The Ground We Stand On

​Reflections on tectonic plates and Columbia politics from Death Valley.

By Natalie Buttner

Illustration by Iris Pope

The architecture in the desert is loyal to the landscape. Towns and cities stick stubbornly to the bottoms of valleys—low, tan, and aggressively unwalkable. Real estate signs dot the sides of the highway. We stop to get gas in a small town and I pick up a copy of the local newspaper. The town sheriff’s successful node removal surgery made front page news. The opinions section reveals that we are deep in Trump country. 

Myself and 19 other underclassmen crossed the country to be in the California desert for spring break because this is where the action is, tectonically. The Department of Earth and Environmental Science has offered this undergraduate trip to Death Valley almost annually since 2002. Death Valley is an exceptional outdoor classroom because it is impacted by both the strike-slip faulting that dominates the West Coast (culminating in the infamous San-Andreas Fault), as well as the extensional faulting common to the east (visible in the Basin and Range Province stretching from Oregon into Northern Mexico). We see two other college geology trips while we are there and stay at a hostel that caters specifically to visiting scientists and their students. 

The beauty and strangeness of the landscape makes Death Valley a destination for tourists, but a copy of a satirical advertisement in the Death Valley Visitor’s Center from 1907 scoffs at the idea: “It has all the advantages of hell without the inconveniences.” My classmates and I have been worn by the climate, visibly dehydrated and all wearing unflattering hats. Each time I apply sunscreen, I can feel the thin layer of grit accumulating on my skin. Us city-slicker college students talk about how long we could live in this part of the country, as if it were a pot of boiling water. 

“What if all your expenses were paid for? Or you had your dream job?”

“Could I leave?”

“You couldn’t leave, but anyone could come visit you.” 

“Maybe two years?” 

“Two years?! That’s a long time.” 

Of course, austerity is what brings us there. You don’t have to venture so far from bustling, politically liberal Columbia University to do basic field geology. The difference in erodibility between the Manhattan Schist and Inwood Marble is the reason why Columbia is on a hill, Harlem is below one, and the paths through Morningside Park are dominated by stairs. The rare outcrops in Manhattan are marked with the footsteps of the glaciers which created Long Island and the Hudson River Basin. UN2200 The Solid Earth, required for most Earth science adjacent majors and recommended for anyone who seeks to ground themselves, visits and discusses these sites. However, much of New York City’s geology is obscured by the city itself. In the desert, every clue the Earth gives us as to her origin is laid bare. On the drive to the valley, I look out of my van window to see the bedding planes of millions of years of sedimentation, revealed by continuous colorful stripes across the sides of enormous mountains. All of us are overjoyed to be there, thrilled by the landscape and the steep learning curve. 

Our tightly wound schedule and personal needs clash with the majesty of the landscape. It doesn’t matter how early we get up, we are always running late. Forced proximity conjures up high school dynamics. We play a lot of question games and argue about who is going to sit where in the van. Maybe because none of us are that far out of high school, we can revert back easily to being shuttled, monitored, cared for. Or, as the ads for all-inclusives scattered along the highway seem to suggest, everyone craves this return to a lifestyle without decisions. 

…

One cold evening, I trek a little ways into the desert by myself to look at the stars and am astonished by the silence. I quickly grow to love the desert. The dry ground forms strange patterns in its dehydration, and now empty riverbeds braid across the alluvial fans shooting out from the base of each mountain. Cross bedding created by ancient sand dunes provides a record of wind direction across an unknown timescale. We see their modern day analog migrating slowly across the bottom of the valley, accompanied by enormous clouds of dust. The wind picks up across a system of craters, the walls of which reveal the paths of magma as the lithosphere spreads and thins as a result of extensional tectonics. Enormous fields of salt remind me of snow and blank canvases, stretching across the bottom of a dry lake. The landscape is foreign and distancing, more likely to be seen in a sci-fi movie than a Western. 

The landscape places me so far away from what is familiar that in the beginning I expected any mention of gates, midterms, executive orders, to fall out of our mouths and roll to the bottom of the valley like other heavy things. But it is impossible to escape politics when the environmental sciences have become increasingly politicized. The Environmental Protection agency is rapidly buckling: As of March, over a billion dollars in environmental justice grants have been cut. The Columbia Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory ripples with anxious conversation of funding cuts, both from Columbia University and the National Science Foundation. In my environmental science classes, our passion for understanding the Earth’s systems is dulled by a sense of future financial doom. 

It can’t be avoided. Our conversations continuously fold back to the strain of choices, personal and political. The dry, emptiness of the desert makes the question of how to act in a time of transition seem like it could be answered. With an understanding of basic physics we could identify in the desert cross sections which blocks were ascending or descending. Maybe the same simple logic would allow us to understand what around us was permanent, and what would be sucked into the earth forever. 

I find the small, grey haired woman who owns the hostel to be incredibly wise. Sitting around the kitchen table while a few of us take turns washing the dishes, she tells us that any shame, guilt, or fear that we are holding onto will not serve us. She asks us what we played as children and what we might do as careers and tries to square the difference. She tells me how happy she is with the life she has created in the California Desert. “I live in a fake world that I created. No one comes here I don’t want to come here.” 

…

During a morning lecture, a road runner paces slowly across the road in front of us. We are reminded that we are not here for the roadrunner, we are here for the rocks. Studying geology, at least in its initial stages, forces you to disconnect from a world with executive orders, cancer-free sheriffs, college, shame, guilt, and fear. We look out at enormous slabs of rock and condense time, imagining them sinking into the earth. We move together underground and watch processes that will only ever be seen in our minds, slower than lifetimes, deeper than witnesses. 

It is the day that then president Katrina Armstrong capitulated to the federal government's terms. We have just pulled off along the side of a winding desert highway, staring at a cross section of rock. No one has checked their phone yet, or if they have, they stay quiet. We begin by making sketches of what we see. I sit down in the sharp rocks and dust and configure my knees into a desk. My drawings are cute, I want them to look stylish in my geology notes, but I often miss key details, like the evidence of faultline, or a crucial color change in the sediment. The drawings are visualizations of the distance between reality and our understanding, even in a field that markets itself as objective, in a desert that appears sterile. The professor and TAs make laps, using our drawings to notice where our filters are untuned. The desert is silent once again. I find comfort in honing this skill, meditating on my own perception. 

The drawings are also a way to help us observe first, and then draw conclusions. The layers bend around the stone. Then, the stone must have fallen into the layers. This is a surprisingly difficult lesson to apply to each rock, and even more difficult to apply to our lives at large. 

On a drive back to the hostel, an argument breaks out in the back seats of the van over the value of idealism in modern America. I am sitting up front, too tired to join in, looking out the window and trying to read the flat. Fire and Rain by James Taylor is playing on the speakers. Death Valley is tearing itself open beneath us. 

…

The last few days of the trip we hunt for fossils and discuss larger theories of the land. Across one mountain, we see a bright orange stripe of raised rock, representative of mats of early organisms. The professor explains their role in the formation of the world and of life. Already, everyone is bemoaning the return to New York City. 

Being exposed to such a massive scale of existence has the potential to belittle all our dilemmas. However, spending time in the field, close to the landscape, also has the opposite effect. This knowledge and these skills have incredible value. I fall back into time to try to imagine the water getting deeper, the sunlight fading, and the organisms migrating, or dying. Then they are compressed with enough force to transform them into a negligible line in a sedimentary stone. Uplift brings them back to the surface. Wind and rain reveal them to us now. We climb over the ridge of orange rock.

The Show Must Go On

The overwhelming desire for a musical theater program at Columbia.

By Lily Ouellet

Illustration by Etta Lund

A director sprawls across the floor of the Glicker-Milstein Theatre, clutching a crumpled callback list and staring at the ceiling, hoping answers might be hidden in the catwalk. A choreographer eats a dry Liz’s muffin in desperation. A producer clicks furiously through a shared spreadsheet, while a caller sits slumped in the audience, phone askew, waiting on an actor who’s been deliberating for 15 minutes. Someone—probably a stage manager—is keeping everyone together by sheer force of will, because it’s 1 a.m., all the writers are arguing, and no one is going home soon. This ritual begins each semester of Columbia student-theatre: a single delirious night known as Actor Share.

Actor Share is the existing system by which the directors and creative teams of all upcoming student-theatre productions simultaneously assemble their casts from the available talent pool. One production securing a lead for their show means that another must relinquish that actor, unless they agree to share. Actors anxiously wait at home for a call offering them a role. It is both exciting and terribly agonizing. 

This process exists because there are simply too many productions for any to host its own auditions without creating a myriad of problems for the others (The Varsity Show is an exception, as it is to many of the rules). This semester alone, four major musicals are taking the stage: The 131st Annual Varsity Show, Alive: The Mary Shelley Musical, Ride the Cyclone, and One-Armed Bandit. All of these are student directed and produced; three of the four are student written. 

This is an impressive feat, considering that Columbia does not offer a dedicated musical theater program. At best, students can major in theater, with concentrations available in directing, playwriting, and dramaturgy. But there is no equivalent to the conservatory-style, musical theater–specific training and pre-professional resources of other nearby institutions such as The New School and NYU. 

Columbia’s musical theater practitioners must navigate a growing patchwork of clubs and organizations to develop their craft. There is no singular space in which budding performers can train—instead, they assemble their own curricula by participating in multiple extracurriculars that each focus on an aspect of musical theater practice. “Theater as a concept is incredibly diverse and holistic,” says Eshan Kabir, CC ’27. “It requires so many different disciplines to come together into a well-functioning work—and all of those disciplines have to give everything that they have.” Kabir himself exemplifies this philosophy: he is on the board of both the Columbia University Performing Arts League, an umbrella organization of performance clubs on campus, and First Stages, a club dedicated to nurturing original musical theater composition. He is also a Varsity Show alumnus, an orchestrator for Alive, and the co-composer and lyricist of XMAS19!, the 19th rendition of an annual holiday-themed musical comedy.  

At the same time, the absence of a musical theater program has not only shaped pressures within the student-theater landscape, but it has also fundamentally disrupted its equilibrium. A structured pathway would regulate the number of students interested in musical theatre, optimally aligning interest with opportunity. Instead, student theater has become oversaturated, pulling in a flood of all the aspiring theater practitioners vying for the same limited opportunities. Kabir describes this as a logistical nightmare: “There are too many people in these student groups doing musical theater. There are a lot of people interested in doing art, and if people are competing for that space, it makes it much more difficult, especially for resources.” 

The result is an ecosystem in which creativity outpaces infrastructure. As a composer, Kabir points out that while the number of aspiring composers grows every year, without musical theater composition classes, there are only three or four opportunities to compose in any given semester. Notably, those vying for one of these slots can include music majors composing their senior thesis, a de facto requirement for any composer intent on entering the musical theater industry after graduation. “Someone who’s writing a thesis shouldn’t have to compete for that slot with me to do something professional,” Kabir explains. This bottleneck produces similar problems for aspiring musical theatre directors, playwrights, and producers. 

Daniella Sapone, BC ’25, founded the club First Stages with the goal of “filling this gap in the theatre community” by “creating infrastructure and support to develop original musicals.” As a seasoned composer of both The Varsity Show and XMAS!, Sapone was frustrated by the fact that these clubs were the only two existing avenues for musical theater composers. Unlike these clubs, however, First Stages offers masterclasses where student lyrics, composers, and playwrights can receive immediate feedback from industry professionals. Despite initial funding challenges from the administration, the group flourishes, with over 75 active members across the University. In just three semesters, it has staged two full productions, with a third—composed by Sapone herself—in the works. 

First Stages masterclasses are led by alumni volunteers eager to support student musical theater in lieu of a departmental program. Through a serendipitous encounter after a panel and their shared connection as Varsity Show alumnae, Sapone won the support of two-time Tony Award winner Jeanine Tesori, BC ’83 for the First Stages cause. Other alumni who have generously supported First Stages include playwright Kait Kerrigan, BC ’03, producer Rita Pietropinto-Kitt, CC ’93, and Pulitzer Prize and two-time Tony Award winner Tom Kitt, CC ’96.

Despite the general lack of institutional support for musical theater, there is one official opportunity for musical theater on campus. It’s an elusive class—one of the five semesterly Acting II sections. It’s taught by professor Mana Allen, a musical theatre veteran whose 15 original Broadway credits make her class one of the most sought after in the department.

Getting into Allen’s class takes years of effort, according to Wren Pfetcher, BC ’27. A current cast member of The 131st Annual Varsity Show, Pfetcher has performed in departmental productions, serves on the board of the King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe, and sings as a Tenor 1 in the campus a capella group SHARP. Entry is so competitive that Allen maintains a “priority list,” effectively barring students who don’t meet its criteria from even submitting materials, although the class advertises that the process is available to all undergraduates. As a result, the only avenue for formal musical theater instruction is, in practice, offered solely to senior actors. 

With the only musical theater class perpetually overfilled and its waitlist spilling over into student productions and clubs, it’s evident that the absence of musical theater support doesn’t stem from lack of demand. The theater department tantalizingly teases musical theater opportunities but fails to allow most to come to fruition. 

When I ask Sapone what departmental support for musical theater could look like, her eyes flick momentarily to her bag. Within moments, she’s scrolling through a meticulously organized 13-page document, complete with a table of contents. “Solutions need to be large-scale, cohesive efforts to provide the support that students are looking for,” Sapone says. In particular, this includes the need for more long-term musical theater faculty to develop courses in performance, writing, directing, and producing. Beyond curricular changes, Sapone advocates for more practical resources like arts-specific professionals at Beyond Barnard, Barnard’s career office, to support students looking to pursue careers in the arts, which follow entirely different trajectories than those in fields like law, STEM, or finance. Kabir echos Sapone’s sentiments, envisioning that an institutional focus would bring “funding, professional mentorship, and network connections which “students are trying to make up for on their own.” 

But above all, Sapone stresses the need for faculty investment. Without departmental backing, she wishes faculty would become more engaged in student-led productions: “It often feels like we put so much of ourselves into these works, and the college doesn’t even know they’re happening.” 

This ignorance places barriers within multiple bubbles of student theater. Kaiden Currie, CC ’27, tells me—half laughing, half exasperated—that this is the first year that UnTapped, the only tap dancing club on campus, has received any performance funding. By not holding formal auditions or charging for performances, UnTapped distinguishes itself from other performance groups by prioritizing accessibility—but Columbia’s infrastructure is not designed to accommodate free student-led art. As Currie explains, most theatres are extremely difficult to secure, and for clubs without funding, many are functionally unusable.

Miller Theatre, although owned by Columbia, is famously inaccessible to student groups. Even Columbia’s own arts departments must pay for its use, with costs for each production ranging upwards of $10,000. Columbia’s other theater, the Lerner Black Box, could be a perfect solution, but it operates as a union space: Anyone working in the theater other than student performers must hold an Equity card, signifying membership in the Actors’ Equity Association. As a result, each time a student group wants to stage a production in the Black Box, it must personally hire a union worker and pay their wages directly from its club budget. Rather than Columbia maintaining any technical staff, performance groups repeatedly outsource the same essential roles—lighting designers, tech coordinators—meaning Columbia effectively shifts the logistical and financial burden of musical administration onto students rather than directly investing in their artistic work. A perfect bureaucratic loop. 

One of the only “free” theaters is Barnard’s Glicker-Milstein Theatre, alongside newly advertised spaces like Lefrak Theatre and the Wang Pavillion. However, with dozens of groups competing for the same handful of weeks and hours in a semester, securing rehearsal hours—let alone the setup and run time needed for a meaningful performance—is a challenge in the absence of a program to coordinate access. 

Even as UnTapped battles for scraps of rehearsal time in the Glicker-Milstein, the University does show its support when it’s convenient for them: Currie has recently been interviewed by the Columbia Arts Initiative about his dance achievements and involvement in UnTapped, and videos of him tapping have been posted on the Columbia College Instagram page. To Currie, this supportive energy feels hollow. “There is a push in elevating the arts when they don’t have to deal with it,” he says. “It’s not helping the students.” While Currie makes a flashy headline and UnTapped a perfect poster-child for Columbia’s “arts-Ivy” narrative, the backstage reality is less glamorous.

Columbia’s theater practitioners don’t just perform; they have to perform while building and maintaining the institutions that let them perform in the first place. By designing curricula, maintaining network connections, and securing rehearsal spaces, students shoulder responsibilities that at other institutions would be handled by dedicated departments or permanent staff. This challenge, while never lowering the quality of student work, has undoubtedly shaped Columbia’s musical theatre culture into something distinctly independent and self-sustaining. The existence of a vivacious musical theater community thus stands as a testament to the ingenuity, passion, and relentless drive of Columbia’s creatives. Whether Columbia will eventually recognize and formalize this artistic energy into an official program remains to be seen—but for now, its students remain undeterred, creating, performing, and advocating for a place where their art can be fully supported.

Cloistered

By Gracie Moran