Editors Note: To arrange interviews or photographs at Base Line Middle School, please contact Mary Jo Bode at (303) 442-3580. For other questions contact Mike Liquori at (303) 492-3117 in the CU-Boulder News Services Office.
Boulder middle school students this spring will study a Tony Award winning play about ethical, moral and personal dilemmas surrounding the creation of the first nuclear bomb as part of a partnership with the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for Humanities and the Arts.
The CHA Copenhagen Project is a cooperative effort with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Denver Center Theatre Company. The company's production of "Copenhagen" is scheduled to run March 12 to May 10, and students from Base Line Middle School will attend a special matinee show on April 17.
Winner of the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play, Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" depicts what might have happened during a mysterious 1941 meeting in occupied Denmark between Werner Heisenberg, head of Nazi Germany's nuclear research, and his half-Jewish mentor and old friend Niels Bohr. Historians have debated about what the two Nobel laureate physicists discussed in their awkward encounter at the height of the race to build the world's first nuclear bomb, but few facts are known.
As part of the Copenhagen Project, CU-Boulder doctoral candidates Heather Smith-Beasley, Matt Beasley and Nancy Brown are working together to design a 90-minute class on the ideas and subjects of the play, incorporating theater, history and science. The class will be presented to eighth graders at Base Line Middle School on April 8th before they see the play at the Denver Center.
Brown saw "Copenhagen" at an international Holocaust conference at Oxford University. "It is chilling and complex. Our goal is to assist students in working through these issues and prepare them for experiencing the play itself," she said. "It is our hope that our diverse backgrounds and perspectives will help them build their own bridges."
Brown's research emphasis is on the French Holocaust experience. She plans to teach at the university level and continue outreach activities for students in grades 6-12 on subjects related to the Holocaust.
Smith-Beasley is pursuing a doctorate in theater and is married to Matt Beasley, who is working on a doctorate in astrophysical and planetary science. Smith-Beasley would like to direct "Copenhagen" at some point in the future. "My take is that it was a thought-provoking look at the personal relationships and irrational elements that are hidden beneath rational scientific discovery," she said.
Base Line Middle School was chosen for the Copenhagen Project because it is Boulder's arts focus school. Teacher Jill Gartland, who created the arts focus program, will join fellow teachers Mary Jo Bode and Larry Runnels to implement the project at Base Line. Bode recently received an Impact on Learning Award from the Boulder Valley School Foundation.
"It's so exciting to think that we can show [the students] literature, and show the impact on history and science, and look at historical fiction and make that whole study real and exciting," Bode said, adding that the play is especially relevant to the current global political climate. "I certainly think it's an interesting dialogue on a period of history that seems to be revisiting us. It's intense."
Bode is looking forward to the students' study of "Copenhagen," a school visit by play director Anthony Powell on April 4, the trip to the Denver Center to see the performance April 17, and the CU-Boulder graduate students' presentations in April.Ìý
"We feel very privileged to have CU working with us," she said. "CU is very important to us - the way that they have reached out during this program, especially during a fiscally tight year, has been terrific."
The Copenhagen Project also includes two symposia - one at Denver's Seawell Ballroom on April 13 and a second at the Eaton Humanities Building on the CU-Boulder campus April 14 - featuring CU-Boulder scientists and historians and members of the Denver Center.
The United Government of Graduate Â鶹ÒùÔº is co-sponsoring a reception to follow the April 14 symposium on the Boulder campus. Graduate students will have the opportunity to attend the reading of scholarly papers about the play, and to interact with the academic community. "The Copenhagen project is a chance both to give something to the larger community through the middle school project and to enrich the campus community through the symposium," Smith-Beasley said.