By Sahana Shravan, (left) a violinist with roots in Chennai, India, and a childhood in South Florida became involved with the Juilliard Green Club as a Juilliard undergraduate at 60 Lincoln Center Plaza. She is just starting her second year of a two-year Master’s program. Anoushka Mishra, (right) a second-year Juilliard student in the four-year acting program, came to New York from Mumbai in August 2023. Soon after, she met Sahana. “She was one of the few Indians on campus that I really connected with,” Anoushka recalled.
Sahana took the younger student under her wing and introduced her to the Club activities, leading to her becoming a committed participant. Club members engage in activities that include an annual multi-disciplinary performance. This year the program’s theme was What will be: dreams and stories of our future. “The future is hard to imagine, especially for people of our age, especially since we don’t make the decisions now that affect our futures,” Sahana commented. Thirty-one artists, current and former Juilliard students alike, participated in the 2024 celebratory April 22 Earth Day event featuring classical music, jazz, vocal, dance, and drama. The event, which was free to the public, was held at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium.
Lazlo Torok (below, left) plays vibraphone as a third-year undergraduate student in the Jazz Division. He joined the Green Club, like Sahana and Anoushka, because it resonated with his values, and he currently enjoys his role among the organizers of the club in their determination to encourage fellow Juilliard students and administration to participate in composting and other activities supporting sustainability and the environment.
Throughout the year many activities are organized and promoted by club organizers. They have included a clothing swap, distribution of reusable cutlery sets, and a continued drive for trash separation into bins marked for trash, recycling and composting.
From the very beginning of her involvement with Juilliard Green Club, Sahana dreamed of starting an urban garden on a building terrace that overlooks Broadway. Anoushka is among others who share that dream. “It would be great to grow our own vegetables,” she said.
Sahana said that many of the hurdles to make this an idea have been worked out and she and her enthusiastic team of student performers are hoping to have buds blooming in 2025. By then, perhaps the garden will be the site of community concerts since a key personal mission for Sahana is to bring music to the community. “I’m involved in performing and teaching,” said Sahana, a recipient of a Morse Teaching Fellowship. “I love doing work for the environment,” Sahana said, “and envision performing in the service of that.”
As the club is described on Juilliard’s website, “The purpose of this organization shall be to promote sustainability and environmental awareness within the Juilliard community and to encourage and facilitate action against the climate crisis, as artists and residents of NYC.”
Ben Sellick, a young composer, was a member of The Green Club while earning an MM at Juilliard. He wrote, “Music and nature are not such fundamentally different things: In the natural world birds make songs, flowers make blossoms, and we make music. The environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy has said, ‘We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves. We are not only nature defending itself, we are nature healing its connection with itself.’ At Juilliard, Green Club aims to be nature making itself heard.”