By Susan Seligson (BU Today)
The BMC Cancer Care Center’s chemotherapy unit is a busy place. Adult patients of all ages and prognoses settle into curtained-off sections called “boxes” and endure up to five hours at a time being hooked to IVs. Some watch TV and some doze, but on a recent spring day, Lucia (not her real name), a patient in her early 50s, gratefully accepted Amanda Britton’s offer to sit beside her and recite poetry. As a downpour streaked the hospital windows, Britton (CFA’13) read Lucia the sunny quatrains of William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” along with Elizabeth’s Bishop’s “I Am in Need of Music” and selections from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. When it was over, Lucia gave the theater arts major a hug, and before moving on to another patient, Britton declared the experience “awesome.”
The intimacy of reading poetry one-on-one “allows me to make a new friend,” she says. “And I’ve learned that any one of us can be hooked up to that IV.”
This poetic interlude was one of many recent efforts of the fledgling Arts Outreach Initiative of the College of Fine Arts, which enlists students like Britton to nurture a partnership with the Medical Campus through its diversity and multicultural affairs office. Since the program was launched in October, students have shared their talents in a range of nontraditional venues, from monthly concerts in the lobby of BMC’s Menino Building (a string quintet) to the hospital’s surgical unit (soloists on cello and viola) to the pediatric outpatient clinic (various soloists).
“It’s like you light a direction for the patients to exit from their reality,”
says Moisès Fernández Via, curator and researcher of the program, which has trained about 65 undergraduate and graduate students from the Schools of Music, Visual Arts, and Theatre. The CFA musicians also provide occasional stress relief for BU medical students, who can take late afternoon study breaks and hear 20-minute concerts in the lobby of the School of Medicine Student Residence.
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