Lorena Alvarado
National Sentiment, Global Stage
April 26, 2011
12pm Kaufman room 160
Sentimiento demands attention. Look at me! Listen! Sentimiento, the embodiment of heartache, solitude, love and longing in the Mexican canción ranchera-- is at the heart of this presentation. In this talk, I analyze how sentimiento's aesthetic of emotional excess is re-signified when performed in a cross-border context, particularly in the work of Oaxacan singer-songwriter Lila Downs. She claims the ranchera, and thus its methods of fervent emotional expression, as a musical influence in her oft-labeled world music. Drawing from performances of songs from her albums La Cantina (2006) and Border: La Linea (2001), I explore how Downs' renditions of rancheras and sentimiento (from her gut) grants her repertoire an aura of "authenticity" and enhances the discourse of mestizaje and borderlands often generated around her persona. Moreover, I examine the problematic effects and affects of sentimiento as embodied by Downs: as both "innate" and performative, as an exoticized expression of Mexican feeling and a form of cultural discipline and vocal technique that affirms and challenges national identity.
Lorena Alvarado earned her B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in Modern Literature and Latin@ Studies and her M.A. from UCLA in Culture and Performance. She looks forward to completing her manuscript, Corporealities of Feeling, this Spring.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
4.19 : Jenna Delgado
Please join us for our next Chew on This.
Jenna Delgado
The STAHR! Project: Community-Based Arts and Pedagogy for Adolescent Behavior Change
April 19, 2011
12pm Kaufman room 160
Jenna Delgado will discuss a community-based arts process she led in 2003. Funded through a social service organization and stretching across a 6-month period, STAHR! (Somebody's Talking About HIV Risk!) culminated in the production of an original short film. Consisting of several phases, each level of the program was built upon two program goals: strengthening decision-making skills and lowering HIV risk among youth participants. At the nexus of art-making, social service, and community, STAHR! presented unique challenges to conventions in HIV prevention programming, film production, and collaborative process. This presentation will focus on the special considerations to curriculum development, artist training, and assessment methods required for the success of such a project.
Jenna M. Delgado is an actor, writer, and facilitator. She has been a specialist in the design and implementation of youth development programs for 20 years. For much of that time at both the local and the national level she trained art educators, youth workers, and social service providers on issues of sexual health risk, cross cultural dialogue, youth development, and art based curriculum development. In that capacity, Jenna has presented at several local and national conferences speaking on adolescent issues and on the use of theatre arts for behavior change. In non-profit and grass roots sectors, she collaborates in designing long-term art based youth development programs using theories of behavior change and dialogue facilitation to explore notions of community, activism, and youth development. As a graduate student in the Department of World and Cultures, Jenna?s research interests include exploring the function of art making in relationship to adolescent identity construction and community, the critical analysis of negotiations of power in collaborative art process and theorizing the efficacy of process methodologies in relationship to subjective transformation.
Jenna Delgado
The STAHR! Project: Community-Based Arts and Pedagogy for Adolescent Behavior Change
April 19, 2011
12pm Kaufman room 160
Jenna Delgado will discuss a community-based arts process she led in 2003. Funded through a social service organization and stretching across a 6-month period, STAHR! (Somebody's Talking About HIV Risk!) culminated in the production of an original short film. Consisting of several phases, each level of the program was built upon two program goals: strengthening decision-making skills and lowering HIV risk among youth participants. At the nexus of art-making, social service, and community, STAHR! presented unique challenges to conventions in HIV prevention programming, film production, and collaborative process. This presentation will focus on the special considerations to curriculum development, artist training, and assessment methods required for the success of such a project.
Jenna M. Delgado is an actor, writer, and facilitator. She has been a specialist in the design and implementation of youth development programs for 20 years. For much of that time at both the local and the national level she trained art educators, youth workers, and social service providers on issues of sexual health risk, cross cultural dialogue, youth development, and art based curriculum development. In that capacity, Jenna has presented at several local and national conferences speaking on adolescent issues and on the use of theatre arts for behavior change. In non-profit and grass roots sectors, she collaborates in designing long-term art based youth development programs using theories of behavior change and dialogue facilitation to explore notions of community, activism, and youth development. As a graduate student in the Department of World and Cultures, Jenna?s research interests include exploring the function of art making in relationship to adolescent identity construction and community, the critical analysis of negotiations of power in collaborative art process and theorizing the efficacy of process methodologies in relationship to subjective transformation.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
4.12 : Alissa Cardone / Kinodance Company
Alissa Cardone | Kinodance Company
Choreography of Elements: An Artist Presentation
April 12, 2011 @ 12pm Kaufman room 160
Alissa Cardone, choreographer and co-founder of the intermedia performance collaborative, Kinodance, will give an overview of her MFA portfolio projects, sharing footage from recent touring engagements, and inviting feedback and discussion about the work.
Alissa Cardone, interdisciplinary choreographer, improviser, curator, her work has been supported by Baryshnikov Arts Center/Summer Stages Dance Residency Program, Asian Cultural Council, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding (Armenia), Open Society Institute (S. Caucasus), CEC Artslink, Boston Cyberarts, VT Performance Labs and New England Foundation for the Arts. Co-artistic director of internationally acclaimed intermedia performance collaborative Kinodance Company, she's toured nationally and abroad in Japan, Peru, Russia, France, Belgium, Monaco and Armenia and has been presented as a solo artist by Maison Moet Dance Festival/Spiral Hall (Japan), Soundscape (N. Carolina), Gloucester New Arts, DancenowNYC, Soundfield and Bowerbird (Philadelphia). Influenced by trainings in Japan with Min Tanaka (Body Weather Farm) and intensive study and performance engagements with butoh master Akira Kasai, she has collaborated and performed with choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy, Ann Carlson, Paula Josa-Jones, Nora Chipaumire and musicians such as Roger Miller, Masakatsu Takagi, guitarist Chris Brokaw, Tatsuya Nakatani, Mike Bullock, Gene Coleman/Ensemble N_JP and noise artist Jessica Rylan. Alissa is founding director of Critical Moves Contemporary Dance Series (Boston) and co-founder and curator of Boston Cyberarts' Ideas in Motion: Innovations in Dance, Movement and Technology.
Kinodance Company, selected by Dance Magazine's "25-to-watch" in 2008
is an artist collaborative founded in Boston by choreographer Alissa Cardone, filmmaker Alla Kovgan and visual artist Dedalus Wainwright out of passion for the kinetic arts, experimentation and a strong belief in the power of interdisciplinary collaborations.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
3.8 - Sam Anderson Rough Cuts: Video and Spectacle in Postwar Sierra Leone
Sam Anderson
Rough Cuts: Video and Spectacle in Postwar Sierra Leone
Masked devils take to the streets to reclaim their city. A war-torn capital tears itself down once again, this time to build itself up. A former military commander marshals dangerous spiritual forces in the name of national reconciliation. After five weeks of preliminary research over the summer and winter breaks, I will discuss some of the struggles and successes of the early stages of a new project in Sierra Leone, and share a ten-minute rough cut of video documentation. Please join me for an informal discussion on image and access, chaos and reconstruction. How can one document the unspeakable? The secret? The invisible? The future?
SAMUEL M. ANDERSON is a second year PhD student in Culture and Performance at UCLA, whose research focuses on aesthetics and politics in the manifestations of the invisible world in West Africa, principally in masked dance. He has recently begun a project on the postwar reconfiguration of militaristic mystic arts in Sierra Leone. Between 2006 and 2008, Sam held a Fulbright scholarship for research in Burkina Faso, where he followed several masking troupes and worked with Ouagadougou-based theatre and dance companies. Other sites of prolonged investigation have included Nigeria, Benin, and Niger. As a video artist, he has collaborated on dance films and interactive animations with groups in the USA, France, and Burkina, including Cie Salia nï Seydou, Cie Philippe Ménard, and Créatures Cie. A former theatre director, Sam co-ran the award-winning Seattle-based company Defibrillator Productions from 2000 until 2006. He received his BA from the University of Washington in Theatre and Anthropology, and his MA from New York University in Performance Studies.
Rough Cuts: Video and Spectacle in Postwar Sierra Leone
Masked devils take to the streets to reclaim their city. A war-torn capital tears itself down once again, this time to build itself up. A former military commander marshals dangerous spiritual forces in the name of national reconciliation. After five weeks of preliminary research over the summer and winter breaks, I will discuss some of the struggles and successes of the early stages of a new project in Sierra Leone, and share a ten-minute rough cut of video documentation. Please join me for an informal discussion on image and access, chaos and reconstruction. How can one document the unspeakable? The secret? The invisible? The future?
SAMUEL M. ANDERSON is a second year PhD student in Culture and Performance at UCLA, whose research focuses on aesthetics and politics in the manifestations of the invisible world in West Africa, principally in masked dance. He has recently begun a project on the postwar reconfiguration of militaristic mystic arts in Sierra Leone. Between 2006 and 2008, Sam held a Fulbright scholarship for research in Burkina Faso, where he followed several masking troupes and worked with Ouagadougou-based theatre and dance companies. Other sites of prolonged investigation have included Nigeria, Benin, and Niger. As a video artist, he has collaborated on dance films and interactive animations with groups in the USA, France, and Burkina, including Cie Salia nï Seydou, Cie Philippe Ménard, and Créatures Cie. A former theatre director, Sam co-ran the award-winning Seattle-based company Defibrillator Productions from 2000 until 2006. He received his BA from the University of Washington in Theatre and Anthropology, and his MA from New York University in Performance Studies.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
3.1 - WAC MFA year two co-hort - Heather Coker, Sarah Leddy, Herbbie Moore, and Sarah Wilbur: Food For Thought
The MFA year two cohort invites you to join a brainstorming conversation focused on the art of generating meaningful audience feedback on work in progress within and beyond the academy walls. Fresh from their collective production of WATCH THIS! (February 25th at the Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater), choreographers Heather Coker, Sarah Leddy, Herbbie Moore, and Sarah Wilbur will co-facilitate a discussion entertaining useful and not-so-useful strategies for generating viewer or reader critical response to new works, on the stage or on the page.
COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY: Heather Coker is a choreographer and filmmaker who fuses both art forms to make dance films and live work that integrates technology. Sarah Leddy creates and performs dance theater work within a variety of settings, fusing her interests in post-modern dance, ensemble-based theater and community engagement. Herbbie Moore is a choreographer with investments in post-modern hip hop experimentation. Sarah Wilbur is a choreographer and director of The Wide Sky Dance Project, a progressive arts initiative supporting choreographic research and experimentation aimed at widespread participation in contemporary dance.
COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY: Heather Coker is a choreographer and filmmaker who fuses both art forms to make dance films and live work that integrates technology. Sarah Leddy creates and performs dance theater work within a variety of settings, fusing her interests in post-modern dance, ensemble-based theater and community engagement. Herbbie Moore is a choreographer with investments in post-modern hip hop experimentation. Sarah Wilbur is a choreographer and director of The Wide Sky Dance Project, a progressive arts initiative supporting choreographic research and experimentation aimed at widespread participation in contemporary dance.
Monday, February 21, 2011
2.22 - Michael Sakamoto: A Case Study in Auto-Ethnography and Practice-Based Research
Michael Sakamoto
Kazuo Stands: A Case Study in Auto-Ethnography and Practice-Based Research
Feb 22, 2011
12pm Kaufman room 160
This presentation will display and critique the author's transdisciplinary methodology of butoh dance theater practice and scholarship, exploring the mechanics of and socio-cultural influences on the scholar-artist entity. As a modality of historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic contextualization for his performances, the process of practice-based research-- or rather research-based practice-- is central to his "dual" identity. The author will perform and engage his "scholar" and "artist" identities as a false binary in a dialectic process of auto-ethnographic revelation, placing his artistic and intellectual influences in tension with his psycho-physiological desires and instinctual, improvisational dancing body.
Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist active in Butoh-based dance, contemporary theater, media art, and photography. He has performed and/or exhibited in Japan, Thailand, Mexico, and throughout Europe and North America and received numerous grant awards, including from the Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer, and Asian Cultural Council. Michael has taught college/university-level classes and workshops, including at California Institute of the Arts, Chiang Mai University, and many others. He is on faculty in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College, holds a Dance MFA from UCLA, and is a PhD student in Culture and Performance at UCLA.
Website:www.michaelsakamoto.
Kazuo Stands: A Case Study in Auto-Ethnography and Practice-Based Research
Feb 22, 2011
12pm Kaufman room 160
This presentation will display and critique the author's transdisciplinary methodology of butoh dance theater practice and scholarship, exploring the mechanics of and socio-cultural influences on the scholar-artist entity. As a modality of historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic contextualization for his performances, the process of practice-based research-- or rather research-based practice-- is central to his "dual" identity. The author will perform and engage his "scholar" and "artist" identities as a false binary in a dialectic process of auto-ethnographic revelation, placing his artistic and intellectual influences in tension with his psycho-physiological desires and instinctual, improvisational dancing body.
Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist active in Butoh-based dance, contemporary theater, media art, and photography. He has performed and/or exhibited in Japan, Thailand, Mexico, and throughout Europe and North America and received numerous grant awards, including from the Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer, and Asian Cultural Council. Michael has taught college/university-level classes and workshops, including at California Institute of the Arts, Chiang Mai University, and many others. He is on faculty in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College, holds a Dance MFA from UCLA, and is a PhD student in Culture and Performance at UCLA.
Website:www.michaelsakamoto.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Winter Quarter Line-up Announced!
2.08.11 - Angeline Shaka : Putting on the "hula girl"
2.22.11 - Michael Sakamoto : Kazuo Stands - A Case Study in Auto-Ethnogoraphy and Practice-Based Research
3.01.11 - WAC MFA 2 : Food For Thought - Methods for garnering feedback on works-in-process
3.08.11 - Samuel M. Anderson : Rough Cuts - Video and Spectacle in Postwar Sierra Leone
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