Friday, October 31, 2008

"Curiosity did not kill this cat."
Studs Terkel
May 16, 1912 - October 31, 2008.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival in Toronto November



















photo from the website at http://www.rendezvouswithmadness.com/

Rendezvous with Madness

November 6 - 15
Toronto, Ontario
Info: 416-583-4339

Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival is an annual film festival that presents features and shorts touching upon the facts and mythology surrounding mental health and addiction. Each program focuses on a different theme. Post-screening panel discussions involve filmmakers, artists and people with professional and personal experience with mental illness and addiction.
See the programme here

and I've included for you below a link to an animation created by Henry Banger Benvenuti
"Rendezvous with Madness" produced in 2006 by Workman Arts...
front row seats at Youtube
see it now here

and visit the artist's website here

Johnny Saldaña New One-Man Autoethnodrama "Second Chair"

I had an opportunity today to connect with Johnny Saldaña Professor and Associate Director, Katherine K. Herberger College of Fine Arts, School of Theatre and Film, Arizona State University, Tempe. Johnny is the author of the book, "Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre" , and is considered a leader in North America in the research based theatre genre "ethnodrama". We are pleased to inform you about his newest autoethnodrama project, "Second Chair". CM


Johnny Saldaña at Arizona State University (ASU), developed a 30-minute, one-man autoethnodrama titled "Second Chair," which explores the reminiscences by an older adult of his high school band years and his quest to become first chair clarinetist through an epiphanic challenge.
The play is a metaphor for the feelings of lesser status experienced by the marginalized individual in a competitive mainstream society.

The play was commissioned for performance at the second annual Narrative Inquiry in Music Education conference in February 2008 at ASU. Since then, Saldaña has performed the piece for a Phoenix valley LGBTQ youth group, and at the September 2008 Seventh Qualitative Research Conference in Health and Social Care at Bournemouth University, UK. He has also been invited to present "Second Chair" as the keynote address for the Arts and Learning Special Interest Group meeting at the April 2009 American Educational Research Association conference in San Diego.
The full play script and related commentary will appear in a future issue of the journal "Research Studies in Music Education."

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Photo Gallery October


For me, photography is art and therapy...a chance to get out in nature and observe my surroundings closely. It's good medicine. The first 3 are from a series called "the blue egg", and below a few others.






All photos copyright c. mclean

the first photos were reflections through a coloured glass ball, I like the
dreamlike quality of the shots viewers can fill in their own stories, next
the Dahlia has the painted, surreal quality I try for, next what I call a "found" visual metaphor a natural reflection on the pond which for me immediately suggested childbirth..even the small roundish reflection in the lower left corner looked a bit like an infant's face, 2nd photo from left I came across a pile of recycled scrap at the local dump...the horse, a memory of childhood, reluctant to go, has its own story to
tell, photo 3 the wedding chairs found lined up "the morning after the wedding" at Elora Mill, next leaves in water, leaves in mud and a feather floats by..a bit of fancy.



Monday, October 13, 2008

Digital Arts and Humanities Conference

CHArt Conference 2008
Seeing.... Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture

November 6 to 7, 2008

The Clore Lecture Theatre

Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square, London, WC1 7HX.


"This year's CHArt conference takes seeing as its theme and the associated questions of vision, perception, visibility and invisibility, blindness and insight - all in the context of our contemporary digital culture in which our eyes are assaulted by ever greater amounts of visual stimulus, while we are also increasingly being surveyed, on a continual basis."

"What does it mean to see and be seen nowadays? How have advances in neuroscience or developments in technology altered our understanding of vision and perception? What kind of visual spaces do we now inhabit? What new kinds of visual experiences are now available? And what is lost or no longer possible? How does the increasing digitalization of media affect the experience of seeing? What and who might be rendered invisible by the processes of digital culture? What are our current digital culture's blindspots? What are its politics of seeing? The 2008 conference investigates such questions." (from website, read more here)

Friday, October 10, 2008

Performance and the Global City

ATHE Conference, New York, 2009 Call for Papers
“Performance and the Global City”

We invite proposals for papers investigating the intersections of urban issues and performances of all kinds in cities beyond the Anglophone West. “Performance and the Global City” at the ATHE 2009 Conference in New York City will comprise a series of paper panels hosted across several working groups; papers will not be clustered according to geographic region, but will rather be grouped around the urban policy and culture issues that each addresses. We are especially interested in the relationship among theatre events, both formal and informal, and any number of urban culture issues, including: urban policy (its making and its implementation); civic architecture (both utopic and resistive); discourses of municipal and state power; underground city-building movements; homelessness and other forms of dispossession; racial tensions; other embodied tensions. The panels will ask the broad but focusing questions:
  • How does performance intervene in the making of the contemporary non-Western city?
  • How is that city “global,” and in what ways do theatre and performance help to shape the understanding of that term, and mitigate its defining tensions, outside of the Anglophone West?

    Specific topics to be addressed may include (but not be limited to):

    • performance, the urban, and mobility studies
    • border studies
    • east asian urban development
    • utopian architectures in “third world” global cities
    • performance and the Mediterranean city, past and present
    • traditional performances in contemporary urban contexts
    • indigenous peoples and the urban (in both Western and non-Western city spaces)
    • architecture and design for refugee communities
    • the civic impact of civil and global war

    Please send 250-word abstracts, a 50-word bio, and your contact information to: dhopkins@mail.sdsu.edu; morr@mail.sdsu.edu; and ksolga@uwo.ca NO LATER THAN 24 OCTOBER 2008. Successful participants will be notified by 31 October 2008.

Convened by D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, Kim Solga

More info about ATHE
http://www.athe.org/about/faq

Americans for the Arts Webinars

Americans for the Arts would like to share with you information about their upcoming Webinars. Webinars are 90-minute online seminars on a current topic, issue, or trend. This new media platform enables a high level of interaction with the presenter, other attendees, and the content. To join a webinar, you will need access to high speed internet and a phone line for at least 90 minutes. Some webinars may have advance reading assignments or post event follow-up items.

In early October Americans for the Arts presented the Webinar "Creative Aging the Untapped Demographic" with presenters Gay Hanna and Susan Perlstein, National Centre for Creative Aging.

Here are just a few of Americans for the Arts upcoming Webinars:

  • Leadership Succession in the Arts
  • Public Art for Administrators
  • New Technologies for Professionals Networking in the Arts
  • Secrets of Success in Rural Arts Communities

and more see http://eo2.commpartners.com/users/afta/

Americans for the Arts is the leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts in the U.S.

Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Congress 2009



Mark your 2009 calendar for:

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Congress 2009

Carleton University, Ottawa

May 23 to May 31, 2009

"Capital Connections Nation, Terroir, Territoire"

See more info here

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Arts and Science Converge Through Dance, Ferocious Beauty: Genome

I would like to share with you today a video of the presentation about the performance by Liz Lerman' s Dance Exchange troupe exploring knowledge of the human genome through dance, "Ferocious Beauty, Genome". This presentation describing the performance process took place through Case Western Reserve University at the Renaissance Hotel on May 2, 2008. CM

From Youtube:
"Choreographer Liz Lerman discussed and showed excerpts from her highly acclaimed performance project, Ferocious Beauty: Genome. From folk tales to scientists as choreographers, the piece takes an unconventional look at the nature of the genome and its impact. Lerman asks tough questions about the ethical, legal and social implications of genomics: ....If we have the capacity to select what we want in our genes, what will happen to diversity? If perfection is possible, who decides what it is? "

"The development of Ferocious Beauty: Genome initiated an unprecedented collaboration between dance and science, as the Dance Exchange partnered with a group of scientist and humanities scholars from institutions such as the University of Chicago, University of Illinois and Princeton and Stanford universities, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health and the Genetics and Public Policy Center. Many of these advisors appear in the performance in videotaped interviews, representing viewpoints on the uses of genetic research that range from curing disease to maintaining bio-diversity to fighting terrorism.
Dance Exchange members and scientists learned from each other as the work evolved. Scientific collaborators provided accurate and objective information and the Dance Exchange filtered the information through their methodology for making dances, a process in which the company members engage as full collaborators."
above quote from Press Release


Sit in on this interesting lecture with video clips from the performance.Front row seats now at Youtube:

Watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF_JYiPQToU

More info at: www.danceexchange.org.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

AERA 2009 Meeting Announcement, ABER Dissertation Award

2009 AERA (American Educational Research Association) Program Theme
Disciplined Inquiry: Education Research in the Circle of Knowledge
"At a time when knowledge creation and use requires spanning boundaries between academic disciplines, education researchers can take pride in their long tradition of multi-disciplinary work. AERA's 2009 annual meeting will celebrate this tradition, and look ahead to assess new ways that education research and disciplinary inquiry might be more effectively integrated.
The 2009 annual meeting will be an opportunity for renewed discussion and expansion of the role of education research as a hub of interdisciplinary scholarship. Special attention will be paid to proposals for papers and sessions that demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research, the significance of multiple methodological perspectives, and interactions between education and its sister disciplines in the sciences and humanities."

For more information see


2009 ABER Dissertation Award at Masters and Doctoral Levels
The Arts Based Educational Research (ABER) special interest group for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) would like to announce its sponsorship of the ABER Outstanding Dissertation Award for the best Doctoral Dissertation that explores, is an exemplar of, and pushes the boundaries of arts based educational research.
The award is intended for students who have graduated in the year preceding the award. One award will go to a Doctoral student.The winner will receive an "Outstanding Dissertation" award at the ABER business meeting at the 2009 AERA annual meeting. The winner will also be invited to present highlights from their dissertation at this meeting.


more news about this award