The Filipino-American acapella group “The Filharmonic” performed on Wednesday, May 4 at Whitman. The six-person group has a distinct self-described “90s vibe” and has performed alongside artists such as Linkin Park, The Black-Eyed Peas, and Pentatonix, as well as appearing on Universal’s hit movie “Pitch Perfect.” Last week, The Pioneer sat down with members Joe Caigoy and Jules Cruz to talk boybands, touring, and original music.

Megan Hearst: How did The Filharmonic start out?

Joe Caigoy: Well we actually formed for a competition on NBC called “The Sing-off.” It was just the three of us–Jules, Niko and I. We met in college, at Mt. San Antonio, we were all singing over there with Avi Kaplan, who’s in Pentatonix. So he kind of gave us the show and helped us form. Then we met VJ who sang at Long Beach, and Trace who’s from USC and Barry I knew from school so I kind of just called him up.

Hearst: What’s your favorite part about performing?

Caigoy: Probably my favorite part is the audiences. We’re on the road a lot and we’re just constantly driving, taking a bus or flying somewhere, so we’re really tired. But as soon as we get on stage and the audience is just screaming, it’s really energizing and it really reminds us just why we’re doing this because it’s just so much fun.

Hearst: You look like you’re all having fun up there. Has this been a bonding experience? In the past, you’ve talked about how you’re all Filipino and how that plays into your work.

Cruz: Yeah absolutely, I think that just being on tour you have to hang out no matter what and you’re forced to get to know each other pretty intimately, especially when you’re in a van for however long. You bring up the Filipino culture, and I think that’s a really good point because we’ll be in some shows in some really obscure places and the Filipino community will still be available,–they’ll come to our show. It’s really cool to see the Filipino community out in that area, and I’m really surprised to see them come out and support us.

Hearst: It’s really cool that you say that, particularly because you’re coming all the way out to Walla Walla. What are some of the most interesting places you’ve performed?

Cruz: Well we’ve performed at some places we’ve never heard of and a lot of the big cities, so we’ve been all kinds of places. We were in the Philippines last year, so that was a whole different experience. It’s been really interesting.

Hearst: In the past you’ve talked a lot about nineties music, particularly nineties boy bands. I was wondering how that plays in to your style?

Caigoy: So all of us grew up in the nineties, so we were influenced by those groups, those bands. I mean we grew up listening to NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Boyz II Men and so we do a lot of covers. Acapella in general [is] a lot of covers, so we take what’s top forty now and put that nineties R&B spin on it just because that’s what we’re familiar with–I mean, that’s what we listened to as kids. It’s great with acapella because you can take one thing and make it completely different just by changing up the rhythm section or the way we sing it.

Hearst: So what is that like? How do you adapt popular songs to an acapella format?

Cruz: Well, all of us arrange, and we pick a song that we think is really cool and we think might be big in the future, and we listen to it and listen to the instrumentation of it like, what is the bass guitar doing? What are the background vocals? We listen to the background and we put voices to those rhythms and those notes and then we put it all together.

Hearst: So you guys have gotten the opportunity to perform with some really awesome musicians and actors and comedians, who would be your dream person or group to perform with?

Cruz: Well it’s hard to say, I would really like to perform with NSYNC. They were one of my first concerts, my uncle was working for them at the time and they let me go on their tour bus and I got to meet them. Then years later I’m on stage singing them, it’s so cool.

Hearst: Expanding on this idea, what sort of hopes do you have for the future of the group?

Cruz: Well right now we’re on our “Get Up and Go” tour, like I said before we so mainly covers, but “Get Up and Go” is the title of our first original song. So we hope to just keep putting out original music and maybe get on the radio someday.

Hearst: I’ve noticed at Whitman and other schools that acapella is really popular, why do you think it’s such a popular art form among college students?

Caigoy: I kind of think for me it was an escape from studying. I went to a community college in California, but I transferred to Michigan state, and I was alone; I didn’t really know anybody out there. All I was doing was studying and homework and I was like, I need to go make friends, I need to do something and the acapella community was an escape. I love to sing and be with others who love to sing, so it was an escape. That’s what acapella was for me.

Hearst: So you perform for a lot of college students, and I know at our school we have three acapella groups who will be performing with you. What advice would you give to them?

Cruz: That’s awesome! We’re so excited, we love to meet other groups. That’s another really good part of going on tour, we get to sing with other acapella groups and hang out with them, so yeah, we’re really excited to meet them. It’s so strange, I was considering giving it up before the [Sing-Off], but then I’m so glad I came around. I feel if you’re really passionate about it you should just do it.

This interview was conducted over the phone and was edited for length and clarity.  

For almost two decades Foundry Vineyards has brought art and wine together. Foundry, who prides themselves as “a creative blending of fine wine and contemporary art,” has quickly become one of the best places to see art in Walla Walla–and it’s completely free.

Foundry Vineyards was founded in 1998 by Mark Anderson on three and a half acres of land just outside the city of Walla Walla. The business expanded, and in 2003, Foundry produced its first vintage with a label designed by world-renowned artist Jim Dine. In 2013, the Anderson family founded the Anderson Foundation for the Arts with a mission to bring art to Walla Walla. Many of the pieces seen on Whitman campus are due in part to their funding. The business is still run by the Anderson family. Patty and Mark Anderson’s two children, Jay and Lisa Anderson, now manage the art gallery.

Although Foundry Vineyards is foremost a wine business, art is the Anderson family’s first love. Mark Anderson was the founder of the legendary Walla Walla Foundry, a studio space located near the vineyards, where well-known artists such as Deborah Butterfield, Dale Chihuly and Kehinde Wiley have worked. “We have a really incredible arts scene in Walla Walla, and the Foundry is one of the preeminent workshops,” Anderson stated. All members of the Anderson family studied art in college, with Mark Anderson majoring in studio art at Whitman in 1978. Their deep abiding love of the subject shows through in their vineyard.

Photo by Natalie Mutter

The Foundry Vineyard is a prominent feature on 1111 Abadie Street, a modern marvel of glass and cement nestled between the industrial buildings at the edge of Walla Walla. The fenced outdoor space plays host to a large sculpture garden where events are held. The inside is even more striking, as high-arching ceiling highlights the art below. The current exhibition, “Exploring Fragility and Transience” displays pieces from ten Japanese “Mokuhanga” printers. “Mokuhanga” is an ancient form of Japanese printmaking using water-based dyes. The pieces have come from all over Japan and were brought over with the help of the new Walla Walla Mokuhanga Center.

Photo by Natalie Mutter

The gallery is an expression the Foundry’s mission. All the art shows are free and open to the public, and have shown a vast variety of art from all around the world. “The most amazing part of this job is bringing unique perspectives from all around the world to Walla Walla,” Anderson said.

This task is not always easy. “It can be difficult arranging pieces, particularly from distant places like Japan or China, the Ai Wei Wei exhibit must’ve taken one or two hundred emails, but you know, it was worth it,” Anderson said. Ai Wei Wei’s “Refraction,” the fruit of these labors, was installed outside Whitman’s studio art building last summer.

The Foundry has big dreams which span beyond the borders of Walla Walla. “We have a private collection of art, and one day, in the future, we’d love to display it some sort of public spaces, like community centers of other colleges, we really just want it to be seen,” Anderson said. Decades and generations on, the original mission of Foundry Vineyards lives on.

The Reid Coffeehouse was abuzz with activity on the evening of Jan. 30 as students awaited the arrival of Texas poet and educator Ebony Stewart as well as resident Whitman slam poets, Almighty Ink.  While people milled about their usual business upstairs, downstairs a large collective of Whitties gathered, some in chairs, some on tables and yet others leaning over the railings of the stairway, all of them hoping to hear some inspiring and thought-provoking pieces.

Slam poetry nights have become highly anticipated events at Whitman. Prior events have brought lauded poets Andrea Gibson and Sister Outsider. Part traditional poetry reading and part performance art piece, slam poetry draws a large number of students from a wide variety of disciplines. These performances are highly energized and thereby dependent on a lot of audience participation, with snaps, claps and hoots of approval punctuate particularly powerful lines.

Six Whitman poets served as the openers for Stewart, each presenting carefully honed and often deeply personal pieces before their peers. Fed by the support of the audience, these student poets plumbed the depths of their own experience and brought it up on stage.

“We were excited to perform and top open for Ebony,” said senior Linnaea Weld, president of Almighty Ink. “We put together a lineup we already had.” The team is also preparing to attend the Colleges Unions Poetry Slam Invitational competition in Austin, Texas this April. The opening provided opportunity to practice and hone pieces that many members will perform at the national slam event.

Though the pieces explored a wide variety of topics including romance, violence and personal loss, they were all linked together by the passion each writer possessed and the forcefulness with which they delivered their words. These poems served to set the stage for Stewart’s performance.

Photo by Mika Nobles

Like the students who came on stage before her, Stewart spoke passionately about a wide variety of issues. Most of her poems rotated around her experience as a woman of color. In her very first poem of the night she introduced herself as “Ebony Stewart AKA Gully Princess AKA I eat your cupcake” and went on to elaborate the reasons why she became a poetess including the traumas of her puberty and the trials she saw her mother go through. Her most raucous performance of the night was of her piece “Original Eve,” a stunning retelling of the Adam and Eve fable, interwoven with the plight of modern women which received enthusiastic snaps all around. Whether Stewart was probing topics as benign as pick-up lines or as existential as fear itself, she always related it back to her own life experience, giving her poems a deeply personal tone.

Though Stewart now makes her living as a traveling artist, her background in education still serves as the catalyst for her work. She started her set by passing around a bucket along with small strips of paper and encouraged the audience to write down their questions on poetry, sex, relationships and art, promising to answer this one as best she could.

Photo by Mika Nobles

After passing the bucket around, she jumped into one of her most poignant poems of the night wherein she spoke of a former student questioning his own sexuality, which led her to question homophobia as a whole. Stewart’s role as an educator defined the whole night, as she stopped intermittently to give the audience lessons on topics like romance, respect and self-care, all with her own signature mix of humor and earnest concern.

There’s a reason slam poetry is becoming increasingly popular among college students, it’s a forum which allows the poet to express their most intimate concerns in creative fashion.  Through slam poetry, Whitman students shared in seven poets’ anger, laughter and heartbreak, all of them united by the power of poetry.

Alex Dimitrov reading at the Visiting Writers Series event at the end of September. Photo by Ione Fullerton.

When Katrina Roberts arrived at Whitman College 15 years ago, there was no such thing as the Visiting Writers Reading Series. Writers arrived on campus often inconsistently, without a cohesive narrative. Now a decade and a half later the VWRS is a well established program introducing students and non-students alike to the shared experience of reading.

Roberts is the Mina Schwabacher Professor of English and Creative Writing and a highly regarded author in her own right. She has published multiple collections of poetry and has a forthcoming anthology of anecdotes, experiences and insights derived from conversations with the Whitman visiting writers, entitled “Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art and Craft of the Writing Life,” due out Oct. 11.

The VWRS has drawn authors from great variety of genres and backgrounds. Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz, Nick Flynn and Kim Barnes are just a few of the authors who have graced the stage in the past. Roberts reveals that, “It seemed to me crucial, when I arrived at Whitman over a decade and a half ago, to establish a consistent Visiting Writers Reading Series dedicated to bringing active writers in all genres–and emerging, as well as extremely established–to campus for readings and discussions.” Considering the lineup VWRS has this year, Roberts seems to be fulfilling her goal.

The program for the 2015-16 brings authors Alex Dimitrov, Alison Bechdel, Benjamin Percy, Rick Barot, Elena Passarello and Diane Cook to campus. Dimitrov, the founder of queer poetry salon Wilde Boys, and author of poetry collections “American Boys” and “Begging for It” kicked off this year’s esteemed and diverse gathering of writers on Sept. 27.

The next visiting writers event will bring cartoonist and 2014 Macarthur Genius Award recipient Alison Bechdel to campus on Oct. 23. The event is a collaboration between VWRS and the Sheehan Gallery “Seeing Stories” Exhibition, as Bechdel is best known for  both her autobiographical graphic novels “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?”, and her long running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Others may know her as the creator of the “Bechdel Test,” a widely used method of examining gender representation in the media.

Like most, this VWRS event will span many different disciplines. “This sort of collaborative work is so valuable,” says Roberts, “and I’m grateful to the Sheehan Gallery this year, for asking the VWRS to be part of the Alison Bechdel event; there’s so much wonderful discipline-rich work happening in the literary and visual arts these days–graphic and visual texts across genre.” The Bechdel reading event, as well as all the events in the series, will be free and open to the public.

The VWRS, despite being under the umbrella of the English department, often embraces many different majors and disciplines. The Bechdel reading is a direct collaboration with the Art Department, but other events connect in subtle, varied ways.

Roberts remarks that “I try to bring writers whose work is relevant and challenging in a cross-disciplinary way, as well–a notion central to the liberal arts; we’ve had writers come whose work, though sometimes highly literary, appeals to those interested in environmental issues, in politics, in science, in history, in art, in gender issues, etcetera.” The idea that all students can benefit from literature is integral to the program.

Since this program was designed to bring authors who would benefit both the academic and social environment on campus, Roberts’ job is often highly collaborative. Visiting writers’ pieces are found in the syllabi of English classes as well as other disciplines. “Interactions with visiting writers deepen the experience of exploring published works in classes,” Roberts said.

The link between this program and the rest of academia remains quite deep, and provides a unique learning experience for those listening. “When the texts come alive off the page, as voiced by the writers themselves, they expand for those of us in the audience,” Roberts said.

The Instant Play Festival arrived this year in a whirlwind of activity, creativity and collaboration. For two days, over the 26 and 27 of September, theater goers were entertained by 14 funny, strange and often poignant plays Whitman students produced.

The premise of the Instant Play Festival is simple: Each night, seven writers were given 12 hours each to create a ten minute play. In the following 12 hours, the plays are cast, blocked and memorized by a group of volunteer actors, directors and tech workers. It’s in the execution that production gets complicated.

IPF has its roots in the 14/48 festival held in Seattle, which describes itself as the “world’s quickest theatre festival,” but Whitman adds a collegiate twist to the traditional 14 plays in 48 hours model. For eight years, Whitman College has offered an opportunity for 14 student writers to spend three weeks studying under professional playwrights (this year brought the likes of Sharon Bridgeforth, Basil Kreimendahl and Scot Augustson to campus) to prepare for the 48-hour push. It’s this combination of education and experimentation which makes the Instant Play Festival unique.

Finally, after all the preparation the time for performance arrives. Eager volunteers swarm in at 9:30 in the morning, and from there a flurry of activity begins. Actors get into character, directors orient themselves with the script and all across campus dozens of people go on the hunt for elusive costumes and props.

“It’s just amazing how so many different people from all different backgrounds are drawn together for two days of artistic collaboration and experimentation,” said stage manager, junior Alexandra Lewis.

If you’ve ever seen an art piece at Whitman and wondered how it ever got assembled, chances are Lynn Woolson is behind it. Woolson is the force behind a lot of a lot of what keeps the art department running as the Safety and Technical Assistant, and after four years of hard work, Woolson is progressing on to new stage of her career.
Woolson came upon her job through a series of happy accidents. She first came to Walla Walla via Portland due to her husband’s job and found a new opportunity here. “I moved and felt like this would be a nice way to get involved with the community,” said Woolson. The position was originally supposed to last four to six months, but soon became permanent, and Woolson settled in as a part of the Whitman community.
Despite serving as a member of the art department, Woolson’s previous career was in the criminal justice system. “My work was not even that often with students, my background is with convicts, so this is a little brighter,” stated Woolson.
This transition was easy for Woolson who has been an artist throughout her career. “I am not related to art, but I’ve had art in my background, welding and woodworking have always been there”, says Woolson. Welding and sculpting have always been her primary format. Her job as Safety and Technical Assistant is in many ways a combination of her artistic and interpersonal skills.

Photo by Keifer Nace.

Woolson’s job covers a lot of the tasks which keeps the art department afloat. She helps assemble and move the pieces, instruct the students, assemble the materials, hire the models, and, in the midst of all this, keep everyone safe.

The sheer amount of errands to run makes the day interesting. “I do a lot, it’s very fun, no day is the same,” said Woolson. The variety in her tasks makes for some interesting situations, including the time she and several art department assistants had to figure out how to get a “house” the size of a truck out of the building. Her role in the art department is “mostly about getting people to do the things we want to do and get accomplished.”
The skills Woolson learned in the criminal justice system have ultimately served her well as an advocate and assistant for students. “What I have found is that the students are really busy, they have a lot on their plate, so I can be a sounding board, I can be assistance, I can alleviate their stress,” said Woolson.

This dedication has paid off as she seen the pieces of the students she has aided, primarily in her favorite formats, welding and sculpting. But regardless of the art form, Woolson always tries her best to form both a physical and a personal support system for the students and their art. “My role is often times just a sounding board to their process, since I’m not grading them and I’m not encouraging them to go in any direction, it’s easy for me to say ‘what about this,’” she said.
In August, Woolson will be stepping down from her position at Whitman. She is returning to her roots and working on her art from her home studio. Woolson works in welding, sculpting, and clay, creating many indoor and outdoor pieces displayed among galleries in Walla Walla. Though she will be leaving her position at the end of this year, the contributions she’s made can be seen in the pieces of all the students she has helped.