By Clay Evans
Reprinted from CU Arts & Sciences Magazine

Four travelers flee to the mountains to escape a terrible plague — a Red Death. There they meet at an ancient, crumbling abbey and begin to share tales of mystery and imagination to pass the time.

A man plots deadly revenge against a friend he believes has betrayed him; hearing the beating of his victim’s heart, a murderer cannot bear the guilt of his crime; a prisoner awaits the awful torture of the Spanish Inquisition; a mansion tumbles into ruin from the weight of fear, madness and murder….

That intriguing mash-up of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous suspenseful stories is at the heart of University of Colorado Boulder theatre graduate student Hadley Kamminga-Peck’s new stage adaptation, “Tick, Tock, Poe,” which has been playing at schools and community centers this spring.

The program includes a 50-minute performance with CU-Boulder students Cole Cribari, Tucker Johnston, James Miller and Stacey Ryan and workshops focusing on Poe’s life, the creation of music for theatre, stage combat vs. real-life violence and the cycle of vengeance at the center of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

“I adapted the five Poe stories with a lot of help from the cast,” Kamminga-Peck says. “We really focused on what middle- and high-school students would understand.”

The production’s roots go all the way back to 2011, when Kamminga-Peck contacted local teachers via email to get a sense of what students might enjoy. They chose Poe — grisly and spooky as the stories are — over H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” and “Cyrano.”

“The set is definitely melancholy Victorian age, all gloom and doom,” she says. “But we’ve found some humor, too.”

For instance, there are flourishes of humor even in the grim “Tell-tale Heart” and while it’s not the sort of thing one might expect from Poe, the action is accompanied by music played on a ukulele. The instrument turns out to be a surprising fit, managing to sound both eerie and, at times, comical.

The show also plays “The Fall of the House of Usher” — the creepy tale of a man who has inadvertently killed his sister — for laughs.

“Roderick (Usher) is basically dying of emo” — the sort of overwrought melodrama sometimes attributed to teenagers — “and it’s hard not to make that funny,” Kamminga-Peck says.

The cast has fully embraced both the drama and the comedy.

“Wait – is this a show?” asked Tucker Johnson as he strummed a ukulele during one recent rehearsal. “I thought it was a cast party.”

The play features period costumes, a simple set — basically a trunk — and just a few props. But there is plenty of action, including some vigorous onstage fighting choreographed by Kamminga-Peck.

“We’ve had great responses from teachers,” she says. “They tell us what an inventive way it is to teach literature and violence prevention.”

“Tick, Tock, Poe” will continue to tour through the end of the spring semester. Anyone interested in scheduling a performance at a school, community center or senior center can contact Peg Posnick at cumoving@colorado.edu or 303-492-4336. The program is supported by a CU-Boulder Outreach Award through the Office for University Outreach.

By Clint Talbott
Reprinted from CU Arts & Sciences Magazine

Clara Boland didn’t fully appreciate coal’s role in her life until she did some digging. That meant going to Paonia, a small town in Western Colorado, which has mined coal for more than a century.

Boland’s aim was to create a short documentary film for a course on conveying climate science through film. Her journey began in Boulder, where young people called coal “yesterday’s fuel,” dirty and toxic.

Longtime Paonia residents like Alan Austin said it’s easy to “sit in our ivory towers and look down at coal miners.” Actual life in a coal town is not, he said, so black and white.

As Boyd Boland, Clara’s father, said on screen, coal fuels the American dream, providing good-paying jobs. “Without coal, I don’t think this community could survive.”

Boland acknowledges that burning coal produces greenhouse gases and harmful airborne particulates. “But when you’re here, those problems are somebody else’s problems.”

In the film’s final scene, Clara Boland strides across a small mountain of coal. She says that the North Fork Valley— a tightknit area that feels more distinctly western than the resort towns on the other side of McClure Pass—needs a “shift in thinking,” and that Paonians can create safe, new jobs in clean energy.

It is early February. Boland and her professor, Rebecca Safran of ecology and evolutionary biology, are guest speakers in a new course at the University of Colorado Boulder that aims to explore innovative, creative and effective ways to convey climate-change science and its implications.

That course, called “Inside the Greenhouse,” takes Safran’s concept and runs with it. It is team-taught by two faculty members: Beth Osnes and Maxwell Boykoff from theatre and dance and environmental studies, respectively.

These disciplines seldom rub elbows. But in this course, cross-disciplinary teaching—collaboratively analyzing issues from the disparate lenses of social science, natural science and the arts and humanities—is intentional.

Boland is addressing the class that hopes to learn from her, as she herself has learned. In retrospect, she says, her film’s conclusion might be a stretch. “I don’t think a community like Paonia can easily make such a huge shift.”

As Professor Safran noted, it is a challenge to convey scientific information on climate change in a way that “doesn’t just spell depression.” Osnes and Boykoff see that challenge and, have, from their respective disciplines, addressed it.

Disciplinary cross-pollination

Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, explains that cross-disciplinary interaction of two faculty members “creates opportunities for new scholarship, research, and creative works that may not happen in the absence of these courses.”

That description fits here: Osnes and Boykoff each has a distinguished academic record. Together, they make a synergistic powerhouse.

Besides teaching and researching in the Department of Theatre and Dance, Osnes, a former Fulbright Scholar, has a lead role in an award-winning 2011 documentary called “Mother: Caring For 7 Billion,” which features the contrasting lives of Osnes and an Ethiopian woman and which effectively frames the population explosion with these individual narratives.

Boykoff is the author of a 2011 book—“Who Speaks for the Climate?”—which has been called a “path-breaking” analysis of mass-media representations of climate science.  He is a fellow in CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and a senior visiting research associate in the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. His research has been cited in Science, Nature, The New York Times, CNN and Columbia Journalism Review.

Coached by these two experts, small groups of students enrolled in “Inside the Greenhouse” will create two “compositions”—original expressions ranging from “choreopoems” to a video montage.

After creating both compositions, each group will choose one to revise and polish, drawing from feedback from the class, the professors and an outside expert panel.

Then collectively, the whole class will create a 30- to 40-minute program—also called “Inside the Greenhouse”—which will include work generated by students and will feature excerpts from an on-stage interview with a “high-profile public figure who has been wrestling with questions regarding climate science, policy and the public.”

Brainstorming communication

That’s all yet to come. But on this day in class, the students observe Clara Boland’s work before describing their concepts for their own compositions.

One group, for instance, assembles at the front of the room and describes its concept: following a person who wastes energy all day. Then, the students say, the scenes will rewind, and the protagonist will make different choices—to conserve energy. At the end, there might be a message that each person can make easy, meaningful choices.

Osnes observes that in a short video, only one artistic device should be employed. That will help drive the point home, she suggests. Further, she notes, it’s not clear why the protagonist would change her behavior.

Perhaps the pivotal scene would involve a “drop-dead gorgeous guy” who’s conducting survey about energy usage. A dreamy dude, Osnes suggest, could motivate behavioral change.

Another group of students proposes a variation on a series of commercials from Liberty Mutual, an insurance company. The original commercials depict a series of selfless acts that appear contagious. The tagline is “Responsibility. What’s your policy?”

Boykoff, an expert in climate communication, says being overly earnest could be a “pitfall” that could keep the message from being effectively heard.

Osnes, whose expertise is communication from the stage, concurs: “If using clean energy doesn’t look like fun, that won’t work. Showing somebody freezing in a yurt won’t work.”

Before the class departs, Osnes challenges the students to commit fully to the project. “Let’s do this for real,” she says, emphasizing the point with a quotation from the poet Mary Oliver:

“What is it you’re going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Behind the scenes

Gordon Gamm suggests that such a learning environment fosters critical-thinking skills and enables academic disciplines to be enriched by perspectives from other disciplines.

Gamm is an attorney, but has “interests in a number of disciplines.” He was a philosophy major and taught high school honors math before becoming a lawyer.

He was in a Ph.D. program in communication science and linguistics after receiving his law degree. In law school, he studied comparative law—how legal systems in nations throughout the world resolve civil disputes.

In an interview, he highlights discipline myopia with the example of Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman who, while testifying before Congress, acknowledged that he had been wrong in subscribing to libertarianism for his entire economic career. The evidence of the 2008 economic collapse convinced him that markets are not self-correcting, that regulatory oversight is necessary.

Greenspan exemplifies the perils of discipline myopia, Gamm says.  Similarly, he offers examples in several academic disciplines of their being stymied by artificial boundaries. Thus, “bringing people in from another discipline is a refreshing way of revitalizing them.”

Gamm is eager to see the results of the interdisciplinary program. Meantime, he says the Osnes/Boykoff course seems a fitting way to highlight a productive intersection of theatre and environmental science.

“It’s a good marriage.”

For more information about supporting academic programs, contact Carroll Christman, senior director of development at the CU Foundation, at 303-541-1450 or carroll.christman@cufund.org. For more information on “Mother: Caring for 7 Billion,” see http://www.motherthefilm.com/. For more information on “Who Speaks for the Climate?” see http://www.climatescienceandpolicy.eu/2012/01/who-speaks-for-the-climate-boykoff-tries-to-make-sense-of-media-reporting-on-climate-change/.

By Brittany Anas

Camera Staff Writer

In a dance studio on the University of Colorado campus, graduate student Jessica Page called out a sequence of action verbs for her class of dancers to interpret through movement.

It was choreographed chaos as middle- and high-schoolers at the spring break dance camp reacted uniquely to the commands including “scatter” and “swim,” before they “wobbled” or “whirled.” The 10 dancers, ranging in experience, then coalesced for a synced jazz dancing performance and a playful hip-hop finale.

Instructors from the CU theater and dance department host the annual “Dancing into Spring Break” workshops for young people who want to refine their technique to try out for pom squads, who want to learn a new type of dance or who just feel inspired by “Glee” and other high school musical shows.

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CU faculty member Chip Persons to star in one-man show March 13-17

Lee Blessing’s provocative one-person play, “Chesapeake,” takes its cues from the heated culture wars of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when members of Congress accused federally funded visual and performing artists of peddling obscenity.

That may sound prosaic. But halfway through the hour-and-a-half performance, the play takes a surprising turn.

“There is a marvelous plot twist at the end of act one,” says San Diego-based Lucy Smith Conroy, who will direct CU-Boulder Theatre and Dance’s production of the play, which opens March 13. “It will be funny in a shocking way that really makes you laugh. It has some serious, introspective moments, but overall this is a night of comic theater.”

Assistant Professor and professional actor Chip Persons portrays Kerr, a performance artist whose funding has been threatened by Congress. Kerr, in turn, takes on the guise of U.S. Sen. Therm Pooley and other characters in the course of the play.

“This performance artist assumes he has just one opportunity to influence the world. But it turns out that fate gives him a very different chance to make a difference,” says Persons, who also will play the lead in this summer’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival production of “Richard II.”

The play also represents a twist of a different sort: It’s the first time the department has produced a one-person play performed by a faculty member and staged by a visiting professional director.

“I was extremely pleased that Lucy accepted my invitation to come work with the talented students of CU’s theatre division,” Persons says. “Her vision for this piece will challenge our design and technical students to apply their training in a real-world creative process.”

CU’s production comes on the heels of an October appearance by Tim Miller, one of the “NEA Four,” performance artists whose federal funding was threatened by Congress in 1990. Blessing’s play encompasses themes that go beyond the confines of that specific political struggle.

“It’s about the search for humanity in both ourselves and the people around us,” Conroy says.

For more information and tickets, click here.

[un]W.R.A.P. brings New York dancer Trajal Harrell to CU March 6-9

Trajal Harrell, called “the brainy downtown experimentalist with a sharp sense of humor” by the New York Times, will headline an impressive lineup of dance, lectures and risk-taking at “[un]W.R.A.P.” at CU-Boulder March 6-9.

Cristina Goletti, curator and art director, describes the four-day event as a “choreographic forum with lectures and performances.”

“We’ve invited people who are really influential in the field of contemporary dance and dance scholarship,” says Goletti, a graduate student in the Department of Dance. “These are really extraordinary people.”

Harrell has won notice recently for his piece “Twenty Looks or Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem,” a fusion of classic Harlem voguing and the early postmodern dance that emerged in downtown New York City in the 1960s. He will perform a version of that work on March 9.

Harrell’s show asks the question, “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?” Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, this work transplants the proposition into a contemporary context, here and now.

Ryan Platt, assistant professor of performance studies at Colorado College and André Lepecki, associate professor in performance studies at New York University, will give lectures.

There also will be an informal performance on Friday evening of “raw ideas, short masterpieces or even charming failures” with students who are taking part in a weeklong mentorship program with Harrell.

“The idea is really to bridge the gap between writing about dance and performing. We hope to create a platform to look at how writing and theory can be informed by dance, and how dance can be informed bya larger theoretical discourse, Goletti says.

More Information and Tickets

The University of Colorado Boulder
Department of Theatre & Dance announces

Auditions for the BFA in Performance Program
Monday, March 18, 2013
University Theatre, CU Theatre Building

3:00 to 6:00 pm – Individual auditions and interviews

• Please prepare two contrasting monologues, totaling no more than three minutes combined.

6:00 to 7:00 pm – Mandatory ensemble workshop for ALL applicants

• Please wear clothes that you can move in comfortably.
• You do not need to prepare material for this portion of the audition.

How to apply…

1)    Prerequisite Course.  You must have either passed or be currently enrolled in:

• Acting 1 (THTR 2003) or
• Acting for Nonmajors (THTR 1003)

Transfer students who have taken a similar course elsewhere should consult the Performance Faculty.

2)    Recommendation Form.  Your acting teacher or a recent director must complete this electronic form and e-mail it to the address therein by Thursday, March 15, 2013.

They can download this form from the BFA Performance page on department’s website:  http://theatredance.colorado.edu/theatre/academics/thtr-ba-bfa/bfa-in-performance/

3)    Application Materials.  Submit the following three documents together in one e-mail to Chip.Persons@Colorado.edu by Thursday, March 15, 2013.

• Statement of intention, in PDF format, no longer than one page (approx. 250 words, double-spaced):

- Why you want to enter the BFA Performance program

- What relevant perspective you feel you will bring to the program

• Resume of your acting training and experience, in PDF format, no longer than one page
• Headshot (a full-page photograph of your face) in PFD format, no larger than 1 MB

4)    Appointment. Sign up for an individual audition and interview appointment online:  www.signupgenius.com/go/bfaperformance

Please sign up in the earliest slot available.  Failure to do so will cause the empty appointment before yours to be skipped, and you might miss your audition.

Remember that you must also attend the ensemble workshop audition on Monday, March 18, at 6:00 pm, but you do not need to sign up for this workshop.

Photo position

CU Presents, which offers the best in performing arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, is seeking a student photographer.

Qualified applicants should be comfortable shooting studio, action and portrait photography for PR and archival shoots of dance, theatre and music events.

The position also will require photo editing and posting to websites on different platforms and social media sites

Must have strong leadership skills and be able to direct studio and archival shoots in a live setting and work in a professional manner with students and faculty.

Applicants should have good knowledge of high-quality DSLRs. Experience with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator preferred. Experience with video shooting and editing preferred.

Students with work-study awards preferred, but others will be considered. Students who can make at least a two-year commitment are preferred.

To apply, please email cupresentspr@colorado.edu with a cover letter, resume and 3-5 samples of your work.

Dear Theatre and Dance patron,

First, we’d like to thank you for your continuing support of the performing arts at the University of Colorado. It’s thanks to you that we are able to offer world-class dance, music, and theatre.

As we move into the new year we’d like to share some important news about changes to ticketing for our programs.

In an effort to better serve patrons of CU-Boulder’s many wonderful performing arts organizations, we recently integrated the box offices of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the CU Department of Theatre and Dance, the College of Music, the Artist Series, CU Opera, the Takács Quartet, and the Holiday Festival. CU Presents now promotes all of these outstanding programs at CU-Boulder.

This change means there is now a “one-stop” box office at the University Club on campus, which will make it easier for you to buy tickets for all performances.

For your convenience, we will continue to have a box office open in the University Theatre building from noon to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, through the end of the spring semester. The University Theatre box office will be open on days when there are CSF performances in the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre or University Theatre. We also will maintain a box office at Macky Auditorium immediately before each performance in that venue.

If you have questions about the new box office, please don’t hesitate to contact us at cupresents@colorado.edu or 303-492-8008.

Again, thank you for your support.

Sincerely,
Joan McLean Braun
Executive Director
CU Presents

An ambiguous future that uneasily reflects the present:  CU’s Far Away onstage January 30 – February 3 in the Loft Theatre

Fear and ambiguity haunt the dystopian world of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Far Away.

And that’s just the way director Andryn Arithson wants to keep it.

“There is a lot of room for interpretation,” says Arithson, who is pursuing a master’s degree in both Theatre and Business. “It takes place in an apocalyptic future that feels dark and dangerous. Modern technologies seem to no longer exist, or at least are not at the disposal of the masses.”

Though futuristic, the world of Far Away is uneasily evocative of the present, portraying a world in which unspoken horrors take place offstage and even nature is at war with itself. Yet it’s also laced with black humor.

In the opening scene Joan, a young girl visiting her aunt and uncle, witnesses a violent act but is sworn to secrecy.

Years later she and a colleague work for a company making hats to be worn by government prisoners paraded to execution. The vast majority of hats are destroyed with their doomed wearers. But one is always saved for posterity, and when Joan’s design is chosen, it raises uncomfortable moral and social questions.

“It’s partly about working for a system that is not your advocate, the way that most of us end up doing to some degree in our lives,” says Arithson, noting that the Occupy Wall Street movement informed her decision to direct the play, which was written in 2000.

In the final act, Joan and her husband engage her aunt in an almost surreal conversation about the all-encompassing war that has broken out following Joan’s dangerous journey home.

The story is evocative of other imagined futures in such works as The Hunger Games, The Giver and Fahrenheit 451. The Guardian calls it “a wake-up slap to the face, as we sleepwalk towards a future in which governments have played on terror to make us fear ourselves.”

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