Eliot Circular

Performers Win Kahan Fellowship

Dance/music major Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies ’16 (center) won the Jim Kahan Performing Arts Fellowship.
Photo by Alex Kracik

By Lauren Cooper ’16

Dance/music major Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies ’16 and art/dance major Grace Poetzinger ’16 are first-ever winners of Reed’s new Jim Kahan Performing Arts Fellowship.

The purpose of the fellowship is to provide students with the means to be able to spend their summer working on a music, dance, or theater project, which is performed at Reed during the following year.

Both students took creative risks with their projects. Grace travelled to Vienna to study an obscure but influential modern dance movement. Hannah, a talented dancer, spent the summer learning the clarinet. They performed a joint concert (or was it a Kahan-cert?) of music and dance in October.

The fellowship is supported by the Kahan Performing Arts Fund, started by Jim Kahan ’64 out of a desire to give back to the college and to help students pursue their passions in the performing arts.

Jim and Prof. Virginia Hancock ’62 [music], who leads the selection committee, stress both the performance and thinking aspects of the fellowship. “One of the things that struck me about Reed is that the students aren’t just performing, they’re really thinking about what they’re doing,” Jim says. “That’s what this place is about.” In addition to the performance, recipients must host an informal ’talkback’ discussion with the audience about what they just did immediately afterwards.