Apos S

APInews: Call: Arts/Justice Symposium, Toronto, May

Open Call

The Laurier Centre for Music in the Community calls for presentation proposals for “Arts for Social and Environmental Justice,” a symposium at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, May 15, 2010. The one-day symposium features as keynote speakers arts-integration educator Rena Upitis; Stephen K. Levine, dean of the doctoral program in Expressive Arts: Therapy, Education, Consulting and Social Change at the European Graduate School; and cultural critic Max Wyman. The conference invites submissions dealing with the symposium themes in the form of research papers, interactive workshops and narrative papers describing practices in the educational or arts community. Deadline is February 15. The symposium is co-hosted by ISIS-Canada and the European Graduate School.

via APInews: Call: Arts/Justice Symposium, Toronto, May.

APInews: Public Conversation: Public Art & Sustainability

Artists will lead a conversation about public art and sustainability during “Waterpod: Autonomy and Ecology,” an exhibition at New York’s Exit Art this winter. The show is a survey of a five-month voyage around the boroughs of New York by Waterpod, a floating, sculptural structure and community-building space designed as a futuristic habitat and an experimental platform for assessing the design and efficacy of living systems. It visited the five boroughs and Governors Island from June to October 2009. The discussion, February 4, 2010, includes Jennifer McGregor of Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Bronx; public artist Mary Miss; Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a “maintenance artist” known for her service-oriented artworks; Mary T. Mattingly, Waterpod founder; and members of her team. The exhibition, January 9–February 6, 2010, is part of Exit Art’s SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics) program. Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

via APInews: Public Conversation: Public Art & Sustainability.

Mo`olelo’s Green Theater Choices Toolkit

In Fall 2008, Mo`olelo received a “MetLife/TCG A-ha! Think it , Do it” grant to research and develop a tool to measure the environmental impact of theater and help the industry make choices that do not cause long-term damage to our communities. We partnered with Brown & Wilmanns Environmental Consulting and adopted their “Green Choices” methodology. The Green Theater Choices Toolkit was finally completed on December 18, 2009. Click here to download the 24-page pdf.

via GREEN MO`OLELO.

ashdenizen: not bothered by parallels

The big new Christmas movie, James Cameron’s Avatar, which opened yesterday, has some striking green themes.

There’s deforestation: a truly massive tree gets destroyed. There's a threatened indigenous people: the home of the Na’vi tribe gets obliterated. And there’s a new-agey idea that that there’s a mutual thing going on between the people living in forest and the forest itself and there may even be scientific evidence (Sigourney Weaver tells us) of electro-magnetic impulses that allows the forest to act like a brain, communicating between its many constituent elements.

The baddies of the piece, of course, don't have such a sophisticated brain. What the US military has is muscle – a massive arsenal of weaponry which it aims to use ( ‘shock and awe’) to get the ‘savages’ moving out of an area where there they have discovered a very precious mineral called – yes! – ‘unobtanium’;.

This raises an interesting question. I assume you can't have a successful blockbuster movie that’s anti-American. So there must be plenty of people watching this movie who aren’t remotely bothered by the parallels suggested by the storyline.

Update: in this interview Cameron refers to the themes of imperialism and biodiversity and attacks the way America has ‘had eight years of the oil lobbyists running the country’. But he points out that anti-imperialism is American too. ‘You can take it back to the origins of America in a fight of rebels against an imperial dominating force.’ Except the rebels in question were hardly fighting on behalf of indigenous people.

via ashdenizen: not bothered by parallels.

APInews: Launch: Green Youth Art & Media Center, Oakland

Oakland’s Art in Action will launch its Green Youth Art & Media Center in Oakland, Calif., on January 14, 2010. The solar-powered center, at 2781 Telegraph and 28th St., offers entrepreneurial, vocational and green-job readiness training for Oakland youth between the ages of 18 to 25. Center activities include leadership development, new media, arts training, music production, community organizing skills and green-job education, plus a business that sells and contracts merchandise produced by program participants. The Center’s Youth Green Team remodeled the 3,000-square-foot site, putting in recycled fiber carpeting, a mini-garden, a Kijiji Grows aquaponics system, four state-of-the-art recording studios, a computer lab and an eco-dance floor made of bamboo. The Grand Opening, starting at 3 p.m., features a Youth Arts Festival with freestyle rap and dancing and live painting, followed by arts performances and a a ribbon-cutting.

via APInews: Launch: Green Youth Art & Media Center, Oakland.

the nytheatre i: Kickoff! — Stolen Chair Theatre’s Community Supported Theatre

Here’s the first dispatch from Jo Ann Rosen, nytheatre.com’s “embedded journalist” with the Stolen Chair Theatre’s Community Supported Theatre program.

*****

November 22, 2009

Even before President Obama urged educators to concentrate their efforts on math and science, Stolen Chair Theatre co-artistic directors Jon Stancato and Kiran Rikhye were reaching for the stars. Last night, they launched the pilot program of their Community Sponsored Theatre (CST) that introduced friends, family and, most importantly, the new CST members to this year’s theatrical theme: Quantum Poetics: A Science Experiment for the Stage.

The evening, divided into two parts, began with a slide presentation by Jon, also the resident director, explaining the CST concept, which he hopes will solidify a long-term relationship between the theater group and its membership. The plan is to update and educate the members monthly on the creative process. Kiran, Stolen Chair’s resident playwright, focused on their mission statement: to create “playfully intellectual, wickedly irreverent and exuberantly athletic original works.” Aviva Meyer, the communications director, explained how they intend to increase awareness through telephone interviews that will become pod casts and through their online social network, The Chaise Lounge, where subsequent CST events and other related activities, will be posted.

But it was the second part of the evening that delivered on the CST concept; that is, they shared the result of their first steps in the dynamic process of creating a play. Seven actors re-enacted exercises developed during a recent creative retreat. To prepare for the retreat, each actor received a 211-page compilation of articles and books on a wide variety of scientific subjects, including theoretical physics and neuroscience. They also received books by Bertolt Brecht, Aristotle, and Richard Schechner, who, in Jon’s words, “approach theater with the same sort of empirical rigor as scientists.” During the retreat, ideas percolated and Jon added requirements and boundaries to the concepts. The actors interpreted and enacted them. The best of the compositions were presented at the kickoff.

Performances represented the personification of five theories: chaos, gravity, memory, evolution, and synethesia (senses crossing from one part of the brain to another, as from brain damage or drugs). The first exercise, made up of all seven actors, reflected an imaginative interpretation of a human collider creating new matter. The group, held tightly together by a hula hoop, moved slowly to center stage. Once the plastic ring dropped, each burst from the whole with great energy. Another performance related the story of The Three Little Pigs to represent three gravity-defining moments; a third showed the daily routine of two people that could easily have doubled for two rats in a maze. All were big scientific ideas applied to every day life. They were made comprehensible and whimsical by this very clever group.

Kiran, who will be giving shape to the final play, knows there will be lots of changes during this year-long collaboration. The final version may include parts of the exercises, maybe only a gesture, or none of it. But, what the charter members saw last night was the first spark of a new play – Quantum Poetics: A Science Experiment for the Stage. The next event is on Sunday, December 13. They will be screening clips from movies that explore scientific themes. Membership is still open.

*****

via the nytheatre i: Kickoff! — Stolen Chair Theatre’s Community Supported Theatre.