbilt News Service, at www.vanderbilt.edu/news/.
Media Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu