Consuelo Sherba, a teaching associate in music, has won a 2008 Rhode Island Pell Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts from Trinity Repertory Company, a Providence theater organization.
Sherba, a classical violinist who teaches private chamber music lessons at Brown, is founder and co-artistic director of Aurea, a performance group that fuses music and poetry.
According to Trinity's Web site, the Pell Award celebrates "excellence in the artist's chosen field, work that significantly advances the art form and contribution to the betterment of the community and the world at large through artistic presence and community service."
The Pell Award is granted in two categories: national and local. This year, the theater company gave the national award to itself. "As we approached our 45th anniversary, we started looking at just how far we have come from such humble beginnings in - literally - the Trinity Square church basement," Trinity's Artistic Director Curt Columbus said in a press release.
Previous national recipients have included Robert Redford, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison and Maurice Sendak.
This year, the other local winners were Rhode Island School of Design President Roger Mandle and stained-glass artist Peter Geisser.
Sherba said it is "a huge honor" to be added to the "very illustrious list" of Pell recipients. "I'm just overwhelmed," she added.
Much of Sherba's work with her ensemble has been geared towards teenagers. Sherba said Aurea has "found an enormous amount of success blending music and poetry" for young audiences at a time when public schools' art courses are being "decimated" by funding cuts.
At the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the troupe set Stephen MacDonald's play "Not About Heroes" to musical pieces by classical composers, including Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith, and performed it at Pawtucket's Charles H. Shea Senior High School. The play, which is set at a military psychiatric hospital during World War I, focuses on the friendship of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Though Sherba said some of the students were "reading on a fourth-grade level" and "had probably never heard of" the production's literature and music, she introduced the play and music to students through Shea's English department.
"I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't speak to them," Sherba said of the students, some of whom had family members in the war. "They were so thirsty for it."
The response was so positive that Aurea returned to Shea with a production of "War Music," based on a book of the same name that retold "The Iliad." The group's production had a score composed by Senior Lecturer in Music Paul Phillips, who is also the University's director of orchestras and chamber music. Aurea later performed the piece at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2006.
"Poetry operates on your soul kind of like music," she said.
Sherba said her work with students is consistent with her belief that performers "have a responsibility to inspire and connect with audiences" and that universities should "reach out to the community."
"We don't perform because it's an intellectual exercise. We perform because it's exciting," she said. "It elicits an emotional response."
Sherba also teaches at the Music School of the Rhode Island Philharmonic and has performed with a number of American orchestras. She will be honored May 30 at a gala at the Trinity Repertory Company along with the other two 2008 Pell recipients, Geisser and Mandle.
The Pell Award honors Claiborne Pell, a former Rhode Island U.S. Senator who sponsored legislation creating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also served a term on Trinity's board.
