LOCAL COMMITMENTS:
A Conversation with and about Community
Date: Sunday December 05
Time: Noon - 3:00
Place: Regis Center for Art - Influx Auditorium
Panelists:
Philip Blackburn, Composer and Director, American Composers Forum, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Lou Bellamy, Artistic Director, Penumbra Theater and Professor,Theater Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota
Ananya Chatterje, Choregrapher and Associate Professor of Theater Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota.
Marlina Gonzalez, Curator and Digital Community Development Manager, Intermedia Arts Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Sonja Kuftinec, Moderator, Associate Professor of Theater Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota
Ann Markusen, Fesler-Lampert Professor of Planning and Public Policy, Director, Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
Mark Nowak, Poet and Director, Union of Radical Workers and Writers
Michael Sommers, Performance Artist and adjunct faculty, Theater Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota
Synopsis:
As theatre artist Anne Bogart notes, commitment derives from the Latin,
committere, to ignite action, to bring together, entrust and do. The Art
and Commitment symposium devotes three days to investigating the relationship
of artists to the public sphere, the capacity of the arts to offer social
critique, and the limits of a commitment that descends to propaganda.
In the final symposium day, we bring together local curators and interdisciplinary artists from intersecting fields of the visual and performing arts. This group of activists, presenters, performers, and creators has been entrusted and they have done-they ignite action by bringing together artists, ideas, and disparate audiences. These are in the trenches activist/artists who materialize and continuously redefine the relationship of art and the public sphere.
In a roundtable discussion moderated by Sonja Kuftinec, associate professor of theatre arts and dance, participants will respond to the key themes of the symposium and link these themes to their ongoing actions in the Twin Cities. They will address such questions as:
-What is the value of inter-disciplinarity?
-What is the relationship of art and the public sphere beyond audience attendance?
-How do you define your "public"?
-What's the particular relationship of your art to your public?
-How can curatorial practices help to build socially engaged art practices
and foster community involvement?
-In the Twin Cities community what do we do well, where do we need to stretch,
where do we fail and why?
-How do local press and critics fashion (or not fashion) a critically-engaged
public?
Biographies:
Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge,
England (October 15, 1962), and studied there as a Choral Scholar at Clare
College. He earned his Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Iowa
where he studied with Kenneth Gaburo and began work on publishing the Harry
Partch archives, now completed after 15 years. Blackburn's book, Enclosure
Three, won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He has been the Senior Program Director
for the American Composers Forum since 1991 and continues to compose, build
sound-sculptures, perform, and write about things like Partch, Vietnamese
music, and the use of sound in public art. He runs the innova record label
and the Sonic Circuits International Festival of Music and Art. He received
a 2003 Bush Artist Fellowship to begin building a sound park in Belize.
Artist Statement:
For thousands of years, architecture has been described as "frozen music."
I want to melt those edges and reinvigorate the use of sound in public art;
to make musique concrète with a mixer and trowel; to further the
practice of listening; to make a camera obscura for the mind's ear - by
subtly activating the acoustic environment and building magical resonant
spaces: chirping stairs, fluttering walls, singing wires, throbbing sewers.
Music with some assembly required.
Website
Blackburn C.V. (download .pdf)
Lou Bellamy is founder and artistic director of Saint Paul's Penumbra Theatre. During his twenty-eight year tenure as artistic director, Penumbra has evolved into one of America's premier theaters dedicated to dramatic exploration of the African American experience. Bellamy is an accomplished professional director and actor. His most recent directing projects are On The Open Road, Dinah Was!, King Hedley II, Black Eagles, Louie and Ophelia, Riffs, Jitney, Blues for an Alabama Sky, Hospice, Seven Guitars, Portrait of the Artist..., Raisin in the Sun, and Two Trains Running at Penumbra Theatre; Angels in America, A Lie of the Mind, Tod, the Boy Tod, and Wedding Band at the University of Minnesota Theater, and The Darker Face of the Earth, and Big White Fog at the Guthrie Theater. He holds degrees from Mankato State, Minnesota and Hamline Universities and is appointed to the teaching faculty of the University of Minnesota's Theatre and Dance Department at the rank of Associate Professor. Bellamy was appointed a McKnight Fellow to the Salzburg Seminar in Theater, convened at Schloss Leopoldskron in 1996. He is an executive board member of The African Grove Institute for the Arts and has been honored with numerous awards including The W. Harry Davis Foundation Award for Excellence in Afro-Centric Education, The Minnesota Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award, The National Association of Negro Musicians, Inc. Distinguished Contribution Award, and The First Bank Sally Ervine Ordway Arts Award of Commitment.
http://www.penumbratheatre.org/
Bellamy C.V.
(download .pdf)
Ananya Chatterje is a dancer, choreographer, dance scholar, and educator, who believes in the identity of her art and her activism. Initially trained in Indian classical and folk dance forms, she completed her Masters’ in Dance and Dance Education from Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She then started doctoral studies in Dance, at Temple University as a Russell Conwell Fellow. She earned her Ed.D. in 1996 With Distinction, along with Certification in Women’s Studies. Ananya has taught and performed widely. Lately, she has taught in Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges (Dance Program), the Boston Conservatory of Dance, Temple University (Women’s Studies), and is now Associate Professor in the Dept. of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where she teaches courses on dance history, dance writing, and the philosophy and politics of performance and aesthetics. Ananya has published her work widely in renowned journals such Dance Research Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, and Women & Performance.
Chatterjea C.V. (download .pdf)
Marlina Gonzalez is an arts administrator with a special focus on media arts and activism. Her curated programs have always been informed by a connection to community action. She was Assistant Curator for Film & Video for the Walker Art Center for seven years, Executive Director for Asian American Renaissance for two years. She is currently media arts advisor for Pangea Theater's upcoming play about the role of media in our lives, Program Manager for NEXUS, a career development program for pre-emerging film, video and digital media artists, and consultant for Teatro Del Pueblo's Political Theater Festival. She recently began her new role as Digital Community Development Manager for Intermedia Arts and will be developing new program and audience strategies to broaden the digital dialogue and ensure the representation of artists of color in new media art forms. Marlina holds a Master's degree in Radio/TV/Film for the University of North Texas and a B.A. in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines.
http://www.intermediaarts.org/
Gonzalez C.V.
(download .pdf)
Ann Markusen has served as a Brookings Institution Economic Policy Fellow and a Fulbright Lecturer in Brazil and has consulted for the Clinton Administration, the World Bank and the OECD. She has served as a consultant to the cities of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Berkeley, and Chicago, and to the states of Michigan, Ohio, and California on industrial retention and economic development efforts. Her work on industrial development includes a major study of the mid-western steel industry, Betting on the Basics, for the City of Chicago, and a study on The California Software Industry for the California Commission on Industrial Innovation.
Markusen served as Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1995-2002) and as an Executive Committee and Board member for the Economic Policy Institute (1994-2002). In October of 2000, she was appointed by the President and approved by the Congress to serve on the ten-member National Commission on the Use of Offsets in Defense Trade and its companion President's Council on Offsets in Commercial Trade. In 1999, she complete two terms as Chair of the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2000, she served as President of the North American Regional Science Association. Markusen was a participant in President-elect Clinton's Economic Summit in 1992.
Markusen is the author of dozens of articles and book chapters and a dozen books, including From Defense to Development (Routledge, 2003), America's Peace Dividend (Columbia International Affairs On-line, 2000), Second Tier Cities (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Arming the Future (Council on Foreign Relations, 1998), Trading Industries, Trading Regions (Guilford, 1993), Dismantling the Cold War Economy (Basic Books 1992), The Rise of the Gunbelt (Oxford 1991), Regions: the Economics and Politics of Territory (Rowman and Allenheld 1987), High Tech America (Unwin Hyman 1986) and Profit Cycles, Oligopoly and Regional Development (MIT Press 1985). She frequently writes for a broader public, including in magazines such as The American Prospect, Harper's and Foreign Policy, and op eds in major newspapers including The International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Duluth News-Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Christian Science Monitor. Her most recent public policy work includes The Case for a Substantial Increase in the Minimum Wage (Humphrey Institute, 2003) and The Artistic Dividend (Humphrey Institute, 2003).
At the Humphrey Institute, Markusen teaches Introduction to Urban and Regional Planning; Regional, Economic Development and Workforce Planning; Writing for Planners; and Current Planning Practice. She also recently completed a three-year term as Director of the Institute's interdisciplinary Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree. Her current research focuses on artists' livelihoods and their contribution to local economic development and communities.
Ann Markusen is an economist and Fesler-Lampert Professor of Planning and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, where she also directs the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics.
Education: Professor Markusen received a Bachelor's Degree in Foreign Service at Georgetown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics at Michigan State University, and has held faculty positions at the University of Colorado, University of California Berkeley, Northwestern and Rutgers Universities.
Markusen
C.V. (download .pdf)
Bibliography
(download .pdf)
Mark Nowak is author of Revenants, Shut Up Shut Down (finalist for the James Laughlin Award, Academy of American Poets), and co-editor (with Diane Glancy) of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours, all from Coffee House Press. He is the editor of the journal Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics and founder of the Union of Radical Workers and Writers. His verse play "Capitalization" (about Reagan's firing of striking PATCO workers) won a developmet grant from the Stage Left Theatre in Chicago, where it premiered in 2004; another verse play about a Teamster organizer, "Francine Michalek Drives Bread," premiered at UAW Local 879 in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 2003. Nowak's essay on gothic-industrial music and deindustrialization in America's rust belt is forthcoming in Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press).
http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1241/article12460.asp
"http://www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/nowak.htm"
United Radical Workers and Writers - http://www.urww.org
Nowak C.V. (download.pdf)
Michael Sommers
Sommers C.V.
(download .pdf)
Sonja Kuftinec works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, and professionally as a dramaturg and director. She also works as a conflict resolution facilitator with Seeds of Peace. Since 1995 she has brought together Balkan and Middle East youth through original performances and workshops. Her production Where Does the Postman Go When All The Street Names Change? (1997) won an ensemble award in Mostar, Bosnia. Her production There is a Field, an original, collaborative meditation on the Middle East, premiered in February 2003 on the University main stage. She has published widely on her theatrical process in the Balkans and on community-based theater. Her book Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (2003) recently received honorable mention for the Bernard Hewitt History Award.
Photo Credits:
Mark Nowak, by Lisa Arresta
Ananya Chatterjea, by Darren Johnson