Photos courtesy of Friends of Aiyyana Maracle.
Celebrating the Life of Aiyyana Maracle
Former MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts student Aiyyana Maracle (MFAIA-VT ’03-’05) was a multi-disciplinary artist, scholar, educator, and a great-grandma four times over; a sovereign Haudenosaunee woman. For half a century, Aiyyana was actively involved with the merging of Ogwehoweh art and culture into the Euro-centric world and consciousness that surrounds us. She had been insistent that this inclusion into Canadian society be done with dignity and respect. In that same vein, for 20-some years she sought that same inclusion for herself and other gender-variant folks. Through performance art, video, theatre, in her published work, and innumerable public and academic presentations, Aiyyana offered an alternate framework to the prevalent Euro-centric view of ‘gender dysphoria’. She engaged profoundly with the Goddard community during her time in the program.
Her family and friends created an archive of her work and a scholarship program to support trans art and activism. You can learn more at the Friends of Aiyyana Maracle Facebook Page.
Cover photo of PearlStitch, poetry by Petra Kuppers, by video artist April Dauscha
New Poetry Book Out: PearlStitch
MFAIA-WA Faculty Advisor Petra Kuppers‘ newest poetry collection, on experimental feminist form, women’s labor, saints and somatics, PearlStitch, was launched with Spuyten Duyvil Press, May 2016.
PBS and Detroit Performs made a documentary about Petra’s work with community arts, disability culture politics, spaces between dance and poetry, and women’s collaborative experimental practice. Many of Petra’s collaborators are featured in the video, from Carrie Sandahl and Anita Gonzalez (Anarcha), to Beth Currans and Stephanie Heit (her current collaborators), as well as people from the Michigan Women’s Caucus for the Arts, at LightBox performance space in Detroit. The video is close captioned.
Additional Link: Studying Disability Arts and Culture
Performance at The Royal Shakespeare Company’s New Studio Theatre
Alumna Shannon Holmes (MFAIA-WA ‘13) is currently completing her third year as a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK. This past year saw her presenting papers internationally relating to her research in somatic vocal methods that traverse the divide between singing and speech. Highlights of her paper presentations have included, “Your Body Must be Heard: Autoethnography and Voicework” at Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Brussels, Belgium, and “The Body as Archive. Freeing The Voice With Autobiographical Narrative” at Royal Holloway University London, UK. This summer she will be chairing a panel at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference in Chicago entitled “Working Hard at Letting Go. Exploring the Use of Conscious Spontaneity in Performance.” In addition to her conference activity she has completed two residencies this past year working in the Roy Hart voice tradition at Pantheatre in Paris, France. This June, Shannon will be performing her piece The Crook of Your Arm, a multidisciplinary piece that weaves autobiographical narrative, extended and traditional vocal methods and singing and speech at The Royal Shakespeare Company’s new studio theatre “TOP” in Stratford-Upon-Avon, June 16 and 17, 2016.
Michael Sakamoto in blind spot. Rennie Harris and Michael Sakamoto in Flash. Waewdao Sirisook in Nu Tong Gin Khao. Photos courtesy of Michael Sakamoto.
Performance and Exhibit
MFAIA-WA Faculty Advisor Michael Sakamoto recently toured his Butoh/hip-hop dance theater duet, Flash, with Rennie Harris, guest artist for the MFAIA Fall 2016 semester, to Virginia Commonwealth University and Dance Center of Columbia College-Chicago, with further dates planned in Minneapolis and Houston. Michael is also in production for his next dance theater trio, Soil (National Dance Project Grant winner) featuring dancers from Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam/USA, premiering at Hancher Performances, Iowa City, February 8-9, 2017.
Michael is also exhibiting his performance photo series, Nu Tong Gin Khao, in collaboration with northern Thai dancer, Waewdao Sirisook, at RMA Institute in Bangkok, June 9 to 15. Both artists will perform excerpts from their recent solo works at the opening reception, June 9, 2016 at 7pm.
Rennie Harris. Photo Left 1 & 2: Bob Emmott. Photo Right: Courtesy of Rennie Harris
Upcoming MFAIA Vermont Fall 2016 Guest Artist Rennie Harris
Lorenzo ‘Rennie’ Harris is a world renowned dancer, choreographer, and professor of hip-hop dance. Harris is recognized as one of the first artists to bring hip-hop dance to concert stages around the world. In 1992, he founded the first and longest running hip-hop dance touring company, Rennie Harris Puremovement (RHPM). In 2007 he successfully launched a second touring company, Rennie Harris RHAW which integrates pop culture with contemporary dance vocabulary and style. Dr. Harris teaches workshops and classes at universities around the country and is a powerful spokesperson for the significance of “street” origins in any dance style. Harris’ work encompasses the diverse and rich African-American traditions of the past, while simultaneously presenting the voice of a new generation through its ever-evolving interpretations of dance. Dr. Harris is committed to providing audiences with a sincere view of the essence and spirit of hip-hop rather than the commercially exploited stereotypes portrayed by the media. Harris is best known for such works as Rome and Jewels, Facing Mekka, Heaven, and a host of innovative Repertory works that continue to challenge expectations of hip-hop dance.
For more visit Rennie Harris RHAW and Rennie Harris Pure Movement. And look forward to exciting activities with Rennie at the upcoming MFAIA residency at the Plainfield, Vermont campus, July 22 – 29, 2016.
The Free Black Women’s Library. Photo: OlaRonke Akinmowo
The Free Black Women’s Library: Afro-Futurist Edition
On April 3rd, the Free Black Women’s Library with current student OlaRonke Akinmowo, popped open in the atrium of MOCADA Museum, located in Brooklyn. The Free Black Women’s Library is an interactive mobile library that features soundscapes, art, readings, performance and a collection of 400 books written by Black women. The goal and purpose of the library is to center and celebrate the stories Black women and girls: an act of resistance and resilience in a world that attempts to minimize and erase their existence. There were over 200 people in attendance to discuss such radical and provocative possibilities such as time travel, dystopian societies and Black Lives Matters. Key aspects of the conversation focused on the iconic novel “Parable of the Sower” written by Octavia Butler and the parallels between her fictional story and present day. Over 100 books were traded and the soulful soundscape was provided by sound artist abstract ego. The library opens once a month, usually on the first Sunday. The most recent library happening was on May 1st at the Halsey Community Garden, with a focus on food.
Lisa Wolpe performs Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender at Tulane University. Images courtesy of Lisa Wolpe.
Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender at the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival
“Sometimes I feel like Shakespeare saved my life” — Internationally renowned actor and alumna Lisa Wolpe (MFAIA-VT ’07) has arguably played more of the Bard’s male roles than any woman in history. Fresh off an international tour, she brought her dynamic solo show to New Orleans. From cross-gender exploration to the unforgettable story of her life, Lisa illustrates that Shakespeare’s insight into the human condition is as relevant as ever. A talkback with Lisa followed each performance. The New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane is a professional theatre company housed at Tulane University, one of the South’s most prestigious academic institutions. Located on its uptown campus, the Festival works under the umbrella of Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts and Tulane’s Department of Theatre and Dance. The Festival has the honor of being one of two professional theatre companies on campus, the other being Summer Lyric Theatre. Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender; created and performed by Lisa Wolpe; May 20 to 22, 2016; Tulane’s Lupin Theater.
Link: Lisa Wolpe Rose Playhouse UK Review
Emergent Ecologies Exhibition Closes in Brooklyn, NY
To mark the closing of the Emerging Ecologies exhibition in Brooklyn, NY, MFAIA-VT Faculty Advisor Ruth Wallen contributed to a series of talks, discussions, performances and film screenings on May 21, 2017. Amongst the other participants was Eben Kirksey whose book was central to the exhibition and who spoke with the Creating Refugia in a Time of Ecological Unraveling group study earlier this semester.
Ping Chong and Ryan Conarro at the Bering Sea wall in Nome, Alaska. Ryan Conarro with interviewee Dan Karmun, Senior, an Alaska Native Inupiaq elder living in Nome, Alaska. Ping Chong encountering a bald eagle in Seward, Alaska. Photos courtesy of Ryan Conarro.
Research Travel in Alaska for Ping Chong + Company’s Where the Sea Breaks Its Back
Supported by a travel grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET), alumnus Ryan Conarro (MFAIA-WA ’15) and Ping Chong of New York’s Ping Chong + Company spent two weeks in February 2016 in urban and rural communities in Alaska, engaging in over 25 interviews and gathering documentary material about Alaskan identity, land, and sense of place. These elements will be integral to their new devised work, ‘Where the Sea Breaks Its Back,’ a collage of historical and personal stories of cross-cultural encounter in the Arctic. The piece will feature puppetry, video projections, and movement, and it will premiere in 2017 at Lincoln Center’s Clark Theater and LaMaMa ETC’s Puppet Festival, as well as a number of venues in Alaska.
Poster for La Linea
La Linea Artist Residency and Exchange in Santiago, Cuba
Alumna Ayanna Bassiouni (MFAIA-WA ’14) has launched La Linea, Artist Residency and Exchange in Santiago, Cuba. La Linea is an all-female Afro-Cuban artist collective. This summer, their first exhibition (of the same name) will take place in Santiago, Cuba. It is a line of connection that stretches across boundaries; a clear border that separates. This first-time cultural exchange between Santiago, Cuba and the United States, with a collaborative residency culminating in an exhibition of collaborative art work will serve as a platform for this conversation between international artists. They will share likenesses and oppositions of their cultures. Four female artists from Santiago, Cuba meet and share lives with four female artists from North America, connecting as artists and as women. The union is documented by a collaborative work of original pieces created in the moment, culminating in an exhibition hosted in Santiago. June 16th to June 26th 2016.
Image Left: even my body now lets the light through experimental voice and video work by Misha Penton. Image Right: Siren on the Sabine with Thomas Helton, Toni Valle, Lindsey McGill, and Misha Penton in foreground. The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, April 2016. Photo by Dave Nickerson.
Soprano and Artistic Director Misha Penton Premieres New Music Work, Siren on the Sabine, at the Menil Collection
Alumna Misha Penton (MFAIA-WA ’13) premiered Siren on the Sabine at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas on April 29, 2016. The new post-opera work is an introspective engagement with Homer’s Odyssey: one singer’s journey to Houston as a Siren alone in the vast and glassy bayou city, far from her wine dark sea. The work was part of the University of Houston Center for Creative Work Dionysia 2016, a re-imagining of the epic through a series of citywide events and the telling of stories by Houston’s residents. Siren on the Sabine featured Penton, soprano, text and artistic direction, with contrabassist Thomas Helton, and dancers and choreographers Toni Valle and Lindsey McGill. Penton’s experimental voice and video poem, “even my body now lets the light through,” inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel, The Waves, was published in May 2016 as an online supplement to the Performance Research Journal issue 21.2 “On Sea/At Sea,” with the poem published in the print journal, as well. The four-minute video work is online at the Performance Research Journal YouTube channel.
A view of Lecce. Photo courtesy of Shawn Van Sluy.
Arts & Social Justice Fellowship
Alumna Risha Rox (MFAIA-WA ’15) has been invited on fellowship by the Musagetes Foundation — a project of Loop House (Lecce, IT) and Musagetes, Free Home University (FHU) is a pedagogical experiment grounded in experiencing life and creativity in common. FHU is a response to the need to generate new ways of sharing and creating knowledge. Created in collaboration with a pool of diverse international artists and thinkers, FHU is based in and around the city of Lecce, in the Puglia Region of southern Italy. June 11 through July 5, 2016.
Ragas Live Festival 2016
Brooklyn Raga Massive, with almunus Neel Murgai (MFAIA-VT ‘10), is co-producing a groundbreaking 24-hour festival of Indian classical music. This event, with over 70 performers, will be held at the beautiful art space, Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn and broadcast live on WKCR 89.9 FM, New York, as well as streaming on the Internet. Ragas are meant to be played at certain times of day, so this kind of festival allows you to hear each raga in its proper time. Noon July 23 through Noon July 24, 2016. http://ragaslive.org/
Nicole Oxendine, Memoria Que Comienza/Beginning Memory/North, LaNiña/East, LaMadre/South, LaReina/West & the CroneThrone, 2016. Photo courtesy of the Nicole Oxendine.
CROSSROADS: Magic + Matter Exhibition
Six pieces from current MFAIA-WA student Nicole Oxendine‘s FEMMedicine and Mi Otra Vida series are featured in the CROSSROADS: Magic + Matter exhibition at the Betty Mae Kramer Gallery. The Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland, curated the exhibition. May 20 through August 26, 2016.
Two Articles by Anne Riley
Interdisciplinary artist and MFAIA-WA Residency Assistant Anne Riley recently published her essay Įladzeeé: Pulse in the Wrist: Indigeneity and the Work of Emotional Labour in MICE Magazine, Issue 01, Invisible Labour, Spring 2016 examining Indigeneity, queer touch and emotional labour. Her Canada Council for the Arts blog post Time_Place_Space-Nomad: Silence as Resilience also shares her observations and experience at the 2015 Time_Place_Space: Nomad travelling lab-based residency that brought together over 25 artists to explore interdisciplinary and experimental practices while camping out together in Regional Victoria of Australia.
Image Left: Erica Gionfriddo in Elegy, which follows a woman who wakes up in the wilderness with no memories of her past. Photo: Eliot Gray Fisher. Image Right: Eliot Gray Fisher answers a video call from his mother in The Warriors: A Love Story. Photo: Lynn Lane.
ARCOS Interdisciplinary Performance
After catching up in person with MFAIA Program Director JuPong Lin when she came to see his commissioned performance installation at Connecticut College, alumnus Eliot Gray Fisher (MFAIA-WA ’15), has several upcoming projects this summer with ARCOS, the multimedia performance group he co-directs. First, he will lead sessions in interdisciplinary collaboration at the company’s summer workshop in Austin (May 29–June 4). The following week, Fisher will be a featured panelist on technology and performance at Dance/USA’s annual conference, during which ARCOS will also present a multimedia work as guests of Performa/Dance (June 10–11). The company will then present Elegy, a performance incorporating site-specific 360-degree videos at Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe (June 13–19). Kansas City International Theatre Festival will present ARCOS’ production The Warriors: A Love Story (July 14–23) before Fisher returns to residence at KHN Center for the Arts in Nebraska City to work on a transmedia performance, Domain, to premiere at Texas State University in the fall. Finally, early August will bring Fisher and ARCOS co-director Erica Gionfriddo to Billings for a multimedia, dance-theater collaboration with fellow Goddardite Jayme Green (MFAIA-WA ’16) and his choreographer colleague Krista Leigh Pasini.
ARCOS will present Hoaxers, a multimedia performance about identity and the internet, in Austin during Dance/USA’s annual conference. GIF: Eliot Gray Fisher
Nine Mountains Improv Weekend
Alumna Sky Elizabeth Halm (MFAIA-VT ‘11) is one of the producers and teaching artists at the upcoming June Improv weekend event in Western MA. In the spirit of interdisciplinary practice, this improv weekend explores how different art forms use improv and leaves room for the co-mingling of these forms into something new. This weekend retreat has the option for lodging and organic food, so friends can come from near and far to enjoy this time of exploration, play, and connection.
The Nine Mountains Improv Weekend in June: a weekend grassroots festival offering dances and workshops during the day and performances and activities at night. Join this opportunity to learn and practice ways of connecting and spontaneously; co-creating in community through experiencing and integrating various arts including vocalization, movement, upcycled clothing, music, theater, visual art and even improvisational cooking.
Work Exchange options available at $15 off per hour worked.
Email Hilary at hilary@ninemountain.com and mark your interest on your registration
Deposit of at least $50 is required to book your spot for the full weekend.
Link: To Register. For more info email Hilary at hilary@ninemountain.com
Paid in Full! by Anthony Chapin and Erin Lavelle. Photo: Steven Lang
Paid in Full!
Current MFAIA-WA student Erin Lavelle recently collaborated with Anthony Chapin on Paid in Full! a storefront installation reflecting on consumer responsibility in sweatshop labor. What are the true costs beyond the few dollars we spend? Who else is paying for these goods with their health, life, and safety? How can we make more compassionate and conscious choices? The installation was part of the Reflection: Made Here exhibition and was open to the public 24/7 for four months at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 8th Street, just steps from the downtown shopping district. December 2015 to March 2016.
Artist-in-Residence @ Things That Can Happen
MFAIA-WA Faculty Advisor Devora Neumark has been invited once again to Hong Kong, this time as Artist-in-Residence at the non-profit art space in the historic district of Sham Shui Po, Kowloon. While the details are still to be worked out, the one-month long residency (to take place sometime during the next 12 months) will focus on creating an ad hoc neighborhood wellness center.
Image Left: Indivisible’s May exhibit, Dowsing, featured work by Lou Watson, Mark Takiguchi, and Martha Schlitt. Image Right: Indivisible’s April exhibit featured Portland-based artist Victor Maldonado as his social-media alter ego Madmex. This experimental exhibition comprised a series of public interventions and events exploring the topics of agency, identity, migration, localism, displacement, exclusion and gentrification including Tacos Against Racism (pictured). Photos: Johanna Robinson
Indivisible
Alumna Christine Toth (MFAIA-VT ’07) launched a new residentially-based exhibition project, Indivisible, in April 2016. Using her home as a cultural palette, the project offers a space that prompts different considerations than that of a traditional gallery. Located in the Division Street neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, the home was built in 1884, a year after Portland connected to the national railroad network, and three years before the first bridge was built across the Willamette River. Among the first developments in the city, the house now is witness to the area’s recent rapid wave of construction: it is uniquely situated in both location and time to connect the art community and the neighborhood community, as an intervention on a neighborhood that is becoming unrecognizable. Converting 500 square feet of her home into a gallery/viewing area, each monthly show runs for four consecutive Saturdays. In June, Indivisible welcomes Seattle-based artist Gretchen Frances Bennett, opening June 4th, with artist reading June 24th. July 2nd opens with Portland artists Vicki Lynn Wilson and John Larsen.
Image Left: City of Vancouver Public Art Program Event Flyer. Image Right: Still from Barnacle City by Laiwan. Photo: John Fukushima.
Coastal City Platforms Launches in Vancouver, Canada
MFAIA-WA Faculty Advisor Laiwan will launch her new videowork Barnacle City on June 13, 2016, to screen among regular advertising on two large LED screens at Vancouver’s downtown corner of Robson and Granville Streets, the heart of what was once Cinema Row. Barnacle City is a mock sci-fi “tiny action” movie, featuring barnacles and Vancouver’s glass towers. Additional venues include the CBC Plaza on Hamilton St.; Telus Gardens on Georgia St.; the Terry Fox Plaza; the Vancity Theatre before each film screening and the Pacific Cinematheque, also before each film screening.
Through oceanic metaphors organic and alive, juxtaposed with current scenes and structures of Vancouver’s cityscape, Barnacle City visually experiments with playful and imaginative possibilities of a future city or a city that once had been, that is of a dream, a poem, of speculative fiction, perhaps alien.
Fifteen Artists have been commissioned to produce artworks for video screens, photomurals and transit shelters on the theme of Coastal City. A new series of temporary public art projects launched on May 16 with new works appearing monthly through October 2016. The City’s Public Art Program is marking its 25th anniversary with a series of two-dimensional artworks that celebrate and investigate the Coastal City – the border between land and sea, the designation of boundaries and life in a region near the shore, the changing land and ocean-scape, the influx of people and goods, the unique ecosystems, challenges and opportunities – the circumstances that make coastal cities such as Vancouver unique. The 15 artworks are a diverse mix of unique artistic approaches ranging from digital and painterly abstraction to documentation of urban faces and spaces; from highlighting lifestyle choices to social alienation; and from specific histories to imaginative interventions. All are rooted in this specific place.
Stills from All That Remains. Photo: Mark McBeth Projects.
Joy Cosculluela’s All That Remains
Alumna Joy Cosculluela (MFAIA-WA ‘14) shared photos from the Wayfinding Performance Group’s successful May 21st performance of All that Remains at NohSpace 2840 Mariposa St, San Francisco, CA., which navigates the spaces between loss and resilience. Performers explore how personal loss connects us with loss on a larger global scale. By working in a non-linear way, the performance is like entering a house with many rooms. Each room has its own treasure and audience is free to respond and imagine what that room is saying and how it feels to them. Upcoming performance this June as part of a larger theatre festival provides Joy an exciting opportunity to distill this 1-hour multi-layered work into a 15-minute piece. How does a smaller piece contain the wholeness of the larger body? What’s removed and what’s expanded? Stay tuned!
Choreographic scores & artistic direction: Joy Cosculluela
Collaborators/ Performers: Jessica Brown, Tomoko Hiraoka, Bricine Mitchell.
Image credit: Jessica Kuszaj
Premiere of Adara Meyers’ Play, Birds
Current student Adara Meyers’ new play, Birds, will premiere alongside Kate Snodgrass’ The Last Bark and Charlotte Meehan’s Beesus & Ballustrada as part of Sleeping Weazel’s festival, The Birds and the Bees. The trio of plays is being billed as: “by turn sexy and surreal, heady and somber, set in landscapes ranging from a therapist’s office and the pigeon-strewn streets of Manhattan to a post-apocalyptic forest in Brooklyn. Together it makes for an equally heartbreaking and hilarious evening of theatre that lives somewhere between the mind of Samuel Beckett and soul of Tina Fey.” Plaza Black Box Theatre Boston Center for the Arts 539 Tremont Street, Boston, June 2–4 and 9–11, 2016. Get Tickets.
Adara Meyers’ Music and Text Collaboration with Leaha Maria Villarreal
New York-based composer Leaha Maria Villareal’s Never Not (for voice and chamber ensemble) features set text from an early version of Meyers’ play, Birds. The work received its Los Angeles premiere at the LA Philharmonic as part of 21c Liederabend (Beth Morrison Projects and VisionIntoArt, in collaboration with the LA Philharmonic). Wild Rumpus originally commissioned it in 2012.
BryceDance. Photo: Art Heffron Photography
BryceDance The Space Between at The Tank
Alumna Heather Bryce (MFAIA-VT ‘14) recently appeared in the Bryce Dance performance at the Tank in New York City on May 26 and 27, 2017 and had the opportunity to perform with Carbon Mirage once more for their final show.
Heather’s transition from Vermont to NYC has her working as a Teaching Artist and Administrator for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as a Teaching Artist for the Center for Arts Education. Bryce Dance Company is learning rep, making new work, and getting ready for more performances come fall and spring.
Link: For more information about the company and upcoming performance information.
Cara Hagan. Photo: Robert Gelber
Public Presentations and Research
Alumna Cara Hagan (MFAIA-WA ’12) premiered a new rhythm tap work entitled Tiny Potato on the Train with students of the Appalachian State University Dance Studies program for the annual spring dance concert in mid-April. Cara presented her newest durational performance work, The Body in the Breath (In Color!) at the Interlude Series in Asheville, NC April 24th. And between May 5th and May 7th, Cara presented various improvised works for the On Site/ In Sight festival in Winston Salem, NC, for which she was also a co-organizer. For the summer, Cara is focusing most of her energy on research on Cultural Reassignment in African American dance forms, made possible through an Appalachian State University Research Council Grant.
Learning how to Create Cantastoria in Kolkata
A group of 15 gathered in the newly inaugurated Augusto Boal auditorium at the home of Jana Sanskriti at Badu, Kolkata to spend 6 days learning how to create Cantastoria— a form of picture story performance— and how to build giant puppets and bring them to life through dynamic image theatre, with the workshop facilitated by current MFAIA-WA student Tamara Lynne. Photos courtesy of Tamara Lynne.
Living Stages partners with Right 2 Survive to perform at Pitch-a-Tent June 10, 2016
With support from Oregon Humanities, Living Stages creative director Tamara Lynne has been working with members of Right to Survive, a Portland-based organization created by and for Portland’s houseless community, to develop theatre for a series of interactive neighborhood forums on the topics of home, housing and homelessness. The first community forum will be at Pitch-a-Tent on June 10th at 6:00, the eve of the Rose Festival Parade and only night in Portland where camping on the street is legally allowed. Audience members will be invited to step into the action and propose their own ideas about how to address the issue of housing and homelessness in Portland.
Working with Apano. Photos courtesy of Tamara Lynne.
What Is a Place?
In partnership with OPAL/Bus Riders Unite, and Portland Tenants United, Tamara Lynne is coordinating community conversations along the Powell/Division corridor to engage neighborhood residents in dialogue and storytelling about the intersection of housing and transit justice. Stories and images generated during the process will culminate in a public performance at the Jade Night Market, August 27th, 2016 at Portland Community College, SE Campus. Thank you to the support of APANO, Jade District, Division Midway Alliance for Community Improvement, Transportation for America and Kresge Foundation.
Patricia R. Corbett and son. Photo courtesy of Queer Black Voices.
Queer Black Voices
Current MFAIA-VT Student Patricia R. Corbett is featured in the latest edition of Queer Black Voices — Be Seen. Be Heard. Be Free.
Paul Ray (left) and Jayme Green (right) provide a demonstration for Paul Ray’s 2014 MFA-IA Portfolio Presentation, Port Townsend, Wa. Photo courtesy of Paul Ray.
Alumnus Paul Ray (MFAIA-WA ’14) and current MFAIA-WA student Jayme C Green have both been accepted into the Society of American Fight Directors Teacher Certification Workshop for summer of 2016. This workshop is a recognized teacher training program being held at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. This workshop is sanctioned by the Society of American Fight Directors as the recognized system of teaching Stage Combat in regional theater in North America.
Still from Threads. Photos: Goddard College.
Anjali Austin at the Aspen Fringe Festival
Alumna Anjali Austin (MFAIA-WA ‘15) will be participating in the Artist Residency, as well as showcasing Threads: A Multi Disciplinary Exploration of Art and Culture at the Aspen Fringe Festival, June 6 to 13, 2016.
Created and performed by former Dance Theatre of Harlem member Anjali Austin, this work “taps her multi-disciplinary talents – from dramatic spoken word, to spirituals sung a cappella to “dance” that is more pedestrian than balletic – and weaves a provocative spell.” –Herald Tribune. Incorporating dance, song and story, Threads explores African-American and Native-American experiences during a time in history when their existence, contributions to society, and cultural and professional achievements were stunted and devalued.
Yvonne Rainer’s TRIO A
Alumni Pat Catterson (MFAIA-VT-’09) and Mark O’Maley (MFAIA-VT-’13) recently collaborated with original Judson Dance Theater member Yvonne Rainer on remounting her TRIO A (1966) set on students in the dance department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University this past April. Pat served as a ‘transmitter’ of the work for the students and Mark, an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, was the lighting designer.
