Dancers and Composers Collaborate in Practice-as-research Project

IU Contemporary Dance and the Jacobs School of Music’s Student Composer Association present their annual collaboration between student choreographers and composers:

Hammer and Nail

An evening of original student works performed by student dancers and musicians

Wednesday April 23-24 // Performances @ 6:30 pm & 8:30 pm
Buskirk-Chumley Theatre
114 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN 47408
(812) 323-3020

Hammer and Nail is an evening of contemporary dance featuring collaborations between Indiana University student choreographers and composers. It is a lively, dynamic event featuring the artistry and virtuosity of contemporary dance majors and the world-class Jacobs School of Music students.

An opportunity to hear live, original, musical scores accompany contemporary dance, it has become a favorite springtime event and is in its ninth year. The 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm programs feature different collaborations.

The event is free, and cash or non-perishable food donations are collected to benefit Hoosier Hills Community Food Bank.

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Apr 21: MA/Phd Paper Presentations

IU’s Department of Theatre, Drama, & Contemporary Dance invite you to a presentation of graduate scholarship.

Selected MA/PhD students will share their work from the past year, followed by a response from theatre faculty.

Monday, April 21 // 4:30 pm
Wells-Metz Theatre
275 N. Jordan Ave. (Off the First Floor Theatre Lobby)
Reception to follow.

 Paper Presentations:

“‘Now I am loathest, alas, that ere was lost’: Satan’s Transformation(s) in the York Cycle”

Miriam Poole, PhD Student

 “Phenomenal Flatulence: A Consideration of Bodily Functions in The Imaginary Invalid”

Sarah Campbell, PhD Student

“Slaves in Algiers, or a Struggle for an American National Identity”

Michael Rodriguez, MA Student

“‘Well, I’ll be hanged for a halfpenny, if there be not some abomination knavery in this play’: Humor as Ugliness & Ugliness as Humor in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle”

Justin Rincker, PhD Student

Student Presenters:

Sarah Campbell
Sarah Campbell received her B.A. in Theatre from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky and her M.A. in Theatre with an emphasis in Directing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her research interests include the phenomenological study of performance, the contemporary re-staging of Restoration texts, and Maya ritual performance in the Classic period. She is currently Vice President and conference co-chair for IU’s Association for Research in Theatre (ART@IU). Sarah is from Louisville, Kentucky.

Miriam Poole
Miriam received her B.A. in Theatre and German from Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan and her M.A. in Theatre HIstory, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University. Her research interests include medieval theatre, German romanticism, and the theatrical activities of the Irish Literary Revival. Miriam is from West Chicago, Illinois.

Justin Rincker
Justin received both his B.A. in Anthropology and English Literature and his M.A. in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His research interests include the combined work of Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart and the history of movement on the stage, especially in comic performance. Justin’s directing and performance credits include productions with Metro Theatre Company, New Jewish Theatre, OnSite Theatre Company, Dramatic License Productions, and HotCity Theatre, all in St. Louis.

Michael Rodriguez Mike received his B.A. in Cinema and Drama from San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California. Before coming to IU, he worked as an actor, a tour guide in Paris, and an ESL teacher. His current research project includes a critical look at American stage productions depicting slavery during the late eighteenth century. Mike also works for the Telluride Film Festival as the Alumni Coordinator of the Student Symposium.

Distinguished Acting Teacher Visits IU Theatre

Dr. Robert Benedetti on Acting and the Current State of Theatre, Film, and Television

Robert Benedetti, PhD is a distinguished teacher of theatre who has had a forty-year career as a professor, director, and producer, and is the author of six books on stage and film. He was Dean of the School of Theatre at the California Institute of the Arts and Chairman of the Acting Department at the Yale Drama School, and won three Emmys and the Peabody Award for his films for HBO.

Thursday, April 10 | 5:30 pm
The Studio Theatre
2^nd Flr., Lee Norvelle Theatre & Drama Center

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ROBERT BENEDETTI received his PhD from Northwestern University. After serving as Artistic Director of the Court Theatre in Chicago, he was an early member of Chicago’s Second City Theatre, and then taught for fifty years at the University of Wisconsin, Carnegie-Mellon University, The National Theatre School of Canada, and the University of California, Riverside.

He was Chairman of Theatre at York University in Toronto, Chairman of the Acting Program at the Yale Drama School, and for eight years Dean of Theatre at The California Institute of the Arts. He was until 2011 a tenured Full Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Artistic Director of the Nevada Conservatory Theatre.

Benedetti has directed at many regional theatres, including the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Australia’s Melbourne Theatre Company, the Milwaukee, South Coast, and San Diego Repertory Theatres, the Oregon, Colorado, and Great Lakes Shakespeare festivals, and many others.

He has also worked in the art museum field, recreating the 1913 Futurist Opera VICTORY OVER THE SUN by Kasimir Malevich for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has also created shows on German Expressionism and Russian Agitprop. His productions have appeared at the Berlin Festival, the Demeervart in Amsterdam, the Hirschhorn Museum at the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Academy. His films are in the permanent collection of MoMA and many other museums and university art departments.

He served as an advisor to the U. S. Department of Education and as a Fulbright Panelist. As President of Ted Danson’s Anasazi Productions at Paramount Studios, and later as an independent screenwriter/producer, he won three Best Picture Emmys, two Humanitas Prizes, and a Peabody Award for producing Miss Evers’ Boys and A Lesson Before Dying for HBO, and six other films. He most recently completed a screenplay for HBO on the 1885 Chicago Haymarket bombing.

Benedetti has also written six books on acting and film production, including The Actor At Work (10^th edition), The Actor in You (5^th edition), ACTION! Acting for Film and Television, and From Concept to Screen, an Overview of Film and TV Production.

In 2005 he received the Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). In 2012 he was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center.

This Friday 4/11 and next Friday 4/18  Robert Benedetti will ALSO be first in AD 060 from 1:00 to 3:00 and then in The Studio Theatre from 3:00 to 4:00.

Apr 7: IU French & Italian Present Dr. Maurice Samuels on Mlle. Rachel and the “Golden Age” of Jewish Theatre

Mlle. Rachel (1855) by Edmond-Aimé-Florentin Geffroy

France’s Jewish Star: Mlle. Rachel at the Comédie Française

Monday, April 7, 2014 | 6:00 pm
Persimmon Room, Indiana Memorial Union

This talk examines one of the most stunning cases of Jewish integration in the “golden age” following emancipation: Rachel Félix, who became France’s most celebrated actress in the 1830s and 40s with her electrifying performances as the heroines of Racine and Corneille at the Comédie Française. The daughter of poor, Yiddish-speaking peddlers, Rachel single-handedly revived the neo-classical theatrical tradition while at the same time maintaining — some would say flaunting — her Jewish identity.  Reading the critical response to Rachel from the time, the speaker shows how she offered a model for the way French universalism, embodied in the neo-classical tradition, could be enabled rather than hindered by Jewishness.

This talks is sponsored by the Mary-Margaret Barr Koon Fund of the Department of French & Italian.

If you have a disability and need assistance, accommodations can be made to meet most needs. Please call 855-5458.

Dr. Maurice Samuels, Yale University

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MAURICE SAMUELS is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French in the Department of French at Yale University. He specializes in the literature and culture of 19th-century France and in Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Spectacular Past:  Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2004) and Inventing the Israelite:  Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford UP, 2010), which won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize. He is also co-editor of a Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature Reader (Stanford UP, 2013) and is currently working on a new book on the relationship of antisemitism and philosemitism in France, from the French Revolution to the present.

 

 

Apr 11: IU Cinema Presents an Evening of Works by and about Richard Foreman

Astronome/King Richard

Friday, April 11, 2014 | 6:30 pm
IU Cinema

Heralded as “the Godfather of the American avant-garde,” Richard Foreman, founder of the Ontological-HystericTheater, has been creating unique theatrical visions for over 45 years. Astronome: A Night at the Opera, his collaboration with avant-garde composer John Zorn and documented by filmmaker Henry Hills, presents “a disturbing initiation” that is singular in Foreman’s career, yet still bears the indelible marks of Foreman’s style.As a companion piece, Hills’ own King Richard is a revealing portrait of the artist, which is both a charming interview and a filmic reflection of the theatrical world Foreman has created.

IU Cinema’s Underground Film Series is presented in partnership with the Indiana University Department of Communication and Culture, whose programming team that includes Russell Sheaffer, Laura Ivins-Hulley, Eric Zobel, Jamie Hook, Christopher Miles, Brian Graney and Joan Hawkins.

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RICHARD FOREMAN has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays both in the United States and abroad.  Five of his plays have received “OBIE” awards as best play of the year—and he has received five other “OBIE’S” for directing and for ‘sustained achievement’.  He has received the annual Literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a “Lifetime Achievement in the Theater” award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Club Master American Dramatist Award, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and in 2004 was elected officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.  His archives and work materials have recently been acquired by the Bobst Library at NYU.Foreman is the founder and artistic director of the non-profit Ontological-Hysteric Theater (1968-present).  Since the early seventies his work and company have been funded by the NEA, NYSCA, as well as many other foundations and private individuals.  In the early 1980s a branch of the theater was established in Paris and funded by the French government.  The theater is currently located in the historic St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City’s East Village neighborhood, and serves as a home to Foreman’s annual productions as well as to other local and international artists. Seven collections of his plays have already been published, and books studying his work have been published in New York, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.

JOHN ZORN draws on his experience in a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular and improvised music, John Zorn has created an influential body of work that defies academic categories. A native of New York City, he has been a central figure in the downtown scene since 1975, incorporating a wide range of musicians in various compositional formats. He learned alchemical synthesis from Harry Smith, structural ontology with Richard Foreman, how to make art out of garbage with Jack Smith, cathartic expression at Sluggs and hermetic intuition from Joseph Cornell. Early inspirations include American innovators Ives, Varese, Cage, Carter and Partch, the European tradition of Berg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Kagel, soundtrack composers Herrmann, Morricone and Stalling as well as avant-garde theater, film, art and literature.

HENRY HILLS was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and received his B.A. in English from Washington & Lee University and an M.F.A. in filmmaking in 1978 from the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied with James Broughton, George Kuchar, and Hollis Frampton. Hills has made 22 short experimental films since 1975, and has frequently collaborated with composer John Zorn and choreographer Sally Silvers including 1992 Festival Favorite, Little Lieutenant,which was storyboarded and cut to a Zorn arrangement of a Kurt Weill song. Hills’ work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library (Donnell Media Center and Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library) , the Archives du Film Experimental d’Avignon, the Arsenal in Berlin, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Rocky Mountain Film Center, SUNY Buffalo, Bard College, Wayne State University, and the Miami-Dade Public Library. He has been a member of the faculty in film at the Pratt Institute and the San Francisco Art Institute and has been Professor at the film academy FAMU in Prague since 2005.

Apr 11: Bruce McConachie Conducts 2014 Wertheim Seminar in Performance

The Wertheim Seminar in Performance and the IU Department of English invite interested graduate students to participate in a seminar conducted by Professor Bruce McConachie, Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh

“New Directions in Performance Studies”

Friday, April 11 | 10:30-12:00
Dogwood Room, IMU

This seminar will discuss intersections of theatre, performance, and embodied cognition. Students should expect to read Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body in preparation for the seminar.

SPACE IS LIMITED; please RSVP to amyecook@indiana.edu to attend.

Dr. Bruce McConachie, University of Pittsburgh

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BRUCE MCCONACHIE is a specialist in American theatre history, theatre historiography, and the intersection of cognitive science and theatre. His major books include, MelodramaticFormations, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, Interpreting the Theatrical Past (with Tom Postlewait), Theatre & Mind, and Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. He is the co-editor (with F. Elizabeth Hart) of Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn and the co-editor (with Blakey Vermeule) of the Palgrave series on Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. He has been the President of the American Society for Theatre Research and a winner of its Distinguished Scholar Award. He is currently the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Theatre Arts.