Syracuse University Shared First-Year Experience 

The Shared First-Year Experience is built around a cultural event that serves as a unifying intellectual experience for all incoming students and invites engagement through the range of perspectives and approaches represented by the schools and colleges of SU. The 2009 Shared First-Year Experience centers on a performance by Shen Wei Dance Arts, one of the world’s most acclaimed dance companies, led by Shen Wei, whom The Washington Post has praised as “one of the great artists of our time.” Their work crosses boundaries not only of artistic expression and technology, but of cultures and currents of thought, resonating across the range of disciplines and the human experiences on which they focus. The New York Times has noted that their movements “combine Eastern and Western ideas, drawing from Chinese opera, martial arts, Abstract Expressionism and Western Modernism.” Such broad references provide scholars and students across the academic spectrum with extraordinary opportunities for intellectual engagement. SU is privileged that the Shared First-Year Experience performance was developed in part while the company was in residence at SU this past spring.

Each school and college at SU has been developing means by which they believe their students can engage most effectively with the performance. Not only will this provide students with ways of approaching the issues raised by Shen Wei that are relevant to their particular courses of study, but a multiplication of perspectives accessible through this website will allow exploration of the approaches of other disciplines.

In conjunction with this performance, monks from the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, New York will create a Tibetan mandala in the Eggers Commons, from September 22nd - 25th, between 9 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. daily. On the final day, September 25th at 3:00 p.m., the monks will destroy the mandala and process to Barry Park to immerse the sands used to create it in water. All are invited to join in this procession. Sponsored by the South Asia Center, Maxwell and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Video

Video