ArtsLab

Thursday, November 5,
9:30 am – 4:30pm

Friday, November 6,
9:30 am – 5:00pm

Duderstadt Center’s Video Studio

Map of North Campus
Map of the Duderstadt Center

Arts on Earth’s ArtsLabs are designed to enable participants to learn through artful engagement: moving in directed ways, playing with visual and aural experiments, witnessing dramatic work from varied perspectives, and in other ways experiencing through the arts.

Designed and led by top faculty and students from the arts, engineering, psychiatry, kinesiology, English, linguistics, and other disciplines, ArtsLabs are a rare, often-surprising, exhilarating opportunity in arts-driven, experiential education for adults.

ArtsLabs are free and open to the public. Space is limited, however, so registration is strongly recommended. REGISTER HERE

Thursday, November 5

9:30 – 12:30 From the London Eye to the cancer cell: How the arts mediate bodily experience of environments around and within

Petra Kuppers, Sophia Lycouris, Stefanie Cohen and friends

How do bodies negotiate and respond to urban spaces, and how can artists collaborate with urban planners? How do different physical supports affect our experience of the world around us? What are the ethical boundaries of sci-art - of transgenic art practice that creates new living cells artfully, of the use of microorganisms as co-creators, of cancer cell images as objects of beauty? U-M Professor of English, Women's Studies, Dance and Theatre, Petra Kuppers; Director of the Graduate Research School, Edinburgh College of Art, Sophia Lycouris; Ann-Arbor-based artist and movement facilitator Stefanie Cohen; English PhD student Jina Kim, independent artist Corey Gearhart and U-M Art and Design lecturer Lisa Steichmann explore these and other questions about arts and bodies, bodies and perception, in a variety of media, including video, sound, guided movement, book art and participatory performance installation.

1:30 – 4:30 Collisions of intention and improv: Clowning around with “art”chitecture

Malcolm Tulip (Theatre & Drama), Mick Kennedy (TCAUP), students of Physical Theatre (Clown) Thtremus 371 & Clown School: Deja La Boberia Arch 432

We move within and between spaces all day, every day. Apartments, dorms, private homes, classrooms, labs, offices, lobbies, gardens, stores, restaurants, movie theaters, performance halls — spaces designed with or without intention to shape activities and consciousness. Our bodies’ interactions with all of those spaces affect us on multiple levels. Our sense of ourselves in our bodies, our physical and emotional comfort, our sense of satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure are shaped by our movements in space. The fact that these effects are often subliminal does not lessen, and might actually strengthen, their power. When we allow ourselves to move with sensitivity towards spaces — as they were intended or contrary to intended use — we intensify our kinetic experience and awareness gained.

This exploration of the architecture of theatrical space is designed to provoke an awareness of the collaborations and confrontations we have in, within and without space in our daily journeys between awakening and sleep.

Theatre artist Malcolm Tulip, architect Mick Kennedy, and their students will invite us to observe, share and participate in the latest stage of their research; an ongoing improvisation of movement and place which has its roots in the explorations of: Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus, and Jacques Lecoq and Krikor Belekian at The Laboratoire d'Étude de Mouvement, École Jacques Lecoq. The artchitects and clowns invite us into a set of collisions between space and form, intention and improvisation, between art and bodies.

Friday, November 6

9:30 - 12:30 The Space of Language / The Eye of Music

Thylias Moss, Laine Stranahan, Ellen Rowe, Mark Kirschenmann, and students

The Space of Language: dedicated to an exploration of some of the possibilities of co-authorship

From within the womb until the day we die we are awash in language. The medium of some of the most painful wounds humans inflict on each other, language is also an artistic medium which we use in endlessly inventive ways to transport ourselves and each other aesthetically, emotionally, morally, and intellectually well beyond the normal human run.

Physically — for it must be physically — how does language work on us? How are its effects produced? In this participatory exploration, faculty and students plumb many facets of this question. Through a multimedia presentation of linguistic shapes, sounds, and modes of delivery, participants will see, hear, and feel world languages in many forms. Immersed in this tour of the Space of Language, participants will co-createan original composition whose boundaries span the realms of literature, movement, linguistics, science, and visual art, experiencing the multidimensional effects of language with heightened awareness. The resulting collaborative work will be recorded and made available for post-event circulation.

The Eye of Music

As we know, music is a language, and it’s often used to convey impressions of movement that can reveal individuality as tellingly as a fingerprint. How might our own movement sound? Professor Ellen Rowe, Chair of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation and students from the Creative Arts Orchestra answer this question for all who wish to know. Improvising on the movement of individuals and groups before them in the studio, these musicians deliver a musical impression revealing the interactions of physical movement and musical thought.

1:30 – 3:00 Line/Perspective: Theater and perception

Jerald Schwiebert and Gregory Wakefield

While we’re watching a play, we’re acutely aware of the effects of the unfolding drama on our feelings: we see, we hear, we feel, we’re actively engaged. We’re likely not aware, however, of how our physical position in relation to the action affects our response to the drama. How would sitting on the other side of the theater affect our experience, or standing among the actors, or, even, standing in an actor’s shoes? Exploring these questions reveals a great deal about the relationship between our perceptual apparatus and our emotional and intellectual responses.

This session make extensive use of arts technology to enable participants to experience a play, and their reactions to it, from all of these different perspectives. The 75-minute play — to be performed by Theatre students — is “Line,” by Israel Horovitz. Having played at the 13th Street Theatre in NYC since 1974, “Line” is the longest running play in Manhattan. Running about 75 minutes, “Line” portrays five characters waiting behind a white line (a piece of white tape on the floor being the entire set). Throughout the show, they battle for “first place,” eventually using deception, sex and violence to try to land the top spot.

As Theatre students perform the play, ArtsLab participants will experience the play through shifting aural and visual perspectives, gaining insight into the interaction of aural and visual perspective and response.

3:00 – 5:00 Arts & brains: Neural development through creative work and problem-solving

Amy Chavasse and members of her Performance Improvisation class, Ed Sarath and members of the Creative Arts Ensemble, guest artists Lisa Gonzales (Columbia College Chicago, The Architects- an Improvisation Dance Collective) and Andrea Olsen, professor of dance and environmental studies at Middlebury College, author of Body and Earth and BodyStories.

Throughout its evolution, the human nervous system has been shaped by creative work and problem-solving. Among the earliest artifacts of homo sapiens are visual art and musical instruments; creative work and the arts have been integral to the development and definition of the human species. This session uses movement, “brain theater,” film, lecture, live music, improv, and discussion to help participants learn and feel and then analyze, with faculty direction, the arts/brains/bodies/creativity connections that have defined our species.

Participants are invited to make masks and launch the session with a leap into "Brain Theater", an 11 minute sonically guided improvisation exploration of play and memory. Andrea Olsen will perform a solo, "On Close Observation" informed and inspired by Darwin's work and writings followed by a brief summary of context and impetus. The full group will engage the audience in improvisational exercises that promote collaboration, connecting to questions about choice and adaptability when one is tacking back and forth between the known and unknown.
Finally, the dance and music improvisation ensemble will compose new works mining the inflections and experiences from the session, making visible the ideas that have been stirred up around us.

U-M faculty planning group:

Tom Bray, Art & Design
Amy Chavasse, Dance
Phoebe Gloeckner, Art & Design
Melissa Gross, Kinesiology
Mick Kennedy, Architecture
Petra Kuppers, English, Women’s Studies, Dance, and Theatre
Thylias Moss, Art & Design, English
Sophia Psarra, Architecture
Ellen Rowe, Music
Jerry Schwiebert, Theatre
Monica Starkman, Psychiatry
Lisa Steichmann, Art & Design
Malcolm Tulip, Theatre
Gregory Wakefield, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Student planning group:

Max Artsis, BFA Theatre Performance
Brett Chalfin, Music
Rob Crozier, Music
Aidan Feldman, Dance, Music
Carrie Fisk, BFA Theatre Performance
Bridget Gabbe, BFA Theatre Performance
Josh Holcombe, Music
Molly Jones, Music
Jina Kim, English/Women's Studies
Richard Kim, Music
Louis Mario, BFA Theatre Performance
Nate May, BFA Jazz and Contemplative Studies
Brian McCorkle, U of M grad
Brian Rosenthal, BFA Theatre Performance
Jay Steichmann, PhD student, Digital Rhetoric, Michigan State University
Laine Stranahan, Linguistics
Melanie Wakefield, PhD Student, English
Torrey Wigfield, BFA Theatre Performance

Visiting faculty:

Stefanie Cohen, Independent artist, Ann Arbor

Corey Gearhart, Independent artist, Chicago

Lisa Gonzales, Professor of Choreography and Dance, Columbia College, Chicago

Sophia Lycouris, Director of the Graduate Research School, Edinburgh College of Art

Andrea Olsen, Professor of Dance and Environmental Studies, Middlebury College