Nelly Bablumian

= Division III =

This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Kate Abbey-Lambertz, Photo Editor.

While Nelly Bablumian has been involved in the theater community at Hampshire since her first months at school it’s only one of the many circles that this dreamer moves in. She’s known by her friends for euphorically dancing in the rain during thunderstorms, spontaneously sleeping outside, and always being up for a bonfire in the woods. “It’s so amazing that we live in the middle of all these forests. I just want to go for a lot of walks in all my free time now.” Nelly will relax at the end of this semester, but she has been driven from her first year, with more focus than most. “From first year, I knew I wanted to put up some kind of play in EDH for my final Div III.”

Nelly wrote, directed, produced, set-designed, costume-designed, light-designed, tech-directed, etc. I Sing Anyway, her Division III play. As a result of some bureaucratic difficulties, Nelly didn’t get a space in EDH to put on her show. Instead she used the Tavern, which initially “felt like a burden” as she rolled suitcases of props back and forth from her mod to any space she could find to rehearse in. But she came to see the Tavern’s “gifts,” and used the difficulty to let her show evolve positively. “I started my own theater company, which I called a theater family. We worked the whole year—I wrote the play before that—but most of the time we didn’t work on it, we worked on developing a foundation of trust and love without which we couldn’t have put on a play because it was so personal.” To Nelly, “It’s all personal. There’s no separation between academic and personal, at least for me in my Division III.” What draws her to theater is that “it’s bodies in a shared space connecting with each other; there’s this instant trust.” Her time studying clowning and physical theater in Arezzo, Italy, had a strong influence on her play. “Being a clown is about tapping into your inner kid, your most free, vulnerable self. This ties in to a lot of the themes of the play… being human, being lonely, dealing with heartbreak, responsibility for each other as people.” Nelly appreciates how safe she feels at Hampshire; “how weird everyone is and that’s okay…There are days and specific events at Hampshire where you feel this sense of community of and love. And it would be a nice if that was every day.” These are Nelly’s ideals, and it was almost by chance that she ended up living them at Hampshire. “I didn’t read much about Hampshire before I went, I didn’t know anything. But I remember being on the phone with my mom the very first week. And the conversation was interrupted by a bunch of people dressed up as butterflies running across the field. And I was like Mom, I think I came to the right place.”