25 April 2016

Winter-Spring 2016 Update

Distinguished University Professorship Lecture and installation
In fulfillment of the Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professorship in Dance awarded to me in 2015, I presented a lecture-demonstration, To See is to Believe: The Body Made Visible at University of Michigan on February 23, 2016. See video documentation in two parts: DUP Part 1;   DUP Part 2. 

During that same week, I mounted an installation in the Video Studio of the UM Duderstadt Center’s Digital Media Commons. The installation featured six video works for the 3-screen Pop-Up Projection Pavilion and 30 of my acrylic paintings.  PUPP Installation  2016 Tour 

Judith: A Domestic Psychodrama for Screendance and Orchestra was commissioned by the Traverse Symphony Orchestra and conductor Kevin Rhodes. It was given its premiere screening/performance at Interlochen Center for the Arts on March 20, 2016. The score by William Schuman, commissioned in 1950 for my mentor, Martha Graham,  was the inspiration for a contemporary retelling of the biblical legend of Judith. Judith;  password: Holofernes

Guest presenter for Society for the Neural Control of Movement: The Neuroscience of Extraordinary Motor Skill: Sensory-Motor, Cognitive, and Pathologic Attributes of Music & Dance Performance. A fellow graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, Gary Paige, (then a clarinetist and more recently a renowned professor of neuroscience) invited IAA alumni Kenneth Broadway and myself to be special guest presenters at his organization’s conference in Montego Bay, Jamaica. As part of our joint presentation, Ken and I spoke of our own experiences learning, retaining, memorizing and producing complex feats of performance. We then presented a new screendance, Fire/Earth/Air/Water, to four pieces from "Six Encores for Piano by Luciano Berio. Ken performed the music live while my videos were screened above the stage.