Scenes of student ingenuity at Harvard Arts Festival

Skyy Brooks ’26 sang a jazzy melody while guitarist Matthew Ryu strummed along. Brooks, seated between glass display cases in the Science Center’s Putnam Gallery, clapped to the piece’s rhythm. The hands of the astronomical regulators arranged behind her ticked along too — at a steady 60 beats per minute. 

Brooks and three other student composers performed original works inspired by artifacts in Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Their concert was one of dozens of offerings last weekend during Harvard Arts Festival, the annual celebration of creativity organized by the Office for the Arts at Harvard. The four-day festival featured music, dance, theater performances, visual art exhibits, and hands-on artmaking in venues across campus. 

“It’s wonderful to see so many of our students excelling, not only academically, but in all kinds of pursuits and arts is no exception,” said David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College. “Everything you see this weekend is a result of student talent, work, and dedication, and I am so happy for all of them who have pulled it all off.  

“I’m also so proud of the staff and faculty who have supported this work,” Deming added. “It's a pleasure and a joy to be a part of it.” 

In a post-performance talkback, Brooks, an African & African American Studies concentrator who is enrolled in the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program, spoke about her creative process.   

"I listened to what sounds the clocks were making. One is about an E (note), one of these here is a C. The air conditioning was humming at a D flat and a G, so I used that to weave in some musical information," she said. “I did some lyric workshopping on my own about my time here at Harvard and living in that legacy of the people who have set me on a path to be here, and to graduate.” 

On the Sever Quad stage, Dexter Suhn ’27 sang original R&B music over a backing track. In Adolphus Busch Hall, Audrey Sun ’28 and John Kim ’28 performed Prokofiev’s “Sonata for Two Violins.” 

In the atrium of Memorial Hall, New England artist Kat Owens was instructing festival attendees in sewing large sheets of donated plastic as part of a collaborative artmaking event. The result was a life-size portrait of an 80-foot fin whale, a visual representation of sea animals harmed by plastic. 

In the Science Center Plaza Tent, nine members of Mariachi Véritas performed high-energy songs in a mix of traditional Mexican styles. After the performance, violinist Guadalupe Vazquez ’27 told emcee Gabriel Brock ’26 that the ensemble is a musical outlet for its undergraduate members, most of whom study STEM and humanities. 

“A lot of us actually picked up the practice through other members,” said Vazquez, an environmental science and engineering concentrator. “A lot of members you saw onstage haven’t actually played mariachi for most of their life. But it’s nice to be able to share that culture with others through our music.”  

After Mariachi Véritas, Helen He ’26 twirled gracefully onstage, one hand lifting a handscroll painting. Alongside was Ziyu Qiu, a student in the Regional Studies East Asia program at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who sang in the style of traditional Chinese opera. Their performance told the story of a woman who, after visiting a spring garden and dreaming of a lover, paints a self-portrait — a narrative adapted from the 16^th-century play “Peony Pavilion.”   

The performance was part of “Portrait,” a Chinese dance opera adapted by He, a double concentrator in East Asian Studies and computer science with a secondary in The Classics. He took scenes from four famous pre-modern Chinese plays featuring female protagonists expressing their identity via different objects: a letter, a painting, a fan, a dance. 

“What I really love about Arts Fest is this celebratory environment for the arts,” said He, who also performed Friday with the Asian American Dance Troupe. “Anybody can show any piece on the stage, and it's clearly something that so many people put a lot of effort into. I really love this middle space where we could put something together that is high quality, but also not in such an intense way. It just removes a lot of the barriers, and is very welcoming and inviting.”