ArtsLink

Down in LA for the summer? Consider the intellectual challenge offered at the Cinematic and Literary Traditions of Liberty workshop hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies.

This workshop will be a rare chance for aspiring young novelists, filmmakers, artists, musicians and future scholars of the arts to engage with serious,talented peers for an entire week, discussing what they care about most: their work, the work of great authors and filmmakers and the very substance of art, the human struggle to know himself and be free.

This year’s Cinematic and Literary Traditions of Liberty workshop will be held at Chapman University (outside Los Anegles, CA), June 21-27. The seminar is free; meals, housing, books, etc. will be covered for all accepted applicants. Interested students can find out more at http://www.theihs.org/seminars/id.844/default.asp

The deadline to apply for this amazing, free seminar is March 31; students who complete their application by March 15 will receive a free book.

This Friday, February 29th, from 3:00pm -5:00pm, the School of Music is holding a valuable information session on this summer’s “Jazz in Paris” quarter. In Paris, students interested in the history and art of jazz music will be led by internationally-recorded jazz-ician, Michael Brockman. Professor Brockman will connect the theoretical intricacies of jazz music with actual performances at the Annual Jazz Festival in Paris. What’s better than taking what you learn in the classroom (if you can call Paris a classroom) out into actual practice!

No music-skill is necessary, nor is any French required. To find out more, attend this Friday’s session:
Music classroom 101
3:00pm-5:00pm

Surrealist Paris (FRANCE)

Surrealism, which emerged in Paris in the early 1920s from the social upheaval of post-WWI Europe and more especially from Dadaism, is arguably the most influential avant-garde movement of the 20th century. It rejected social, moral and logical conventions and sought to revolutionize art, literature, politics and life in the name of freedom, desire and the unconscious. The influence of surrealism extends well beyond the surrealist group itself and can be seen in painting (Picasso, abstract expressionism), in literature (Char, Bataille, Leiris), in politics (Situationism, the May 1968 student revolt), in theater and performance art (Artaud, Living Theater, Bob Wilson) and in psychoanalytic theory (Lacan).

Study surrealism in the city where it was born and which provided the stage for so many of its experiments.

For more information, visit http://depts.washington.edu/complit/study_abroad

To apply, go to http://www.artsci.washington.edu/exploration/apply.asp

Theatrical Futures:The Edinburgh Fringe Festival (SCOTLAND)
Each year thousands of performing arts groups and artists converge in Edinburgh, Scotland for the world’s most concentrated and celebrated festival of trailblazing theatrical work, first established in 1947. The staggering schedule of 1,800 events in 261 venues provides a one-stop experience to see and experience new work from all over the world.

During the four weeks of the festival, students will attend a wide array of performances, interface with artists, study trends and themes that inform the work they experience. The variety of disciplines on display at the Fringe Festival make this seminar appropriate for students interested in drama, dance, music and fine art.

For more information, visit http://depts.washington.edu/explore/programs/2008/scotland.htm

Study Abroad: Fall Quarter in Paris
For Fall Quarter 2008 (October 4 to December 6), the UW Department of Comparative Literature will offer again its interdisciplinary program of study in Paris. This program offers students a unique opportunity to earn 15 UW credits while living and studying in one of the most vibrant and beautiful cities in the world. The program is open to all UW and non-UW students with an interest in the humanities and arts, and who have completed FRENCH 103 by the beginning of the program.

The program is still accepting applications.
Application deadline: March 3, 2008.

For more information, visit http://depts.washington.edu/complit/study_abroad

Combining English, Drama, and Architecture is an ArtsLink dream. Take that dream and put it in London, England this summer? Now, it’s divine.

Join the UW Exploration Seminar this 2008 summer B-Term in London, England for a look at the history of English drama. Led by Odai Johnson from the Drama Department, students will spend the latter days of summer viewing plays, visiting historic theatre, and attending a Society for Theatre Research synaposium in Richmond, England.

Interested? More information to be found here:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” - (Act V, Scene V).

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” - (Macbeth, Act V, Scene V).

Program Director: Tony Geist & Giusseppe Leporace
Dates of Instruction: August 17 to September 12, 2008

In 1968 Rafael Alberti, Spain’s greatest living poet at the time, published a stunning new book of poems:  Roma, peligro para caminantes (Rome, Pedestrians Beware!).  The seminar will be a trilingual experience: students will work in groups translating Alberti’s poems into English.  Those with a background in Spanish will be the primary linguistic resource for the students in Italian, while Italian speakers will lead their classmates through Alberti’s Roman sources.

Roma, peligro para caminantes is Alberti’s tribute to his adopted city.  He devotes sonnets to Rome’s elegant alley cats, to the garbage piled on street corners, to the ubiquitous streams of urine running down the cobblestones, to the city’s innumerable taverns, to the streets and plazas, and to the motorscooters, bicycles, cars and buses that careen through the streets.  The poems all feature epigraphs drawn from two poets who wrote in Roman dialect:  G. G. Belli and Trilussa.

Sites: Our classroom will be the streets, cultural institutions and cafés of Alberti’s Madrid, Cádiz and Rome.  We will spend approximately two weeks in each country. We will begin the seminar in Madrid, visiting the Prado Museum, where Alberti spent the ages of 16 and 17 copying the great masters.  We will also have a tour of the Residencia de Estudiantes, where Alberti consorted with Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí, among others.  In  Cádiz, Alberti’s hometown, on the far southern coast we will alternate working sessions on the poetry with tours of the landscapes of Alberti’s youth.  We will visit the Rafael Alberti Foundation in Puerto Santa María, a twenty minute ferry ride from Cádiz, which has an important collection of the poet’s books and manuscripts, photos, memorabilia, etc.  Cádiz is also one of the birthplaces of flamenco, an art form of vital importance in Alberti’s poetry.

In Italy, the poet’s ancestral homeland, we will visit Alberti’s home in the Trastevere, as well as the local haunts he references in his poems (one neighborhood tavern, for instance, has a copy of a poem Alberti hand lettered for the owner).  Students will continue refining the translations begun in Cádiz.  At the same time, students of Italian will lead their Spanish counterparts through translations into English of the Roman dialect poems that Alberti cites in his epigraphs. 

In Spain and Italy, students will live either residence halls or with local families, and on average 2-3 meals per day are included in the program fee.

Target audience: The Exploration Seminar is designed for students ranging from the advanced 200-level, up through the 300- and 400-level in Spanish and Italian.  The language of instruction will be English, but students will need a considerable level of proficiency in one or the other of the two source languages to deal with complex poetic texts.

Participants may earn 5 credits of CHID 471-Europe Study Abroad (I&S), Spanish 390/499, OR Italian 390/499. Participants should check with their academic advisors to determine how these credits may ammpy to major requirements.

Student costs:
$3,680
$200 IPE Fee
Additional costs include: Round trip airfare, health insurance, select meals (most meals provided) and personal expenses.

Program Director: Odai Johnson ~ Drama
Dates of Instruction: August 25 to September 18

London is the theatre capital of the world today, but it was even more important in the last four centuries, when politics, performance and celebrity shared the city and the city’s greatest theatres.   Come to England and tour the historic theatres in their own centuries.  

Watch world-class performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the reconstructed Globe theatre, visit Stratford-upon-Avon, the Banqueting House where Charles I held his court masques and in front of which was publicly beheaded, tour the restored 18th century theatre at Richmond, watch the 19th century popular repertory still played at the historic Royal Theatre, Bury Saint Edmunds, and browse the greenroom of the Old Vic where Gielgud shared a stage with Olivier.   Watch representative plays of four hundred years staged in the landmark spaces that hosted the works of Shakespeare and Sheridan, spaces in which the great actors of the English stage – Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Ellen Terry, John Gielgud– built their careers.

We will visit the Globe, Covent Garden, The Royal Haymarket, The Banqueting House (1640s),  Richmond Yorkshire theatre (18th c), The Theatre Royal at Bury St. Edmunds (1819),  the Old Vic, and the Newcastle theatre at Tyne, (1864).  In preparation for each site visit, we read the plays, study the genres, and explore the remains of period neighborhoods still bordering the theatres:  the southbank of the 17th century, the coffee-house and market district of Covent Garden of the 18th century, the provincial circuit of the 19th century.  Side visits include the Roman theatre site at St. Albans, the Sheldonian at Oxford, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Leeds, and Richmond, in the Yorkshire countryside.

While in Richmond, we will also be attending a symposium on historic theatres hosted by the Society for Theatre Research. The weekend gathering brings together artistic directors from historic theatres around Great Britain. It also includes tours and a gala performance at the Richmond theatre.

The intent of the seminar is to explore how the history of the space shaped the experience of performing and witnessing the theatrical event, then and now.  In this regard we consider not just the theatrical site, but its environs, and how those have changed across the centuries. .  What was the bankside like in 1600?  What was it like in 1980 when the reconstruction was first proposed?  What did it mean to go to Covent Garden in the 1740s?   Or for an American actor like Kevin Spacey to take over the artistic legacy of the Old Vic?  We are, in essence, walking the city across the centuries looking for traces of its past still preserved in its present experience of theatre-going.

Itinerary & What’s Included: The first two weeks will be based in London, where students will be housed at the University College London dorms, which includes breakfast, and touring theatres by day and attending plays in the evening.  The second half will be spent touring the provincial circuit, staying at guest houses while on the road.  Rail transportation to Stratford-Upon-Avon, Oxford, Richmond, Leeds and Newcastle, as well as the day trips to St. Albans and Bury St. Edmunds, are all inclusive in the program fee, as is the conference registration at Richmond.  Also included in the program fee are eight theatre tours and thirteen tickets to the best English theatre on the planet.

Participants will earn 5 credits of DRAMA 494, or CHID 471 Europe Study Abroad (I&S).  Participants should check with their advisors to determine how these credits can count towards departmental requirements.

Student costs:  
$3,275 Program Fee
$200 IPE Fee
Additional costs include: roundtrip airfare to London, most meals, local transportation, insurance and personal spending money.

Program Director: Christopher Ozubko
Dates of Instruction: August 20 to September 21, 2008

The seminar will be based at the University of Washington Rome Center, housed in the 17th century Palazzo Pio in the heart of historic Rome. Built on the foundations of the Theater of Pompey, ancient Rome’s first permanent theatre (dedicated in 55 B.C.), the Palazzo adjoins the Campo de’ Fiori, site of Rome’s most attractive open air market. The Center provides studio space, a library, a computer lab, as well as logistical support.

Program Instructors: Christopher Ozubko, Professor of Design & Director of the School of Art, and Lisa Schultz, Art Historian.

Courses fulfill a total of 8 credits in art/design/art history that will apply to Autumn Quarter 2007. Participants should check with Art academic advisors to determine how these credits may apply to major requirements.

Student costs:  
$3,800 Program Fee
$200 IPE Fee
Additional costs include: Field trips, museum entrances and excursions included. Additional costs include return travel to Rome, food (approx $15-30 day), health insurance and personal expenses!! This program is open ONLY to design students: contact program director for application information !!

Program Director:  Henry Laufenberg, English
Dates of Instruction: August 11 - September 4 , 2008

It is a place of chic cosmopolitan cities, soaring snowy mountains, great plains, lush tropics thronging with colorful birds and butterflies, friendly villages where cultural practice hasn’t changed much since pre-Columbian times, and stark beaches dotted with penguins. It is a place where even visitors on tight budgets can live very well.  Its people — who love family above all else, but finds close seconds in friends, food, romance, reading and serious conversation — are known the world over for their habit of enjoying themselves when they can.  Provided you avoid displays of arrogance or superiority, the locals welcome you to do the same.

It is a place where students from the University of Washington have ridden horses with real cowboys, toured boutique wine, olive oil and chocolate makers, snowboarded with new friends from half a dozen countries, strolled grand boulevards hard to distinguish from Paris or Madrid, eaten outstanding beef, pastas, pastries and gelato, talked politics over espresso with worldly locals, and danced until sunrise in a wrought-iron balconied warehouse designed by Gustave Eiffel. It is the Americas’ great enigma, Argentina.

Argentina has recently withstood, yet again, serious economic and political upheaval.  Her proud people have seen their way back from many similar downturns in the past century.  As such, Argentina is a land of exasperated defeat and excited renewal, and currently this mood is particularly conspicuous.  While rural areas are still suffering and the suburbs cling to slim hopes, cities and tourist centers are in the midst of an explosion of cottage industry and grass-roots arts spurred by both economic dislocation and new market opportunities.

At the center of this economic and social reformation is Argentina’s inscrutable capital, Buenos Aires.  Most often compared to Paris or Madrid, many Porteños (the resident of Buenos Aires) fancy their city as being more like New York than any other.  But closer examination shows no easy analogies.  Buenos Aires is a city of striking beauty and layered history where residents vigorously enjoy and stubbornly endure complex social, cultural, and political lives in an imported European setting.  Buenos Aires is also typically Latin American, particularly in its political life, folk culture and relatively volatile economy.

Your studies in Argentina will engage the following controlling question: how does the political and social volatility in Argentina’s recent history manifest in its modern and postmodern arts and literature?  We will explore literature, fine arts, dance, and avant-garde movements, and students will be encouraged to pursue their own interests in any field of artistic or creative endeavor as well, including folk culture and popular cultural subgenres like urban arts and popular music.  Historical and culture contexts will center on Argentina’s recent economic crisis, its economic boom in the 1990’s, and its legacy of similar cycles in the 20th century. Theoretical context will include readings and lectures on salient concepts such as national identities and mythologies, surrealism, dadaism, socialist realist arts, nihilism, escapism, anti-foundationalism, rejection and cooption of meta-narratives, modern adaptation of folk and traditional cultures, and heterotopias.

The course will be conducted in English, and host six to eight local guest speakers, including university faculty, art world professionals, artists and performers.  Many activities will be organized in which students will work together in small groups for extended periods.  Students will be expected to keep journals, manage “expert” panels in preparation for guest speakers, keep up with scholarly readings, research and write essays, all activities on which they will be evaluated.  Program sites will include Buenos Aires and nearby rural areas, smaller provincial capitals, and UNESCO world heritage site Colonia, Uruguay.

Students who are selected for this program will be team-oriented, positive, intellectually curious, and mature enough to conduct self-motivated research in real world settings. Participants will earn 5 credits of ENGL 490 (English Foreign Study) or ENGL 363 (Literature and Other Arts) or CHID 472 – Latin America Study Abroad (I&S). Participants should also check with their academic advisors prior to enrolling to determine how these credits may apply to major requirements.

Student costs:  
$2,625 Program Fee
$200 IPE Fee
Additional costs include: Round trip airfare to Buenos Aires, insurance, immunizations, some meals, and personal spending money.

Program Director: Ted Mack, Asian Languages & Literature
Dates of Instruction: September 10 - 23, 2008

When Japanese narrative forms (kabuki, Noh, bunraku, film, plays, comedic dialogs, storytelling, etc.) are studied in the United States, they are seen as exotic objects that are, as printed texts in translation, almost entirely stripped of the qualities that make them art.  If “poetry is what is lost in translation,” as Robert Frost famously wrote, then one can only imagine all of the things that are lost when dramatic performances lose not only their original language, but all of the other sensory elements that are so essential: sound, spectacle, sociality, music, motion, and moment.

“In Situ” will provide an opportunity for students to experience the richness of these various narrative modes in their “natural setting,” Japan.  During the course, we will attend performances in a variety of genres: kabuki, Noh, bunraku (puppet theater), rakugo (storytelling), Takarazuka (all-female musical theater), “Western” theater (e.g., a play by Chekhov in Japanese translation), and film. We will also visit museums and get backstage tours of some of the venues we visit.  At the same time, we will explore parts of Tokyo that are famous venues for many of these narratives, such as the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters of the Edo period (1600-1868), the Sumida River, Ginza, Shinjuku, and the Tokkaidô Highway’s origin in Nihonbashi.  Not all of the cultural forms we will study will be classical ones: one of our stops will be the Ghibli Studios, the museum dedicated to the work of famed animator Miyazaki Hayao (“Spirited Away,” etc.).

This exploration seminar will take place in and around Tokyo, the cultural and political center of Japan. Tokyo has the greatest density of cultural institutions in the country, allowing easy access to a wide variety of performances.  The city is safe, accessible to English speakers, and exciting.  Japanese language ability would enrich the experience, but it is not necessary.  Many of the performance venues provide simultaneous interpretation headphones, and we will read translations of the works to be performed in advance (when available.)  When neither translations nor simultaneous interpretation is available, we will focus on the precise elements left out of the courses offered here at the University, all of which are fully comprehensible even to non-Japanese speakers.  Music, rhythm, movement, expression, timing, choreography, and spectacle are readily accessible, particularly when we discuss these elements in advance.

The experience of seeing these performances in person, in Japan, will achieve the primary goal of the seminar.  A secondary goal, however, will be an informal ethnography.  Students will be encouraged to think about the “naturalness” of the settings of these performances.  To what extent have many of these performances become exotic for the very Japanese who come to see them?  Going to Japan to watch these performances is the best way imaginable to overcome the greatest hurdle in learning about foreign cultures: the belief in that culture’s absolutely “otherness.”  Even as we are immersed in the palpable “strangeness” of these performances, we will also look for the common desires, motivations, and expectations that drive them.

Students will receive five credits of JAPAN 395 (Foreign Study: Japanese Linguistics or Literature), which fulfills the VLPA requirement or CHID 474 Asia Study Abroad (I&S).  Participants should check with their advisors to determine how these credits can count towards departmental requirements.

Student costs:  
$2,000 Program Fee
$200 IPE Fee
Additional costs include: round trip travel to Japan, health insurance, meals, course materials and personal expenses.