Emerson is Celebrating 125 Years of Southwick Recitals on Friday
Kenneth Grout performs at a Southwick Recital in 2022. 
Suzie Sims Fletcher, MA ’94 performing at a Southwick Recital in 1998. 
Professor Emeritus Kenneth Crannell Sr ’57 performed at numerous Southwick Recitals. 
Former Communication Studies Professor Dorothy Prince ’70, MA ’79 performs at a Southwick Recital in 1977. 
Neil Davin ’72, MS ’79 performs at a Southwick Recital in 1991.
Photos from Emerson College Archives & Special Collections
Emerson’s Alumni Weekend will highlight a milestone worth celebrating: the 125th anniversary of the Southwick Recital, the College’s longest-running tradition.
While Emerson will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Southwick Recitals on September 26, it hasn’t been 125 consecutive years. The Recitals stopped after 2015, and then were reborn under the guidance of Communication Studies Senior Executive-in-Residence Kenneth Grout in 2020.
“I think the motivation truly was a recognition on the part of the institution and the Communication Studies Department, that there was this really, really wonderful opportunity and really wonderful product that was kind of sitting on the shelf,” said Grout.
Rekindling the Recitals in 2020 marked the beginning of a new era that, for the first time in their history, welcomed current students as performers.
This new era of the Southwick Recitals has heralded many changes to the program’s presentation and content while still honoring its fundamental focus on oral literary presentation. Along with adding undergrad performers and holding the recitals biannually, Grout has led a team that utilizes contemporary tools to provide more flexibility than historically traditional Southwick Recitals.
“I would say [modernizing the recital] entailed adding movement, interaction, technology, multimedia, and the idea of thinking beyond the rules,” Grout said, “So it was very different from: ‘one person, one platform, one Shakespeare play.’”
Shakespeare works were traditionally part of the recitals, which began in 1900 by Emerson Professor and later-President Henry Lawrence Southwick, a student of the College’s founder, Charles Wesley Emerson. Initially, the series included dramatic presentations of prose and poetry, as well as single-reads of various plays, with a strong focus on the works of the Bard. As the years went by, the Southwick grew to include works by an increasingly wider pool of authors and playwrights.
The modern Southwick Recitals have included a wide array of themes and presentations, all held together by the common thread of uplifting and celebrating literary oral tradition. Productions have been enhanced with the inclusion of a variety of different elements: puppets, written presentations, dance, live music, rap, short films, and more, said Grout.
Once Upon a Southwick, last fall’s theme, which centered on dramatic retellings of different cultures’ versions of the Little Red Riding Hood fable. Navigating Dementia was a theme for a 2021 Southwick Recital, which tackled the difficulties and complexities of dementia: beginning with a monologue created and performed by Grout entitled “Who Was She?” and including an open-panel discussion about the topic.
This Friday’s presentation, Southwick 125!…Legacy, will feature eight pieces by Emersonians drawing upon their own creations, or from works with meaningful connections to the College. As its name implies, this event will focus on the concept of legacy, and the many forms that this concept can adopt.
“We think about legacy as what you leave behind. My legacy is what I do and what’s left behind as a result of it. I’m thinking about legacy both from that perspective, but also from the perspective of when you encounter someone’s legacy, what do you do with it?” said Grout. “The legacy continues with you because of you, and then you leave it. So legacy, we think of it almost as a depot of someone’s life. And I’m viewing legacy as a link in the chain of human creation of which my life is a part.”
As part of the theme, the 125th celebration will feature Professor Emeritus John Anderson, himself an integral part of the Southwick Recital’s legacy, as well as alums Heidi Rose ’89 and Suzie Sims-Fletcher, MA ’94. Grout will himself perform during the recital.
Southwick 125!…Legacy begins at 8:00 pm on Friday, September 26, in the Semel Theater. Tickets are free, but registration is required by visiting the Emerson Theatres website, and tickets are limited, so register as soon as possible.
Before the event begins, the Southwick team, in collaboration with the Archives & Special Collections staff, will host a reception in the Semel Theater Lobby that includes a visual showcase of the Southwick Recital’s history through the years.
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