Events for November

Body Music Mini-Festival

Sunday, November 1, 1:00–5:00pm
Pendleton Room
Michigan Union
530 South State Street

The Body Music Mini-Festival celebrates body music traditions from around the world by bringing together national, regional, and campus groups to perform and teach diverse body music traditions.  Keith Terry performs and emcees an afternoon of performances and workshops that will end with an open mic.

Full Information here

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Lunch & Body Music Workshop with Keith Terry

Monday, November 2, 12:00–2:00pm
Kuenzel Room
Michigan Union
530 South State Street

Have you ever wondered how artistic expression can be channeled into other facets of your life, both work and play?  Come witness internationally-renowned artist Keith Terry talk about and demonstrate how the tenets of body music are applicable to every-day tasks that we all encounter in the home and in the boardroom, including team work and leading, public presentations, relationship management, and confidence building. The event will consist of a brown-bag lunch and an interactive workshop, so get ready to get down! Free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided.

Hosted by Arts Enterprise

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Arts & (Incarcerated) Bodies

Tuesday, November 3, 7:00pm
Stamps Auditorium
Walgreen Drama Center
1226 Murfin Avenue

Bodies are incarcerated everywhere, in many ways – in jails, illness, war zones, dangerous neighborhoods, dangerous families – with emotional, psychological, intellectual, physical, and spiritual effects on the individuals incarcerated. What role do the arts play when bodies – people – are incarcerated?

Can engagement with the arts help undo some of the effects of incarceration? Can the arts help the unincarcerated (or less incarcerated) view the more incarcerated differently, help us think more clearly or compassionately about types of incarceration, and effects? Can the arts bring home how each member of any society is implicated in the incarceration of other citizens?How might incarceration affect the art-making of the incarcerated – both process and product?

Join us for an unforgettable evening of performance, exhibition, and conversation about these and other questions with four consummate artist/activists who have worked with the variously incarcerated for decades.

Buzz Alexander – U-M Professor of English, is Founder and Member of the Prison Creative Arts Project, which has engaged thousands of Michigan prisoners in writing and the plastic arts since 1990. Buzz and Janie Paul curate the Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners.   For more information

Jon Deak – Associate Principal Bassist with the New York Philharmonic since 1973 and a prominent composer of contemporary chamber pieces, Jon Deak also commits himself to helping students in New York’s most troubled schools express themselves through musical composition.
Read an interview with Jon Deak about the N.Y. Philharmonic’s Very Young Composer’s Program
Listen to Jon Deak talk with NPR about the Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea

Janie Paul – U-M Professor of Art & Design and Social Work, Janie Paul is a member of the Prison Creative Arts Project and a co-curator of PCAP’s annual Exhibitions of Art by Michigan Prisoners.  Professor Paul has dedicated much of her life to bringing art-making opportunities to adolescents and adults in Michigan’s prisons, and to underserved students in the Detroit Public Schools.  For more information

Josh White, Jr. – Renowned singer-songwriter, actor, and activist, and son of the legendary Josh White. For more information.

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Queer Art and Censorship after the Culture Wars, Richard Meyer

Wednesday, November 4, 5:10pm
Room 2104
Art & Architecture Building
2000 Bonisteel Blvd.

The “culture wars” that erupted over arts funding in the 1980s and 1990s were all about bodies in art –   the depiction and deployment of bodies and of sexuality in artistic works.  Sometimes religious symbols were also in play (most memorably, perhaps, in Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ”); always, however, religious beliefs and attitudes were at issue, whether or not their role was blatant or claimed. 

USC art historian Richard Meyer, author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford, 2002), addresses some of the ongoing effects of the culture wars on arts funding, sexuality, and religion.  Meyer will consider several queer artists whose work has been censored since the late 1990s in local and state contexts, and will address the suppression of sexually explicit art from within the gay and lesbian communities and from without.

Following Meyer’s presentation, Professors Holly Hughes, Carol Jacobsen, Petra Kuppers, and Robin Wilson will respond.

Richard Meyer is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Director of the Contemporary Project and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California.   He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford University Press: 2002), and co-author, with Anthony Lee, of Weegee and Naked City (University of California Press: 2008).  Last year, he curated “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered” for the Jewish Museum in New York and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.  With Catherine Lord, he has just completed a survey text titled Art and Queer Culture, 1885-present which will appear in Phaidon’s “Themes and Movements” series.

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Arts & Bodies ArtsLab

Thursday & Friday, November 5–6, 9:00am–4:30pm
Video & Performance Studio
Duderstadt Center
2281 Bonisteel Blvd.

The ArtsLab is an intensive, experimental, experiential exploration of the interrelationships between human arts and human bodies worldwide. Faculty and students from Architecture; Art & Design; Engineering; English; Kinesiology; Music, Theatre & Dance; and Psychiatry have collaborated using disciplines as diverse as robotics, movement "fingerprint" analysis, and charcoal drawing to create a set of unforgettable experiences. Free and open to the public, the ArtsLab takes full advantage of the sophisticated multi-media capacity of the black-box Video Studio.
Space is limited: register early.

For more information on each session: ArtsLab

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Sleight of Hand: How Bodies Fool Minds

Thursday, November 5, 5:10pm
Michigan Theater
603 East Liberty Street

Penny Stamps Lecture Series: Jamy Ian Swiss

With support from Arts on Earth.

"Magic" is a performance art in which the body's role is often underappreciated. "Sleight of hand," "legerdemain," and "prestidigitation" — all terms for performance magic — point to the role of the hand in fooling the mind. And in fact, mastery of sleight of hand requires relentless physical practice comparable to that required to master a musical instrument. But like all performance artists, magicians use their full bodies, both as a property of performance, and in the service of deception and illusion. According to Penn and Teller, master magician Jamy Ian Swiss "makes one understand what a terrifying art form pure sleight of hand can be." But in this original and surprise-laden presentation, Swiss provides a behind-the-scenes view of the ways in which the magician employs the entire body electric to determine what we see.

For more information about this speaker and others, visit the Penny Stamps Distinguished Visitor Series site.

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Arts & Bodies ArtsLab

Thursday & Friday, November 5–6, 9:00am–4:30pm
Video & Performance Studio
Duderstadt Center
2281 Bonisteel Blvd.

The ArtsLab is an intensive, experimental, experiential exploration of the interrelationships between human arts and human bodies worldwide. Faculty and students from Architecture; Art & Design; Engineering; English; Kinesiology; Music, Theatre & Dance; and Psychiatry have collaborated using disciplines as diverse as robotics, movement "fingerprint" analysis, and charcoal drawing to create a set of unforgettable experiences. Free and open to the public, the ArtsLab takes full advantage of the sophisticated multi-media capacity of the black-box Video Studio.
Space is limited: register early.

For more information on each session: ArtsLab

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From Fear to the Sublime: Art-Making and the Nervous System

Friday, November 6, 12:40–1:30pm
Pierpont Commons, Boulevard Room
2101 Bonisteel Blvd

In this lunchtime presentation, Olsen will discuss ways of creating ease in the nervous system as support for creative thinking and making. Olsen's work is based on new findings about the evolutionary heritage of the nervous system.

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

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Keith Terry & SLAMMIN Concert

Friday, November 6, 7pm
Hill Auditorium
825 North University Ave.

Using any surface for its rhythmic possibilities, Keith Terry "claps his hands, rubs his palms, finger-pops, stamps his feet, brushes his soles, slaps his butt and belly, pops his cheek, whomps his chest, skips and slides, sings and babbles and coughs, building his music out of a surprisingly varied register of sounds and clever rhythmic variations" (Village Voice).
A percussionist/rhythm dancer whose work encompasses music, dance, theater, and performance art, Keith Terry brings together an artistic vision that defies easy categorization. As a trained percussionist and self-defined "body musician," Terry explores, blends, and bends traditional and contemporary rhythmic, percussive, and movement possibilities. This special performance for families will leave every member of the audience creatively exploring new sounds that they can generate with the oldest instrument in the world — the human body.

Family concert 7:00–8:00 pm, $10.00 and under!
Presented in collaboration with the University Musical Society.

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Keith Terry & SLAMMIN Concert in Detroit

Saturday, November 7, 7:30pm
Marlene Boll Theatre
YMCA
1401 Broadway, Detroit, MI 48170

For tickets call: 313-223-2751

Using any surface for its rhythmic possibilities, Keith Terry "claps his hands, rubs his palms, finger-pops, stamps his feet, brushes his soles, slaps his butt and belly, pops his cheek, whomps his chest, skips and slides, sings and babbles and coughs, building his music out of a surprisingly varied register of sounds and clever rhythmic variations" (Village Voice).
A percussionist/rhythm dancer whose work encompasses music, dance, theater, and performance art, Keith Terry brings together an artistic vision that defies easy categorization. As a trained percussionist and self-defined "body musician," Terry explores, blends, and bends traditional and contemporary rhythmic, percussive, and movement possibilities. This special performance for families will leave every member of the audience creatively exploring new sounds that they can generate with the oldest instrument in the world — the human body.

Presented in collaboration with the University Musical Society and YMCA Metro Detroit YARTS

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Fear of Power: The Distortion of Women's Bodies in Science Fiction Film

Wednesday, November 18, 11:30am–1:00pm
Room 1180, Duderstadt Center
2281 Bonisteel Blvd.

The relationship between media images and women’s perceptions of themselves has been evident for decades. Further, these images have contributed to misperceptions that ultimately hinder achievement and equality. In literature, television, music and film, women and girls have been subjected to stereotyping that contributes to a range of results including physical abuse, an almost impenetrable glass ceiling and appallingly low numbers of women in many areas of engineering and the sciences. The program will consist of a viewing of film clips and a luncheon discussion held for one hour and a half during November. The goal is to engage a wide audience in a discussion of film images of powerful women in science fiction and to consider if the root of current images and attitudes can, in part, attributed to these films.

This program will examine a series of “B” films released in the 50’s and 60’s that equate powerful women with distorted, demented or simply evil creatures. The program will feature clips from several films including “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman,” the “Wasp Woman” and others. In addition, more recent films, including, “Contact” and “Alien” will be examined for images that may or may not offer more favorable depictions of women.

Hosted by Women in Science and Engineering (WISE)

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