Category: Faculty Project

In the summer of 2019 I travelled to Prague, Czech Republic to participate in an exhibition featuring my work on Macbeth as produced by The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in 2017. My work was chosen for this juried exhibition to represent the United States by members of The United States Institute of Theatre Technology. Other American set, lighting, and costume designers included Todd Rosenthal, Anna Kuzmanic, Gregory Gale, Marcus Doshi, Ehrard Rohm, and Tyler Micoleau. This trip was funded by the IPPCR and School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies faculty travel support. Held once every four years since 1967, the Prague Quadrennial is the world’s largest event in the field of scenography and offers a competitive presentation of contemporary performance design — including costume, stage, lighting, sound design, and theatre architecture for dance, opera, drama, site-specific, multi-media performances, and performance art. Over 80 countries were represented in 2019. The exhibit is now hosted on The USITT website and be found at http://pq19.usitt.org/professional/.

At the exhibit in Prague I had the opportunity to view work of stage designers from all over the world and to attend dozens of live performance events at the exhibit pavilion as well as throughout the city of Prague. When I returned to The University of Maryland in the fall I created several exhibits for the students of TDPS and gave an hour-long presentation to the faculty and twenty MFA Design students.

We set out to create a site-specific dance performance throughout the UNESCO World Heritage site Castillo San Cristóbal in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Having pioneered and created site-specific dance performance for over 25 years, this project would mark the 13^th distinct full-scale iteration of our long-standing series A Curious Invasion, the 22^nd site-specific/site-adaptive work overall, and the second at a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our collaborators were Yanira Martinez and Héctor Rivera of the National Park Service, which administers the two historic forts in San Juan. TDPS/MFA Dance graduate Allen Xing and his husband, Dennis Chyba, who have a home in San Juan and originally introduced us to the site, served as local liaisons to the Castillo and local dance artists.

Rehearsals and performances from May 25-June 2, 2019 were free and open to the public. The cast was comprised of three professional dance artists, all long-time PWDT (PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER) company members, and three current TDPS students. In addition to the local population, the audience was comprised of international tourists visiting the Castillo as part of their sightseeing activities during their cruise ship’s stop in San Juan. This most unusual arrangement led to a near constant flow of spectators throughout the days.  Many people were eager to engage in conversation with us about what we were doing, including commenting on their own connections to the University of Maryland. As a result, hundreds of people were exposed to the work as a UMD/TDPS project, some catching glimpses in passing, many staying for an entire rehearsal and/or performance of the dance.

This marking the second such project at a UNESCO World Heritage Site for us, we are very interested in keeping this connection alive and plan to create works at UNESCO sites in the future. Our connection to the National Park Service has already lead to new creative relationships at historic forts in the Washington, DC/Maryland/Virginia area and beyond. In fact, this spring we received a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council to create a new work at Fort McHenry in Baltimore that would expand on our research in Puerto Rico.

This course was taught on location and virtually by long time collaborators Zvi Sahar and Leslie Strongwater. This course, “Puppet Cinema: When Film and Puppetry Meet on Stage” was the first employment of the IPCCR World Outreach Classrooms to use technology to bring in a teaching artist from abroad over an entire semester. Using puppetry and live-feed cinematography, this course explored the question of how we tell stories. Students investigated practical and theoretical studies to employ these multi-disciplinary mediums with the understanding that it takes a delicate balance to juggle two very different but complimentary mediums. The class was part lecture, part studio work. Both the Midterm and Final Exams were performance/film based. The focus of this course was on how to best integrate the elements of theater, puppetry, object theater and cinematography onto a multidisciplinary performance with artistic synergy. By the end of this course, students became fluent in the PuppetCinema technique of animating objects, operating a live feed camera and presenting a multi-layered story on stage and screen.

In the Attic was developed through a devised ensemble process, which involved three undergraduate students, two graduate students, and three alumni from the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS). The piece, inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, focuses on a woman in the final moments of her life as she moves between resistance and acceptance. In the Attic integrates a language where movement, text, sound and visual elements are seamlessly interwoven to create a simple narrative. Touring the piece in Brazil involved six people. Leslie Felbain, TDPS faculty directed and performed. Alumni, Daniel Pinha designed the piece, and Alumni Kristy Leigh-Hall designed costumes. Undergraduate, Daniela Gomez was stage manager and production coordinator, Christina Banalopoulu PhD, was the dramaturg, Colleen Harris, adjunct/guest artist in TDPS was the composer and performed. Another production coordinator from Rio joined us in Brazil.Several other TDPS graduate and undergraduate students, as well as a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate in the School of Music were involved in the development of the piece, but to minimize costs, this tour was with a smaller core group of the ensemble company.

My research as a faculty member in our School focuses on the intersection between creative and healing arts, and applied theatre. This project is the central focus of my current research. In the Attic is a project that focuses on aging, illness, death and dying- the five daily reminders in Buddhism. The material to create the piece was derived from interviews and research with various populations who focus on these topics; hospitals, hospices, cancer support centers, and a wide variety of individuals. -A continued development of the piece, learning from the communities where the piece was presented in residency-Shared the process of developing work in this way with our School community-Created creative collaborations between TDPS and cultural institutions, a theatre company and a school in BrazilThe process of helping to develop the piece has been and will continue to have an impact on our TDPS community, our College and the University-Plans are in discussion with other units on campus to present the research and developments of the piece, and perhaps a performance.-We have been invited to an extensive tour through the Centro Cultural dos Correios throughout Brazil

My first book, Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba, was published by Duke University Press in 2012. The book is based on years of ethnographic research conducted in and about theatre artists and artistic culture in Cuba, and it was awarded Honorable Mention for the Best Book of 2012 by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). The IPCCR funded part of what was needed to hire a professional translator to convert the book into Spanish. Translation is a specialized skill. It is very difficult to do well, and it is exceptionally time consuming. Academic books are even more challenging, given the amount of detailed information, discipline specific terminology, and theoretical analysis. The English version of Trumpets in the Mountains contains 296 pages of content, with an additional 50 pages of front matter, bibliography, appendices, and index.

Translation is essential in order to share research about Cuba, since most Cubans do not speak or read English. This translation allows me to share the material with those who are the subjects of the book, as well as those who have collaborated with and assisted in the work for over 20 years. It will also make the research available for other Spanish speaking artists and scholars in the rest of Latin America and in Spain. I will be publishing it with a Cuban press so that the book is first distributed in Cuba. This element is important, since Cuban academics and theatre artists are often not able to travel off the island, and the cost of foreign press books is prohibitive for them even if they become available locally ($30 is the average monthly salary in Cuba).

The process of translation was very interesting, since one’s words, even in academic writing, can never be translated literally: interpretation, cultural nuance, linguistic differences by country, and author style must be adapted as accurately as possible.

The Spanish-language translator, Julio Durán, is a writer from Peru. He holds a Master’s degree in Literary Translation from Universidad Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona and also in Specialized Translation at Universidad Menendez Pelayo of Sevilla. He will be listed as the translator on the published version, titled: Trompetas en las Montañas: Teatro y la Politica de la Cultura Nacional en Cuba. I will be presenting the original book and its translation in November 2019 in Havana, Cuba, and also at an international conference in Baracoa, hosted by the University of Guantánamo. I am extremely grateful to the IPCCR for helping me complete this project. Without its support, I would not have been able to translate or publish the Spanish version of the book.

Whether you’re thinking about going, or know you are going to the V&A or other places in London, below are some essential things you need to know before you go. Overall, you must plan in advance and do background research on the people, places, and things you’ll be interacting with.

Six days at the Panpapanpalya Fest in Adelaide brought a wealth of classes and performances; it lived up to its name, which is an Aboriginal word that encompasses the four main themes of the Congress: dance, gathering, generations and learning.  I danced in the opening night performances in the duet, “Last Good Thing”, with Stevie Oakes and choreographed by Elizabeth Shea and received many appreciative commentary following. This festival was unique in its blend of scholarly presentations, participatory workshops, performances and community gatherings.  I participated in a variety of movement classes and workshops which emphasized cultural forms and traditions such as: 

• Contemporary Māori and Pacific Dance
• Inclusive Dance, 
• Indigenous Contemporary Dance/Cultural Dance
• Homing Device
• Whakatauki in Motion: ‘Kia mau koe ki ngā kupu o ou tupuna’

I also was able to attend two scholarly sessions which brought a wealth of ideas:

• Teaching dance through the humanities and the humanities through dance: Two case studies
• A new approach to teaching Korean dance traditions to diverse students
• The Rebozo Dance:  A tapestry of Mexican traditional knowledge
• Te mana o te rākau kauri (the authority of the Kauri tree)
  • I connected in particular to the last speaker in particular, Dr. Tia Reihana-Morunga.  We are continuing our working relationship, building a creative project that includes students from both of our institutions. 

The Panpapanpalya Festival coincided with the opening of the Adelaide Dance Festival, and I had an incredibly intense experience witnessing the Australian Dance Theatre at the Dunstan Playhouse. After the festival, I traveled to New Zealand to establish a connection to the Dance Program at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. 

I requested travel and accommodation funding for research that I conducted and for lectures that I gave in Europe during the summer of 2018. Specifically, I requested funding for a trip to Europe from June 15^th to July 15^th, 2018. The time frame for my request was largely the product of the scheduled dates for my lectures, which included an invited lecture at the Freie Universität, Berlin on June 19^th followed by a presented paper at the IFTR Conference in Belgrade during the week of July 9^th.  But I also wanted to take advantage of the time between the two lectures to do archival research in the Dada collections held at the Berlinische Galerie. Those collections include the “Raoul Hausmann Archiv,” which is part of the Berlinische Galerie’s general holdings on the avant-gardist Hannah Höch. The Hausmann Archiv contains material directly pertinent to – and providing context for – the events that the Berlin Dadaists orchestrated on April 1, 1919 when much to the astonishment of the local authorities, Hausmann and his fellow Dadaist Johannes Baader declared a“Dada Republic” in a suburb of Berlin – a declaration taken seriously enough that authorities mobilized the local militia.  I addressed this rather infamous April fool’s day hoax in both of my lectures, and the lectures themselves provided the basis for a chapter in the new book that I am now completing. That chapter examines the performative foundations of calculated hoaxes that masquerade as acts of sedition, and it is the fourth of five planned chapters of a book tentatively titled Performance Beyond the Pale: Radical Acts and Bodies in Extremis. Support from IPCCR thus enabled me to attend the IFTR conference, give the invited lecture in Berlin, and complete the forth chapter in my current book project. 

I am enormously grateful for the IPCCR grant that funded my trip to Dublin and London. It was an incredible gift to be able to reach beyond our borders for inspiration, collaboration and community. At the conclusion of this grant period, I have gained: research and inspiration for my next play, international connections with a possibility for future collaborations, and relationships with Irish theatre professionals which I am able to immediately bring back to our TDPS students. 

The goals from my project, and how I have met them: 

1. To do first-person research for my new play about the Irish diaspora, as inspired by my fathers emigration from Dublin: while in Dublin, my primary goal was to soak up the city by walking and wandering, so that I will be able to use it more truthfully as a setting for my new play. I also ingested as much history from the locals as I could, by visiting The Little Museum of Dublin and going on a literary walking tour. I also was able to visit for the first time many significant sites from my family’s heritage. For example, I visited the building where my great-grandfather worked in a tailor shop and the building where my great-grandmother worked in a restaurant. I was able to see, first person, how the two buildings faced each other across O’Connell Street, right near where Nelson’s Pillar used to stand, and could better picture how my great-grandfather first met his future wife during his lunch breaks. During all of this, I jotted down fragmentary ideas for my new play’s characters, theme and structure. Thanks to this IPCCR-funded trip, I now have a strong research foundation for the play, and I will begin to write it this summer. 

2. To learn more about the new play development process in Dublin and London, and to further relationships with collaborators in those cities: I saw 8 new plays during my 9-day trip (please see list below), and each of them has inspired my work—either through their strengths or weaknesses. I was reminded that it is glaringly obvious when a production is not truthful or committed, and that the strongest plays are messy, honest, and performed with full-throttle intensity. Additionally, the buzzing community that each of these theatres has cultivated in their bar/restaurants both before and after performances reminded me that the most rewarding theatre is that which builds community. I also had the opportunity to meet with four top theatre professionals in Dublin: Selina Cartmell (Artistic Director of The Gate Theatre), Annabelle Comyn (Artistic Director of Hatch Theatre Co), Jesse Weaver (Literary Director of The Abbey) and Jim Culleton (Artistic Director of Fishamble Theatre Co). From those meetings, I gained a more in-depth view of the Dublin theatre community, including the current controversy over the Abbey’s new artistic leadership and slant towards foreign artists. 

I established contact and held discussions with researcher Dr. Eeva Anttila regarding current research in process in Finland to combat inequities in how segments of the Finnish population gain access to the arts. She provided details of methodology and published information regarding the current status of the nationally funded “ArtsEqual Project” research findings. Dr. Anttila also invited me to the Community and Art Symposium held while I was in town. This symposium included presentations by professional artists, international scholars, and current graduate students in the University of the Arts University Theater Academy who engage with community arts projects and research both within Finland and globally.

I also conducted participant-observer ethnographic research on Raisa Ekoluoma’s adult and middle school community theater classes at the Community College of Mikkeli. This experience led to forthcoming plans to develop a community arts dance-theater curriculum that focuses on equity and implementing critical pedagogy methods in its development as part of my continued research. Working with Mrs. Ekoluoma, a master practitioner and fellow Laban-Bartenieff movement analyst furthers my research inquiries on the intersections of race, movement analysis, and inclusivity in the creative processes and studio classes.

I learned of a new area of research that is developing in researching community art programing. This project helped me consider lines of inquiry along with other scholars around why community art has not been as thoroughly addressed in arts research. I also learned of the potential connection of my critical theory work with this conversation about researching community arts programs. I learned that community arts programming is a place in which a broader diversity of participants and challenges can be reached in examining issues of inequity in the arts.