The Department of Theatre and Dance’s Performance as Public Practice program and John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series will host a discussion today of Charles O. Anderson/dance theatre X’s TAR, with conversation about Black dance, producing Black art, and the role of art in generating social change. The symposium will take place in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre in the Winship Building on the UT campus from 1:30-5:00p.m.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Thomas Frantz, Professor of African and African American Studies/Dance/Theatre Studies, Duke University
Featured Panelists:
Ms. China Smith, Founder and Executive Artistic Director, Ballet Afrique, Austin
Dr. Omise’eke Tinsley, Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies, UT Austin
Dr. Michael Winship, Professor, Department of English, The University of Austin
The symposium is in conjunction with two public performances of dance theatre X’s TAR on April 12 and 13 at 8:00 p.m. in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre. Both performances are free and open to the public.
This week, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and Texas Performing Arts will be hosting a 3-day symposium called “Creativity in the Face of Death: The Contemporary Resonance of Terezín.” The symposium will include performances, panels, lectures, and a photography exhibition. A number of the events feature AMS Professor and Director of the Schusterman Center, Dr. Robert Abzug, as well as AMS affiliate faculty member Dr. Rebecca Rossen.
The following is a description of the event from the Schusterman Center’s website:
“Creativity in the Face of Death: The Contemporary Resonance of Terezín,” a three-day symposium, will explore the enduring influence of music and art created by prisoners at Terezín (Theresienstadt), the “model ghetto” near Prague designed by the Nazis as a sham showcase to mask their murderous campaign against Europe’s Jews. The inmates, mostly Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia and among them many notable artists, writers, composers, and musicians, acted out their parts for unsuspecting visitors even as, in the shadow of death, they raised the spirits of their fellow prisoners. Only 12 percent of the 140,000 Jews originally sent to Terezín survived. Virtually all of the members of the artistic community perished in the death camps or at Terezín itself.
Their heroic example has served as a haunting challenge for later artists to create what Kafka declared books must be—“an axe for the sea frozen inside us.” “Creativity in the Face of Death: The Contemporary Resonance of Terezín” will bring together world-class musicians, dancers, choreographers, photographers, and scholars whose work has been touched by the legacy of Terezín.
The following events feature Dr. Abzug and Dr. Rossen in conversation with artists and scholars on the symposium theme:
LECTURE/DISCUSSION Veronika Tuckerova and Robert Abzug History and Memory: The Emergence of Terezín in Historical Artistic Consciousness: Czechoslovakia and America
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. | Garrison 1.102
PERFORMANCE
8:00 p.m. | Texas Performing Arts’ Bass Concert Hall
Spectrum Dance Theater’sThe Theater of Needless Talents, an evening-long work choreographed by Donald Byrd, pays homage to the Jewish artists who, though imprisoned in Nazi death camps, managed to create, perform, and bring hope to themselves and fellow inmates. The work is a series of powerful and eloquent sequences comprising modern dance, theatrical vignettes, cabaret, and commentary drawn from the words of artists and others of the time. These searing and evocative segments resonate with the horror and the absurdity of the situation in which these artists found themselves. The dance is set to the music of composer and death camp victim Erwin Schulhoff. The Theater of Needless Talents strives to make connections between the Holocaust and present-day sufferings brought on by prejudice, oppression, and persecution.
More information and a complete schedule can be found here.
Enjoy this piece from Dr. Randy Lewis, who writes about playing the banjo this summer:
I consider myself a rather dusty, low-rent semi-professional musician. I’ve been paid to play in clubs over the years, but seldom enough to buy a new pair of shoes, and usually not enough to buy a pair of socks at the Dollar Store. I once played nine straight shows at an outdoor medieval fair with a Pirate band in sweaty nautical attire, which, if you look in the dictionary, is the definition of stupid. However, I learned an important life lesson that day: you can’t please an audience hell bent on mixing funnel cake and beer.
Yet I keep plucking away at all things musical in my few moments of freedom, occasionally adding something new to the mix. I’m passable on mandolin, guitar, piano, bass, walking dulcimer, accordion, clarinet, and sax, but only recently came into possession of an old Harmony banjo that became a little summer project. Even for a guitar player accustomed to finger picking, banjo is a strange but wonderful beast. While I was able to teach myself the classic three-finger roll that Earl Scruggs made famous in the 1940s, I really wanted to learn the older technique of “clawhammer” banjo, also known as “frailing”. I quickly realized that I needed lessons to learn how to shape my hand into a “claw,” before striking down on the strings with my fingernails, alternating melody, rhythm and drone attacks to produce the classic “bum-ditty” pattern. When you do it right, it feels like your fingers are dancing on a tambourine covered in baling wire—and you understand why clawhammer banjo propelled so many rural dances across the American South more than a century ago.
A wonderful bit of Steve Martin demonstrating clawhammer
After some lessons from one the best old-time banjo players in Texas (Jerry Hagins at Fiddler’s Green), I discovered that even at my age, I wasn’t too big to frail. With Jerry’s help, I’ve been clawing away at “Cluck Old Hen,” “Big Leg Ida,” and other musical relics that Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga will never cover. Also, somewhat dementedly, I’ve also been working on frailing versions of Led Zep, Jimi Hendrix, and The Meat Puppets. I’m hoping the video of me playing “Kashmir” will go viral and thus immortalize me on Youtube alongside the Segway-riding Chimpanzee and other luminaries of the digital age. (I’ll post it soon).
I should share one other bit of summer news. I was pleased as punch that a new CD was released from my freak folk band Anvil Salute, a small ensemble that plays somewhat “difficult,” droning, experimental music. I play a rather spaced out accordion with this wild improv band, whose members range across the southwest from LA to Oklahoma. You can hear a sample of the new album on the website of our distributor, Pennsylvania-based Deep Water Acres, which is promoting our new CD entitled “Black Bear Rug.”
So that’s something non-bookish that I did this summer. Perhaps it doesn’t connect directly to my work as an American Studies scholar, but maybe it has an indirect connection of some sort. As someone interested in the role of artists in American society, I love to try on various hats and see what can be learned from inside a particular creative process. It’s an experiential kind of learning that I relish, and in the case of frailing, I’ve already started to ask questions that come out of my old time banjo playing: Where did the songs come from? Why these tunings? Why an open back banjo? How much does frailing connect to African banjo traditions? (the answer: A LOT!) Why the drone string? Did women frail? Why did frailing almost disappear? Why are people recovering this style today? Once you start asking a million questions about the deep weirdness and haunting beauty of old time Americana, you’ve probably started doing an organic form of American Studies—and that’s a pretty cool thing.
Today, we’re pleased to share with you an interview with one of our undergraduates, Kelli Schultz, who was recently recognized as one of only twelve Dean’s Distinguished Graduates in the College of Liberal Arts at UT. Congratulations to Kelli on this very prestigious honor!
What was/is your favorite class in American Studies?
I loved Prof. Ware’s AMS 310: Intro to American Studies course. I have taken a lot of specialized AMS 370 courses which I loved but I’m intrigued by how each professor teaches the whole story of American History in one semester. Her underlying mission, it seemed, was to tell the untold accounts of US History, the ones you weren’t told in high school. We learned about the Carlisle Indian School, Japanese Internment and Coney Island. This was the first class I took in the Department and it sparked my interest in the pedagogy of social studies, which I ultimately ended up writing my honors thesis on.
