CalArts Magazine 14 by California Institute of the Arts

The Magazine of California Institute of the Arts | Spring/Summer 2013

Letter From the President This edition of CalArts magazine coincides with what has been, by almost any measure, one of the most active years in CalArts history. Underpinning this activity has been the initiation of a two-year long-term planning process, under the working title of CalArts 2030, which is the subject of a feature article in this issue. One critical principle established at the beginning of this process was that in areas in which we know action is required, we will not wait to act until the full plan is instituted in 2014. For example, CalArts has taken its first steps into online education, partnering with industry leader Coursera. Through our participation, we will draw on CalArts’ experience in creative pedagogy to form our own distinctive approaches concerning online education—today a vital part of any college’s serious look toward the future. We are also celebrating the 10th anniversary of redcat, which, in a remarkably short time, has won a national and international reputation for presenting cuttingedge work, including that of many CalArtians. Reflected in redcat’s programming are CalArts’ commitment to domestic and international diversity and to the continuing exploration of new forms and possibilities for the arts—among the key themes of our planning process. The overview of redcat’s first decade includes the perspectives of many artists—and others—who have been part of this adventure. As part of 2030 planning, we will be looking at the ongoing development of our individual schools and programs. In this issue we profile three alumni who have had a huge impact on what is known as “immersive entertainment.” Since the Institute was first envisioned by Walt Disney, it is natural that CalArts has made important contributions to this rapidly growing field even without a program dedicated to it. Now the School of Theater is looking at an extension of its activity into design for immersive environments, which has exciting implications for the years ahead. With the close of the 2012–13 academic year, I thank all the trustees, alumni, parents and friends who have supported the work of CalArts in this period. I hope you share our pride in CalArts’ past and current accomplishments and our commitment to an even greater future ahead. steven d. lavine President, CalArts

CalArts is published twice each year by the CalArts Office of Advancement. California Institute of the Arts Steven D. Lavine, President Bianca Roberts, Vice President, Advancement Editorial: Stuart I. Frolick, Freddie Sharmini and Michael Rogers Design: Joseph Prichard (Art mfa 08) Type in this issue includes: Roletta Sans, Roletta Serif, Spektro Gothic and Switch by Andrea Tinnes (Art mfa 98) and Lear by Benjamin Woodlock (Art mfa 13) Photography: Scott Groller and Steven A. Gunther Telephone: (661) 255-1050 E-mail: publicaffairs@calarts.edu

Headliners

THIS PAGE The CalArts Class of 2013 celebrated graduation on May 17. The ceremony’s theme this year was “School of Tomorrow.”

Headliners

Spring/Summer 2013

tedxCalArts Explores “Performance” in Many Genres, Guises, Bodies On Saturday, March 9, the Roy and Edna Disney/ CalArts Theater (redcat) brimmed with righteous energy as a lively full-house of 250, augmented by an army of 60 CalArts volunteers, participated in the first-ever iteration of “tedxCalArts.” Subtitled “Performance, Body & Presence,” the daylong program featured an eclectic series of short talks, demonstrations, performances, remote presentations and prerecorded videos that contemplated new understandings of “performance” and “liveness.” Following the format of the Technology Entertainment Design (ted) Conference, these spin-off tedx events are independently organized and operated, in this case by CalArts’ Center for New Performance (cnp), under license from ted, the nonprofit that promotes “ideas worth spreading.” “The process of putting tedxCalArts together engaged so many threads of the CalArts community, especially in the schools of Critical Studies and Music, and the Program in Graphic Design,” said School of Theater faculty and cnp director of strategy and research Leslie Tamaribuchi, who, along with fellow faculty Shannon Scrofano (Theater mfa 06) and Chi-wang Yang (Theater– Integrated Media mfa 07), led the institute-wide, student-powered effort to curate, organize and produce the event. “And the response of l.a.’s creative and activist community was just terrific.” Zimbabwe-born, New York-based dancer and choreographer Nora Chipaumire opened the proceedings with a languid combination of movement and spoken word. Other highlights included Javanese dancer, choreographer, painter and filmmaker Sardono W. Kusumo, who put forward an epoch-spanning concept of “body memory,” and an electrifying spoken-word performance by CalArts playwright Aleshea Harris (Theater mfa 13). Using Skype were Italian media theorist and

Headliners

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Alpert Award-winning dancer and choreographer Nora Chipaumire, internationally renowned Javanese dancer, choreographer, painter and filmmaker Sardono W. Kusumo, and the Los Angeles experimental orchestra Killsonic— all presenters at the tedxCalArts conference in March.

activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi and “artivist” and co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theater Ricardo Dominguez, who each discussed social justice protests and civil disobedience. Other presenters included the Canadian husbandand-wife team of social theorist Brian Massumi and Sense Lab director Erin Manning, and culturejamming interventionists The Yes Men. The program came to a rousing conclusion with Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Art mfa 83, bfa 81) as the renowned multidisciplinary performer, artist and MacArthur genius held forth on his own brand of “performance pedagogy.” Each presenter was introduced by a member of the CalArts community. The entire program was live-streamed, and has been seen by some 1,500 viewers to date. Tamaribuchi explained that the work undertaken for tedxCalArts is continuing beyond the symposium to include a video to further explore the questions raised at the event. The School of Critical Studies, meanwhile, is creating a publication in which students offer a critical response to each of the presentations. She added that events like tedxCalArts also expand the role of the cnp, which now, in addition to developing and producing original new work, is taking on research. “In thinking about the impacts of performance in the world, it was a priority for us to take the behind-the-scenes discussions and deliberations that go into making new work, and make those conversations visible and part of the public discourse.” tedxCalArts was made possible through the support of the MetLife Foundation/Theatre Communications Group A-ha! Program: Think It, Do It.

redcat Gala Celebrates Catherine Opie, Disney Co. at the 10-Year Mark of CalArts’ Downtown Center At this year’s redcat Gala, the Institute honored the contributions to the arts of photographer Catherine Opie (Art mfa 88) and The Walt Disney Company by presenting each with the redcat Award. Held on March 16 at the state-of-theart venue inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, the glossy fête was also the first in a yearlong series of events to celebrate the 10year anniversary of CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts—“the gold standard of the avant-garde in l.a.,” according to The Huffington Post. More than 200 guests attended the chic ceremony, which this year featured more than the usual gaiety, thanks to the dual—and sometimes dueling—comedic bantering of actor and comedian Jack Black, who served as master of ceremonies, and film and tv star Tim Allen, who presented the redcat Award to Alan Bergman, accepting on behalf of The Walt Disney Company. “On redcat’s 10th anniversary, it’s so exciting to see how this theater and arts center has emerged as a bold and logical expression of the CalArts mission,” said Bergman, president of Walt Disney Studios and a trustee of the Institute.

Painter Lari Pittman (Art mfa 76, bfa 74) presented the evening’s other award to fellow alum Opie, who praised redcat’s impact on the cultural landscape of the region. “redcat has proven itself, has continued to inspire us, and has continued to bring the community together,” she said. “This past decade is a marker of what is going to come in the next 10 years.” CalArts presents the redcat Award annually to recognize the exemplary artists and philanthropists whose talent, vision and generosity have helped set new directions in artmaking.

BELOW FROM RIGHT Alan Bergman (left), president of Walt Disney Studios and CalArts trustee, with presenter Tim Allen. Bergman accepted the redcat Award on behalf of The Walt Disney Company. Emcee Jack Black with redcat Award recipient Catherine Opie.

Spring/Summer 2013

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Alpert Award winners Alex Mincek, Sharon Hayes, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Kelly Copper (right) with Pavol Liška, and Julia Rhoads.

Alpert Award Winners Unveiled

Four individual artists and a duo who create exceptional work in the fields of Dance, Film/ Video, Music, Theater, and Visual Arts have received the 2013 Alpert Award in the Arts. The awards were announced on May 10 by The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts. Initiated and funded by the foundation and administered by CalArts since 1994, the Alpert Award honors and supports artists recognized for their creativity, ingenuity and bodies of work at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions. “The Alpert Award honors daring innovators in the arts, and this year’s winners are perfect examples of cutting-edge artistic achievement,” said Herb Albert, the trumpeter, composer, bandleader and philanthropist who, with his wife, singer Lani Hall Alpert, established the annual awards. “They challenge convention and take aesthetic, intellectual and political risks. In the process, they are transforming the fields in which they practice.” The 2013 winner in Dance is Julia Rhoads, founder and artistic director of Lucky Plush Productions, a 14-year-old Chicago company that blends

theater and postmodern dance with a mix of vaudeville and social commentary. In the Film/ Video category, the Alpert Award went to Lucien Castaing-Taylor, a Harvard anthropologist, artist and filmmaker whose films investigate the interaction between humans and the natural world. The winner in Music is Alex Mincek, a composer, saxophonist and the artistic director of Wet Ink Ensemble, a New York-based contemporary music group. Sharon Hayes won the award in Visual Arts. The New York artist uses video, performance and installation to investigate intersections across history, politics and speech. Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, the founding directors of New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, become the second-ever collaborative team to collect the Alpert Award, topping the Theater section. Although Liška spent a year studying in Oklahoma City after he left the former Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, the company’s moniker comes from the name of the fictional theater group in Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika.

Since Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s founding in 2005, Copper and Liška have constructed plays out of recorded conversations with friends as well as strangers. A recent work, Life and Times: Episodes 1-4, is an 11-hour-long production that includes nearly every utterance by the interviewee, including the “um”s and “uh”s. “We want to see how far we need to travel between the original source material and what we put in front of an audience and still call it art,” says Liška. The duo add live music and elaborate costumes to the theatrical staging to make their shows both conceptually rich and uniquely entertaining. Writing about a production of Episodes 1-4 at New York’s Public Theater this year, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called the piece “one of the most unforgettable adventures of my theatergoing experience.” The Alpert Award recipients each receive an unrestricted grant of $75,000—with Copper and Liška sharing that amount. Every prize also includes a weeklong residency at CalArts, with those residencies often developing into longterm relationships. The awardees are selected from a list of 100 nominees by independent, three-person juries in each of the five categories.

Headliners

Institute Partners with Online Education Leader Coursera; 40,000 Enroll for CalArts “moocs”

As the demand for online learning continues to grow, CalArts has staked out a place at the head of this burgeoning field by offering three highvolume internet-based classes next fall through the trailblazing start-up Coursera. Now the foremost global platform for free online higher education, the Silicon Valley-based company partners with some of the world’s best colleges and universities to host “massive, open online courses,” or “moocs”—with those classes reaching tens of thousands of students, or greater, at any one time. CalArts is among 62 top-flight u.s. and international institutions joining with Coursera, alongside schools such as Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Caltech, France’s École Polytechnique, and the National University of Singapore. As of this writing, more than 40,000 students have already signed up for the three CalArts classes. “We at CalArts view this partnership with Coursera as a unique opportunity to enlist new technology and the power of social media in the service of creative pedagogy, which is our specialty,” says Provost and School of Art faculty member Jeannene Przyblyski, who is teaching one of the Institute’s moocs. “It’s also an exciting forum for our faculty to reach a ‘massive’ national and international audience, and to demonstrate our always-unconventional leadership in the qualitative teaching of creativity in digital and traditional contexts.” The Institute is the only comprehensive arts college on Coursera’s current roster of partners. “As an institution focused solely on the visual, performing and media arts, CalArts provides a unique selection of arts courses now accessible to students globally,” said Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng in a statement.

Designed to give large student populations “access to the world-class education that so far has been available only to a select few,” Coursera has been delivering free, non-credit online classes since the spring of 2012. The “social entrepreneurship” company, founded by Ng and fellow Stanford professor Daphne Koller and backed by venture capital, calls on partner schools to develop their own classes while it handles the high-bandwidth internet platform and operational support. Varying in duration from four or five weeks to as many as 14, the moocs consist of a sequence of prerecorded lectures and other videos, which students can stream at their convenience, as well as interactive quizzes and exams, and other forms of individualized online feedback and exchange among teachers and students. Coursera currently offers more than 300 classes, and has around 3 million registered users worldwide. In addition to Przyblyski’s class, which is called “Live!: A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers,” the other CalArts moocs are: “Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists,” taught by Ajay Kapur, associate dean for Research and Development in Digital Arts and director of the Program in Music Technology; and “Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works,” taught by Stephan Koplowitz, dean of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance. “moocs are currently the great experiment in education,” says Przyblyski, adding that online teaching and learning have only very recently extended to the humanities and the arts. “As an arts school, we are dedicated to experimentation. How might the arts flourish in the age of

algorithms? We’re aiming to find out. That’s more interesting to us than just putting classes online, which isn’t rocket science.” In fact, the Coursera partnership is not CalArts’ first foray into internet-based learning. Since 2012, the Institute has been offering paid, noncredit online portfolio development workshops for artists and animators through a social media platform called Tenlegs, with a similar workshop for graphic designers in the works.

“As an arts school, we are dedicated to experimentation. How might the arts flourish in the age of algorithms? We’re aiming to find out.” — Jeannene Przyblyski, Provost The Institute’s exploration of online education, Przyblyski points out, “is a response to our evolving student population. They are increasingly digital natives. We want to learn, through these pilot projects, how to best create dynamic learning environments for the arts in the digital world, and meet the changing needs of students and lifelong learners of all kinds.”

Spring/Summer 2013

RIGHT Trustees Nahum Lainer (left) and Tom Rothman.

Introducing the Institute’s Newest Trustees NAHUM LAINER Los Angeles industrial real estate developer Nahum Lainer is a longtime philanthropist, patron of the arts, and art collector. “I have known about CalArts’ reputation as a leader in the arts, and I wanted to get involved,” Lainer says. “Higher education has always been important to me. I’m very much aware of the cost of it today and that’s probably one of the central issues facing CalArts: making quality education more affordable for students.” Born in Mexico City and raised in Beverly Hills, Lainer holds a bachelor’s degree and an mba from ucla. He was a certified public accountant with the influential Los Angeles firm Kenneth Leventhal & Co. before joining the family business, Lainer Investments. Started by his father Simha Lainer in the 1950s, the company specializes in developing, managing and leasing industrial properties, primarily in the San Fernando Valley. The company currently manages more than two million square feet of property used for warehousing, manufacturing and distribution as well as for the entertainment industry. Lainer and his wife Alice direct their philanthropy through their family foundation. They have supported the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, Center Theatre Group, The Museum of Modern Art, American Friends of the Israel Museum, and Sinai Akiba Academy, among other organizations. As the Institute plans for the years ahead, Lainer is adding his considerable expertise to the board’s Buildings and Grounds Committee. “I hope that my background in business, accounting and real estate can help CalArts in the planning of future facilities and in developing a strategic plan.”

TOM ROTHMAN “I believe in the power of creativity,” says Tom Rothman, a Baltimore native and veteran Hollywood executive at various units of 20th Century Fox. “I grew up in an arts-centered home. My father founded Center Stage, the regional theater in Baltimore; my brother’s an actor; my wife, Jessica Harper, is an actress. So I’m a big believer in all of the arts, and it’s an honor to have the opportunity to serve on the board at CalArts—a school that shares in that belief.” Rothman was educated at Brown University and Columbia Law School, and, after a stint as partner in the New York firm of Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein & Seiz, he began his career in entertainment as a producer for Columbia Pictures. Rothman supervised filmmaking activities at Fox for 19 years, where he most recently served as chairman and ceo of Fox Filmed Entertainment. Rothman also founded the Fox Searchlight division in 1994, and has hosted the Fox Legacy television series. Some of the awardwinning movies made during his long tenure include Black Swan, Juno, The Devil Wears Prada, Sideways, Walk the Line, Boys Don’t Cry, and the box office juggernauts Avatar and Titanic. “I’ve been immersed in the digital universe for a long time, and have experience in that field to contribute,” Rothman says. “I’ve been studying online distance-learning—an area of particular interest to CalArts.” Rothman is serving on the Institute’s Ad Hoc Online Education Committee and the Committee on Trustees.

Feature Title

Herbert Blau (1926–2013)

The Institute is remembering the legacy of its founding provost, the fiercely iconoclastic theater director, scholar and educator who was the chief architect of CalArts’ radical creative pedagogy—what he called “an implosive scene of learning.” Herbert Blau passed away at his home in Seattle on May 3, his 87th birthday. Blau was last on campus in 2008 to accept an honorary doctorate from the Institute. Although he served as provost and dean of the School of Theater and Dance for a scant three years, Blau’s mark on the life of CalArts is indelible, his influence continuing to this day. When he joined the fledgling California Institute of the Arts in 1968—hired by then-CalArts chairman H.R. Haldeman, of later Watergate infamy as President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff—Blau was already one of the foremost innovators of American theater. His first task was to conceive of an educational structure for the multidisciplinary school of the arts envisioned by Walt Disney. What Blau developed was centered on the idea of releasing the creativity of artists from institutional constraints, prompting individual artistic vision and out-of-the-box experimentation. To empower students, learning was rooted in workshops and independent projects; in collegial relationships with faculty mentors; and in the organic connection between the artmaking process and its reception and evaluation. “With a faculty of major artists interacting with students, and the avant-garde as second nature—first in beautiful downtown Burbank, that right-wing wasteland, scandalized by it all, then with happenings and installations all over the San Fernando Valley—CalArts became the exemplary model of the antiacademy,” Blau wrote in the introduction to Reality Principles, a 2011 collection of essays. “And while there were wild and whirling dilemmas in its uncensored beginnings, with an escalation of controversy (up to the Disney-world board) that eventually caused me to leave, there hasn’t been in my lifetime, except maybe for Black Mountain [College], a pedagogical dynamic even remotely like it.” Born in Brooklyn and educated at nyu and Stanford, Blau burst onto the theater scene in the 1950s as co-director, with Jules Irving, of the daring Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. The company introduced American audiences to the avant-garde dramas of Brecht, Beckett, Genet and Pinter, and applied off-beat treatments to the classics. Their productions included

the u.s. premiere of Brecht’s Mother Courage and the historic staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at San Quentin State Prison. Blau became a passionate voice for less conventionality in theater, summed up in the influential polemic The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto in 1964. The following year, the high-profile Blau– Irving team arrived at Lincoln Center as heads of the repertory company housed in the newly constructed Vivian Beaumont Theater. Blau’s tenure there was short and stormy. In an interview with The New York Times, actor Alan Mandell—a member of the Actor’s Workshop who also went to Lincoln Center—recalled, “I don’t think the board of directors understood a thing he said.” Following his time at the Institute, Blau moved to Oberlin College and founded the experimental performance group kraken. Its members included actor, clown and MacArthur genius Bill Irwin—who had followed his mentor from CalArts to Oberlin—and award-winning director Julie Taymor. Blau later taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and, finally, the University of Washington, where he was the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities. Blau authored a dozen books, among them Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point and Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater (both 1982)—seminal texts of performance theory. Other titles are The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater (2002) and As If: An Autobiography (2012). Blau’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. In his interview with the Times, Alan Mandell, 82, the legendary interpreter of Samuel Beckett, remembered a conversation with the playwright shortly before his death. Herb Blau was mentioned. “Ah yes, Herbert Blau,” Beckett is to have said, “overpoweringly intellectual.”

RED Spring/Summer 2013 2013 Spring/Summer

This year, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of redcat, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, but its inception goes back much further, to the late 1980s. At that time, the richness of the artistic life on the CalArts campus was a well-kept secret—not so much for other artists as for Los Angeles audiences and the wider public, for whom the Valencia location of our campus seemed too remote. Many of the more than 300 musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, dancers and theatermakers on the faculty were more likely to present their work in New York or Berlin than in Los Angeles; and of the hundreds of guest artists who came to CalArts from around the world each year, most returned home without ever touching down beyond campus. Beyond the desire to share these riches, two other circumstances of artistic life in Southern California added to the sense that CalArts should have its own, more visible facility for presenting contemporary work to the public. Many of the most interesting theater artists, choreographers and multimedia artists graduating from CalArts felt that they had to move away from Los Angeles to have any reasonable chance of drawing attention to their art—so they were decamping not just to New York, but to cities ranging from Portland and San Francisco to Minneapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia. If this was true for CalArts graduates, it seemed likely to be true as well for the many other artists graduating from area colleges and universities. If it

was worth educating artists in cutting-edge practices, surely it was worth helping them to bring their work to the public after graduation. Surely it was worth building up the audiences, the support and the critical infrastructure, here in Los Angeles, for the kind of experimental artmaking practiced by our best young artists. Conversely, much exciting new work from across the United States and around the world was not making it to Los Angeles because of the lack of local presenters committed to challenging new art by relatively little-known younger practitioners. It was heartbreaking to see an important young dance company travel as far as Arizona State and then forgo Los Angeles on its way to San Francisco and points north. This meant that artists working in Los Angeles, particularly in the performing arts, were in danger of not being part of the latest national and international dialogues about contemporary culture. Today, by contrast, many of the artists who present at redcat also visit our Valencia campus for workshops and master classes, giving our students more exposure to diverse forms and expressions—whether it is new theater from Latin America, modern choreography from Africa, or experimental film from East Asia. The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater was designed to address all of these issues. At the time, building this state-of-the-art venue represented a bold (though calculated) leap into the unknown. Ten years later redcat has succeeded at a level

redcat’sTitle First Decade Feature

“aN aesthetic oasis for experimenters” beyond our hopes. Under the leadership of Mark Murphy and a succession of outstanding visual arts curators, currently Ruth Estevez, and with critical input from faculty artists and curators at CalArts, redcat has become a vital part of the cultural life of Los Angeles; and it has earned an enviable national and international reputation for its commitment to daring and exciting new work. In the process, it has expanded the perception of CalArts, and in turn our own capacities, as both an educational and a presenting and producing institution, opening doors to a whole range of new possibilities for us as a global leader in the arts. Going forward, I expect redcat’s role and reputation to continue to grow. International exchanges have become an indispensable part of contemporary culture. In the current year alone, redcat has presented art, performance and multimedia from France, Poland, Iran, Japan, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, China and Korea; and there is every reason to expect this list to expand in the years ahead. redcat has become

a forum for compelling conversation about contemporary issues, often at the juncture of art and politics, or art and the city. Not least, it has become a vital site for collaboration and partnership between CalArts and other institutions near and far. There is, of course, much more that we can accomplish by pursuing themes of particular interest to CalArts— such as the nature of creativity, and its increasingly important role in today’s world, and the shaping of tomorrow’s horizons. Indeed, the possibilities are only limited by our capacity to dream big dreams. I thank everyone involved for what has been accomplished in redcat’s first decade. The following six pages offers observations and insights from some of those who have been part of this remarkable experience and community. I eagerly look forward to redcat’s next 10 years. Steven Lavine, President damián ortega

kara walker

faustin linyekula

rigo 23

Spring/Summer 2013

“Just before we walked on stage for our very first performance at redcat, I turned to Kate [Valk] and Ari [Fliakos] and said, ‘We’re dead.’ This was Poor Theater, a strange piece in which we pretend to be a fictional theater company and then a fictional dance company. It’s a very personal statement from Liz [LeCompte] about being an artist and making art, self-referential and oblique, and I thought, ‘l.a. just isn’t going to go for this.’ But l.a. turned out to be one of the best audiences we had for Poor Theater. l.a.’s always been a great audience for us… Another thing I like about redcat is that the lounge stays open after the show. This doesn’t happen in a lot of venues, particularly in the u.s., and I really appreciate a theater that lets the audience socialize afterward.”

Scott Shepherd Member of the New York-based experimental theater company The Wooster Group, onstage narrator of Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz

“We first met Mark Murphy in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He had just seen our show Lost Chord Radio. We normally don’t believe enthusiastic Americans—especially those from Hollywood. But we were wrong. Just a few months later we had our first American performance at redcat. After some years we came back for a longer residency that was a wonderful project. The people at redcat were so dedicated and helpful. We sang our Songs at the end of the world two years ago and we will be back in September this year to make Hospital together with the lapd [Los Angeles Poverty Department].”

Wunderbaum Dutch multidisciplinary theater collective

“redcat is the definitive hub of new performance in downtown Los Angeles. As a director and artist, I have not only found career-altering support here, but have continually gravitated to this aesthetic oasis both to see where live art and the moving image are headed and to commune with those wild, like-minded souls—the experimenters—who have become my family.”

Lars Jan CalArts alumnus (Theater–Integrated Media mfa 08), director and media artist, founder of the multimedia company Early Morning Opera, tedGlobal Fellow roscoe mitchell

wunderbaum

calarts gamelan kyai doro dasih

early morning opera

the wooster group

my barbarian

redcat’s First Decade

“redcat makes the impossible practical, the impractical sustainable, the theoretical world-ready, and the dreams we’re not brave enough to repeat even to ourselves, occasions for mutual recognition and collective solicitude. Lucky Los Angeles to have such a place.”

Mark Z. Danielewski Author of House of Leaves and The Fifty Year Sword

“redcat was a perfect venue for the u.s. premiere of my orchestrawith-guitar soloist suite The Universe Will Provide, which I had long supposed would NEVER get a performance in the u.s... That this dream would come true in this beautiful, acoustically immaculate and intimate space made the entire experience especially magical for me.”

Mike Keneally Guitarist for Frank Zappa, progressive rock visionary

“At both of our redcat engagements it was a deep pleasure to connect with old friends and new audience members, and offer more than our usual Eiko & Koma evening. We are grateful for the kind of relationship we have with redcat curators. Mark and George both truly love working with artists, hands-on, and spend a lot of time with them. That makes a true collaboration between artists and presenters/curators. Viva redcat!”

eiko Of Eiko & Koma, the duo of Japaneseborn, New York-based dancers and choreographers

“For those of us who want to live vibrant lives that are challenged in ways that only performance can challenge, redcat is indispensable… For me, redcat is about community. It’s one of the few places in l.a. where I can feel a true ‘buzz’ around performance, and the only one where I can regularly get my buzz around alternative performance. And that buzz is what makes life all the more vibrant.”

David Roussève Alpert Award-winning Los Angeles choreographer, artistic director of the company reality

eiko & koma

mark bradford and glenn kaino

gob squad

karmetik machine orchestra

the fifty year sword

hiroaki umeda

Spring/Summer 2013 2013 Spring/Summer

“One of the very best cinema showcases in the country. No kidding. Really fantastic projection conditions. Plus, on each occasion I showed work there, I was lucky to have a great, responsive and intelligent audience. Why can it not be like this everywhere?”

ernie Gehr Avant-garde film icon

“The publishing arm of redcat has been an important extension of the curatorial voice, as well as of the physical gallery space. It has offered a platform for alumni such as Jon Sueda, Yasmin Khan, Jessica Fleischmann and Deb Littlejohn to produce publications that extend, reflect and, sometimes, help shape the experimental shows at redcat. Significant, too, is that redcat has included the practice of design as an integral component of its program. Many of its publications, such as Margaret Kilgallen’s book [Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye & Bye], have become the seminal publications for the exhibiting artists. The highly successful Two Lines Align show, featuring the work of [CalArts faculty member] Ed Fella and [alumnus] Geoff McFetridge, demonstrates redcat’s embrace of design as a practice that merits a serious curatorial approach.”

Michael Worthington CalArts alumnus (Art mfa 95), co-director of the CalArts Program in Graphic Design

“…redcat was packed. A red-blooded audience filled every seat. Redblooded musicians occupied every inch of the black-box stage. There was excitement in the air. Many concert presenters would consider a mainly young audience giving eager and undivided attention to a three-hour concert of complex modern music a happy fiction… The crowd was real, but it was also spectral. Everyone had gathered for the u.s. premiere of Gérard Grisey’s complete, epic Les Espaces Acoustiques, the magnum opus of ‘spectral music’… CalArts was responsible for the u.s. premiere. The orches tra consisted of students, faculty and alumni. The performance, expertly conducted by [faculty member] Mark Menzies, was enrapturing. [Alumnus] Andrew McIntosh played the important viola solos with commanding beauty.”

two lines align frances-marie uitti

edgar arceneaux CalArts alumnus (Art mfa 01), artist

choi jeong hwa

marc bamuthi joseph

Mark Swed The Los Angeles Times music critic reviewing the April 30, 2010, performance of Grisey’s masterwork

“Clara Kim [former curator of the Gallery at redcat], Mark and George allowed [faculty member] Charles Gaines and I to go on a great and treacherous adventure for our exhibition Snake River— a video installation shot in two countries and 5 different states, and one the most ambitious projects of my career. redcat was there for us to experiment and play, and I cherish being part of its foundational years and playing a part in its growth.”

redcat’sTitle First Decade Feature

“redcat has added a great deal to the experience of CalArts dance students. It brings in exceptional artists from across the United States and all over the world to our studios as visiting artists; it also provides a chance for our students to perform and choreograph for larger Los Angeles audiences. It’s a very nice two-way exchange: an entry point for outside professionals to come to CalArts, and a portal for us to get work out in the world.”

Stephan Koplowitz Dean of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts, site-specific choreographer

“redcat supported my making a new film while in l.a., The Struggle Against Ourselves, with students at CalArts and CalArts [alumnus,] tutor and theatremaker Chi-wang Yang… Relationships that artists make while working with an institution are vital and lasting beyond the experience of the show itself. This is definitely part of the ethos of redcat and is part of what makes it distinct—not only a space for audiences to experience contemporary art, but as a nexus between l.a. and the international arts community.”

“redcat is the snazziest cat in town. You can always look for smart art there. My story is the pleasure of walking by an installation and a nifty coffee bar complete with enticing books behind glass cases. It’s a wonder that one makes it all the way to the theater in back, but once there, the film program rewards more than a rich café au lait.”

Barbara Hammer Queer cinema pioneer

“redcat is always warm and welcoming. I have seen some amazing shows there, some that challenged me, some that were a bit challenging—but redcat always gives me something to think about. It presents people who are taking risks, creating their own thing, and no matter what their capacity or dis cipline, it’s good for anyone who wants to expand their brain connections.”

Miwa Matreyek CalArts alumna (Film/Video–Integrated Media 07), animation artist and performer, member of the multimedia performance trio Cloud Eye Control

Jesse Jones

miwa matreyek

Dublin-based artist and filmmaker

charles gaines & edgar arceneaux

them

laura heit the experimental impulse

carl hancock rux

pandit chitresh das

Spring/Summer 2013

Thom andersen CalArts faculty member, film essay auteur

“redcat is immersed in a prodigious architectural complex; it is a malleable theater that opens space for diverse artistic expressions and is connected to an academic institution that gives it depth and width. But what really makes it exceptional is the human qualities of the little group of people who run it, making its audiences and artists feel truly at home.”

Claudio Valdés Kuri Artistic director of the Mexico City avant-garde company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes

“We had the privilege of performing at redcat a few times. With these performances we reached a wider audience and were able to bring the beautiful, rich and ancient heritage of Persian Sufi Music to the West, and foster a deeper comprehension and appreciation of it.”

Lian ensemble Los Angeles-based Persian classical music ensemble, which includes CalArts faculty member Houman Pourmehdi and alumna Pirayeh Pourafar (Music mfa 00)

slavs and tatars

don cheadle

“With the best projection for video and 16mm film anywhere, a devoted and meticulous projectionist, and stadium seating (although not the kind to be found in modern stadiums), the redcat film shows have built an audience of unprecedented size for movies that couldn’t find a home anywhere else in town, from the films of Pedro Costa to the video diaries of [alumna] Naomi Uman. In this space, marginal films look like blockbusters.”

thom andersen

teatro de ciertos habitantes lou reed

joey arias & basil twist

faust

maureen selwood

redcat’s First Decade

“Without redcat I would never be able to make ‘big’ work. In every aspect— creation, production and performance— redcat has helped bring my imagination to an audience more completely and with greater impact.”

Rosanna Gamson CalArts faculty member, choreographer, artistic director of the dance company Rosanna Gamson / World Wide

Kim Beom Seoul-based artist

“I premiered my first solo work in redcat’s Studio series and later at the now Festival. Since then I have performed in festivals, received national grants and am about to premiere my first full-length production. I can’t imagine having begun my career without the support I have received from redcat. It’s a rare and wonderful place to create.”

Christine Marie CalArts alumna (Theater–Integrated Media mfa 09), shadow theater artist, director, inventor, ted Fellow christine marie

“Being on stage with Morton Subotnick playing a Buchla 200e while performing with the California e.a.r. Unit was an awesome highlight in 2012, encapsulated by having him loop and process the sound of my amplified violin bowed with a twig, or in another show seeing Mike Keneally play electric guitar and keyboard simultaneously, and with a smirk and head nod indicate it was time for me to solo on violin. Those are experiences and unique moments of genuine fun in performance I’ve had at redcat.”

“Working and showing at redcat was very meaningful to me; I was happy and satisfied with the show. It was a significant moment for me, as an artist, to organize and analyze all the drawings I have produced over the past 20 years. With redcat’s support, my book of drawings was printed and it is still one of the two publications of which I am most proud.”

eric km Clark CalArts alumnus (mfa 06), violinist and composer, member of the California e.a.r. Unit, co-director of music performance venue the wulf elevator repair service

barry mcgee morton subotnick & the california e.a.r. unit

shinichi iova-koga

Spring/Summer 2013

CalArts

2030

Shapes of Things to Come President Steven Lavine in Conversation with Provost Jeannene Przyblyski

CalArts 2030

Steven Lavine: We gave you and Don the fairly unreasonable task of leading longterm planning only months after you had arrived at CalArts.

This past fall the Institute launched a two-year planning initiative under the title “CalArts 2030”—the most comprehensive, forward-looking such effort in the school’s history. To be finalized by the end of the next academic year, the plan will take shape against a backdrop of the ever-accelerating economic, technological and demographic changes that are giving rise to new forms of artistic and social expression, and radically affecting the structures of higher education. Drawing on inputs from across the CalArts community, the 2030 plan will address the key questions that are likely to face the Institute and its young artists over the next decade-and-a-half. How can CalArts best serve the needs of students even as those needs continue to evolve in the fully-globalized arena of creative practice— where artists and other innovators are now producing work across borders and disciplines with unprecedented mobility? How should the school, as a now-mature institution, maintain and proactively build on its global leadership in arts education? Leading the Planning Task Force, in close cooperation with President Steven Lavine, are Provost Jeannene Przyblyski and Vice President and cfo Don Matthewson, both of whom joined the Institute last year. This March, CalArts magazine listened in as Lavine, now in his 25th year as CalArts president, and Przyblyski discussed CalArts 2030—the broader context from which it is emerging, some of the key issues under consideration, and the outcomes it aspires to achieve.

Jeannene Przyblyski: CalArts is a culture, with habitual practices that have grown up over time. Obviously Don and I have had to immerse ourselves in this culture in order to be effective in the planning process. On the other hand, the excuse to be curious and questioning, which is what newness gives you, is a positive advantage in this case. We can bring a freshness an outsider would provide, but, as participants in the community, we have a much greater personal commitment than, say, a consultant. SL: I’m fond of saying that CalArts isn’t only a college; it is a cause. The attitudes here are those of a driven community committed to the continual renewal of the arts as a way of thinking about who we are and what this life is for. Yesterday I met with an mfa graphic design student, Isaac Berenson, whose thesis traces a lineage from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College to CalArts, each with its own sense of separateness and cause. We’re the only one of the three that stabilized enough to have an ongoing life. The challenge is how to balance the passion and directness that goes with the sense of cause with the stability that lets you survive changes in the economic and social climate. JP: As an art historian, I’ve approached CalArts as a community as well as a history and archive. In our planning meetings so far, we’ve talked about revisiting Walt Disney’s founding vision, with different arts coexisting and informing each other— of taking that vision up anew, and seeing what parts are most relevant to us today.

Spring 2013

Planning Timeline

Data Collecting

The Planning Task Force develops internal and comparative data reports; hosts focus groups; and elicits feedback from across the CalArts community.

Spring/Summer 2013

What can we best build on? Our appreciation of this legacy already has a built-in sense of critical reflection. Yet it can also become a crutch, sometimes maybe a burden, too. I believe it’s always good to widen the conversation. The success of planning depends on it being inclusive of the community; an even greater success would be if it draws more people in as stakeholders through the process. SL: Some of the challenges we hope to address in this planning process first came up between 2008 and 2011, during the recession, when we were under tight budget constraints and student indebtedness was rising sharply. I remember sending a letter to the community in which I said, “We can either think this through and take our fate in our own hands, or we can just wait and leave ourselves at the mercy of outside forces.” I was then, and still am, concerned with what we can do to make CalArts more accessible to students from a broad range of backgrounds, and to limit student indebtedness after graduation. What, in addition to increased fundraising, can we do to reduce CalArts’ dependence on tuition? Well, life is a little easier now. Even in the shaky economy, CalArts remained fairly insulated. We did not have any layoffs or furloughs in 2008, just as we hadn’t in 2001 [during the previous recession]. We had some tight budget years but we protected the community, kept it intact, and our applicant pool has continued to grow, including an ever-larger number of international applicants. Those difficult years made it clear that it wasn’t just our students who have to be entrepreneurial in sustaining their work after college and finding new ways to bring that work to audiences; CalArts itself had to become more entrepreneurial. JP: Many CalArtians have talked to me about the 1994 [Northridge] earthquake as a decisive moment when people in the community really “self-elected” to stay a part of the ongoing CalArts project. A place like this can survive a crisis because of an upwelling of deep convictions. But to elect to change in the absence of a crisis—that’s a challenge, actually, for an institution of CalArts’ age, prestige and legacy. The world is changing in profound ways, some of them very exciting and some less so; and if CalArts wants to prosper 20 years from now, then we need to keep thinking about what students are like, what art will be like, what CalArts’ place in the world might be like.

Sense-Making

SL: We’ve done big things in my 25 years at CalArts, but the core pedagogy, even if it is updated with changes in the arts, has remained fairly consistent, without any radical changes. Now we are asking, “Are those ways that have served us well for 45 years the right ways for the decades ahead? If you started again, would you design it exactly the same way?” We have never taken up these questions during my tenure. You’re right: If we can bring a constant process of selfquestioning and adjusting course into our way of being—almost as an expectation—then we will have done something big for the Institute. JP: So far the [Planning] Task Force has focused on data gathering. In talks with the different constituencies, we started with basic questions: “What do you think CalArts is? What is it that we do well and want to keep doing? Where can we improve? What would we never change, no matter what?” In tandem, we also embarked on “institutional analytics”—data-driven assessments of our student population, trends in the schools and programs, our physical facilities needs, but also external factors like demographic trends. Our reputation in the world is wholly well-deserved, with an amazing number of transformational artists who are alumni, faculty, or have other connections to the school. But because CalArts has done so well in that regard, it hasn’t necessarily had to take a leadership role in framing some of the larger questions about the importance of creativity to education, and how cultivating creative skills prepares students to successfully adapt, to be versatile

Interpreting the collected data, the Task Force identifies four-to-six key themes and provides a “justification” for each one.

CalArts 2030

and nimble, out in the world after college. Or how creative people might approach the role of new technology in arts education, not just as artmaking tools or but as a way to improve the delivery of the pedagogy. As an institute, CalArts is positioned to be other things in addition to a school. It educates, but it also presents. We are profoundly active producers and content manufacturers, but we haven’t really thought about how this content could have a broader reach and greater impact. Let’s understand the ways “knowledge production” could contribute to the sustainability of the institution, as a research center and think-tank. SL: Even as CalArts 2030 continues well into next year, there are trends we can identify right now. The art world today is global, and has been for many, many years. CalArts is now more international than ever before, with 25 percent of all our applicants being international. We are also contending with the very different level of preparation incoming American students have today compared to 40 or even 20 years ago. American public schools are improving only very slowly, and the “new normal” is a lot of really gifted students who come here without having been taught certain basic skills. It’s a challenge we have in the foundation courses, and the question is, “Does our model for those courses still work?”

“If CalArts wants to prosper 20 years from now, then we need to keep thinking about what students are like, what art will be like, what CalArts’ place in the world might be like.” — Jeannene Przyblyski, Provost

JP: Our current crop of students is the closest we can get to the future, especially the first-year students, both bfas and mfas, who have that sense of questioning. They are very excited—passionate—to be here, but can often come up short academically, or even in their métier preparedness, especially at the beginning. And they pose important questions: “Why are things the way they are?” They talk about their desire for career preparation as part of their studies here. They obviously want to succeed as artists, but they also want to have broader skills, whether it’s personal financial management, or knowing how to form a company or start a nonprofit, or how to put up a website. They really are thinking about

Fall 2013

Visioning

Participating members of the community collaborate to create a shared vision for CalArts 2030, with the Task Force developing a vision statement.

Spring/Summer 2013

their future in concrete ways, which makes those students change agents themselves, prompting us to create programs for career development and non-métier preparation. SL: I’m happy we’re not waiting until the end of planning to act on developments that are already happening. Tom Lloyd on our board calls them “no brainers,” areas in which we know action is required. Now that it’s clear that we are an institution of global reach, we have to figure out how to optimize this shift as part of our vision of the future. So, instead of waiting to find out later how to make CalArts a better place for international students, we are already starting this summer, as a first step, an International Gateway Program designed to address Englishlanguage problems and entering a foreign culture. JP: Becoming more global is very exciting, but of course it brings challenges: language and other issues of cultural understanding going in both directions. Artists are coming in from all over the world, because they see this as a place of creative and academic freedom, where one can think for oneself. We want those students. And I think we can respond to the language question in a creative way, to the extent we embrace English as, on the one hand, a lingua franca in the world and, on the other, a foreign language for many people. They are learning a new language, and we have to address that affirmatively rather than remedially. SL: Or another example of a no-brainer: We already know that American high schools are very uneven in quality, with students gifted in the arts arriving with very different levels of academic preparation. JP: Previously, there had been a habit of thinking about Critical Studies not offering “scaffolded learning” in the liberal arts tradition because it is a métier in itself, and so it’s going to be uncompromising in its status as a métier. Now, with the redesign of the Critical Studies curriculum being led by Critical Studies Dean Amanda Beech [set to be introduced in 2014], it

actually will be a big change for CalArts when Critical Studies begins to take on a more proactive, systematic role in student success at the academic level, in ell [English Language Learner] support, and in support for students with learning challenges. SL: Online education is a challenge and an opportunity that every college is thinking about right now, in light of the high cost and limited accessibility of the best colleges and universities. The huge number of people signing up for non-credit moocs [massive open online courses] suggests the pent-up hunger out there. I think every college is going to have to settle on what the role of online learning will be within existing residential education, and as a way of sharing at least some of an institution’s capacity with those who cannot afford to, or simply choose not to, attend as traditional students. The decisions reached with regard to this issue will have profound effects on the educational, social and economic situation of colleges and universities. There is the additional dimension of students who have been taking online courses all their lives and, in some ways, have the expectation of getting online almost anything they can get out of a course. [CalArts Dance dean] Stephan Koplowitz is offering site-specific dance online through Coursera [see page 5] at a time when admissions to dance schools are a little shaky, and more than 4,000 people have already signed up. You can see there is a gap between the hunger and access. What is the right way to get to talented young people and shape them?

Spring 2014

Goal-Setting

The Planning Task Force defines Institute goals and action plans for the next five years.

Finalizing the Plan

The Task Force distributes the final CalArts 2030 Plan to all Institute councils for review and to the Board of Trustees for approval.

CalArts 2030

JP: Well, with our multidisciplinary mix, we are actually planning for six schools, plus the seventh school, which is the Institute as a whole, and finally the eighth “school,” which is all the spaces in between. SL: I expect some of the significant changes coming out of this process to be at the local level—just adjusting to real-life circumstances right now. But there will be large choices to make. Do we invest in a new residential facility and grow physically on this campus because international students want campus housing? Or, do we look downtown or somewhere else to add facilities that link us to the professional world and ease the transition from college to work? Or, as part of our expanding international dimension, do we need on-the-ground facilities in other countries? Or is the critical investment not in bricks and mortar, but online? It’s both thrilling and a little daunting to have those critical decisions ahead of us.

JP: Not all of Stephan’s students will become choreographers, but some, maybe many, are lifelong learners who would like more exposure to what we do at CalArts. To the extent that we reach out to them, and build out our abilities in the online environment, we may well discover new ways of supporting our students who are here, committed to a career in the arts. SL: In a related concern, we both are at least interested in the idea of “low-residency” courses. We know it’s the intensity of the exchange between faculty and students that is the core of CalArts. On the other hand, especially at the graduate level, we’re asking people, often with a spouse and children, to give up their homes and livelihoods, to move to a different city for two or three years to prepare for whatever happens next. It seems as if there ought to be a better way to handle this at the graduate level.

JP: Institutions often turn to strategic planning as a panacea when they are under such stress that they cannot do anything else but plan. This isn’t CalArts’ position. The school has received resounding affirmation from its regional accreditors. For the practice-based planning ahead, we are in a great position; we are able to have positive conversations across the whole community that can reach a culmination and result in action. I think there are going to be a number of culture shifts. I hope for this, actually. Because this culture is strong and could be even stronger by the time we are through—stronger because it is willing and eager to contemplate how change and adaptation sustains us as a living culture.

JP: We know we need to address how tech nology and social media are impacting education—it’s everywhere around us—but we are not going to know how to address distance and blended learning, and exactly what role it will play in our future, unless we start to experiment with it. Practicebased research makes a lot of sense to artists—figuring something out by actually doing it. SL: I am also eager for us to address the question of “interdisciplinarity,” which is one of our great strengths and distinctive competencies. CalArts was designed to be interdisciplinary, and certainly we are far more interdisciplinary than our peers. Still, how we balance skills in a particular discipline and reach across disciplines remains a question.

Fall 2014

Implementing

The Plan, distributed throughout the CalArts community, is put into action, with future progress to be reported annually.

Illustration by Chris Burnett (Art bfa 13)

Spring/Summer 2013

by michael rogers

Designing Wonders

Three Alumni Dream Big in “Entertainment Design,” Raising the Bar in a Business that Aims to Amaze

Before you can build a theme park, an aquarium or a world’s fair—before you can even draw up architectural plans for such ventures—you need an inspiring concept. To create these fantasy worlds, often rich with captivating stories, color ful characters and immersive environments, you need a dreamer—someone otherwise called an entertainment designer. Throughout its history, CalArts has trained many of these creative conceptualizers. While the Institute does not have a dedicated entertainment design program, it has produced some of the pioneers and leaders in the field, including Gary Goddard (Theater bfa 74), the founder and ceo of Goddard Group; Bob Rogers (Film/Video 72), the founder and ceo of brc Imagination Arts; and Joe Lanzisero (Film/Video bfa 79), a creative development executive at Walt Disney Imagineering—the design and development division of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. Decades after their starts, they continue to design groundbreaking projects. And they hire many CalArtians, eager to ply their creative talents in a robust business that reaches an audience of millions. While today’s entertainment design projects are complex and expensive—the field’s beginnings can be traced to late 18th- and early 19th-century carnivals with their artful barkers promoting a peek at a panoply of human and animal oddities. Arcades at county fairs and coastal boardwalks gave way to amusement parks with bonerattling Tilt-A-Whirls and roller coasters. While those diversions provided fleeting thrills, the game changed forever in July 1955 when Walt Disney opened Disneyland. Dwarfing earlier parks in concept, imagination and scope, Disney added themed rides with elaborate sets, stories and characters that created memorable experiences. The economic potential of the business transformed overnight and quickly grew into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Disney’s far-reaching vision for expansion of the arts’ role in the cultural life of Los Angeles included education and his founding of CalArts. Given Disney’s influence on the Institute, it’s not surprising that many alumni like Goddard, Lanzisero and Rogers would gravitate toward entertainment design. Overseeing different segments of the industry, from theme parks to resorts to corporate welcome centers, they hire, direct and collaborate with a wide range of creative professionals, including graphic designers, animators, writers, modelmakers, actors, filmmakers, musicians and dancers. International markets are now the highest growth areas in entertainment design, so Goddard, Lanzisero and Rogers travel much of the year. Each has a distinctive and outsized personality; all three have high energy and infectious enthusiasm for their work. Each creates inventive, sensational, technologically-rich experiences—all of which begin with compelling storytelling, a skill first developed at CalArts.

Spring/Summer 2013

Gary Goddard

On Manhattan’s 42nd Street, a once-grand theater from Broadway’s heyday is humming with activity, as workers restore the historic Times Square Theater to its original 1920s glory while adding state-of-the art production technology. It’s all for Broadway 4d, a new musical set to open in the spring of 2014, featuring a 3d film, various 4d sensory effects, elaborate scenic design, and an all-star lineup of Broadway singers performing 18 classic show tunes. The mastermind behind this boldly ambitious $65 million makeover and extravaganza is Gary Goddard. While theme parks and resorts have been Goddard’s main livelihood, he is a theatrical impresario at heart. At Santa Barbara High School in the late ’60s, Goddard acted in or directed more than 40 theater productions. Coming to CalArts in 1970, he staged many shows away from school, including youth concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and a musical tribute to classic Disney films. Upon graduation and a yearlong spell at Disney World, Goddard joined Disney Imagineering and designed attractions for Disneyland and shows and pavilions for Epcot. In 1980, he launched his own company, and since then, has produced rides for Universal Studios, Six Flags and Hersheypark, and designed entire theme parks in Japan.

Goddard pioneered the use of 3d films in park attractions, and deploys a range of other high-tech methods to wow audiences. But unlike feature films, for example, that have two hours to tell a story, Goddard must grab the public’s attention and imagination as soon as it enters the space or ride. “We have a few minutes to put you into an experience and take you on an emotional journey just like a movie or play or musical does,” Goddard says. “If it’s based on a movie, we also have to do it in a way that doesn’t turn off the die-hard fans, while bringing in people who may never have heard of the characters or the mythology.” Goddard works his magic in a renovated two-story brick building in North Hollywood, which looks and feels like a contemporary loft, with exposed brick and glass walls. Rooms are filled with models, drawings and computer renderings of projects. His staff includes 18 full-time artists, designers and support staff, and as many as 30 freelancers. Most of his business comes through referral, although Goddard also attends major trade shows to develop potential client relationships.

Designing Wonders

project photos: ©goddard group

Goddard conceptualizes each attraction and guides the design phase, relying on staff to execute drawings, models and detailed plans. Depending on the client, he often remains involved in the architectural, engineering and construction stages. Thirty-seven of his “babies” created in the past 10 years are either complete or under construction. With so much on his plate, Goddard works hard to avoid repeating himself or imitating the competition. “Successful theme parks create an experience—whether rides or shows—that is unlike anything anywhere else,” Goddard says. “I tell my staff, ‘Be inspired by things happening in the world and bring that to your work.’” With Broadway 4d, Goddard is taking some of the lessons learned in theme park design and returning to his theatrical roots. If Broadway 4d excites audiences, it could start a trend. Goddard’s already planning to take his idea back to l.a. by creating a show based on classic Hollywood musicals. “If you want to move people away from their computers, interactive gadgets and cell phones, you have to create something compelling—something that they can’t see or do anywhere else,” Goddard says. “This will be a new form of entertainment.”

FROM LEFT

Major Projects

Gary Goddard in his North Hollywood headquarters.

Sanrio Puroland Tokyo (1990) and Harmonyland Oita, Japan (1991)

The Ring of Life, part of an urban design project near Fushun, China.

The Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas (1992)

The Sanrio Puroland theme park in Tokyo. A cgi illustration of the Shanghai Bund district recreation at Hengdian World Studios in China. An artist’s rendering of the Broadway 4d marquee and the renovated Times Square Theater in Manhattan.

Jurassic Park: The Ride Universal Studios (1996-2001 at three parks)

Terminator 2 3d Universal Studios (1996-2001 at three parks)

Star Trek: The Experience Hilton Las Vegas (1997)

The Amazing Adventures of Spider-man Universal’s Islands of Adventure, Orlando (1999), and Universal Studios Japan (2004)

Hershey’s Really Big 3d Show Hersheypark, Hershey, Pennsylvania (2002)

Georgia Aquarium Atlanta (2005) Six Flags Glow in the Park (2008-2010 at six parks)

Galaxy Macau Hotel Resort Cotai, Macau (2011)

Spring/Summer 2013

Joe Lanzisero

A small, framed handwritten note hangs on the wall of Joe Lanzisero’s memorabilia-filled office at the Glendale headquarters of Walt Disney Imagineering. Lanzisero wrote it years ago for the Imagineering Way handbook, and it reads: “Make it fun, my motto. If it ain’t fun—it ain’t done. Kids know the value of humor and playfulness. Good ideas flourish in an atmosphere of fun and silliness.” Making “kids of all ages” happy is a business model for Lanzisero, who oversees the creative side of Hong Kong Disneyland and Disney’s four cruise ships. Growing up in Burbank in the ’60s and ’70s, Lanzisero was an avid cartoonist and fan of Disney films. In 1975, he came to CalArts to study Character Animation, and joined Disney’s animation apprentice program upon graduation. After several years of work on numerous films, including The Fox and the Hound (1981), Lanzisero moved to Walt Disney Imagineering in 1987. The wdi complex includes spaces for concept, mock-up, element assembly, sound stages and other production activity.

Imagineering employs approximately 1,400 people in more than 140 disciplines— Lanzisero’s core group numbers 25—so when he designs a new attraction, he calls on multiple teams of professionals. Each project begins with drawings and a strong story, and Lanzisero still sketches out ideas himself on the drafting table in his office. Hong Kong Disneyland is Lanzisero’s crowning achievement. Two years after it opened in 2005, Lanzisero was handed the creative reigns. He quickly racked up thousands of frequent flyer miles traveling to China as he led the planning and development for three unique lands: Toy Story Land (2011), Grizzly Gulch (2012), and the latest, Mystic Point (2013), which features Mystic Manor, a counterpart to the Haunted Mansion found in other Disney parks—but without the ghosts. “Chinese people have different views of the afterlife than Westerners,” he says. “Happy, singing ghosts wouldn’t work.” Lanzisero’s solution was to design a fictitious explorer’s house, starring a mischievous monkey who opens an enchanted music box and releases magic dust to bring the explorer’s

Designing Wonders

project photos: ©walt disney enterprises inc.

collection of artifacts to life. It includes Disney’s characteristically impressive sets and animatronics, plus cg imagery and a special effect (partly designed by former classmate Jerry Rees [Film/Video 77]) in which one of the walls appears to disintegrate, revealing a tornado of flying objects. Most visitors to Hong Kong Disneyland speak one of three languages—English, Mandarin or Cantonese—so Lanzisero kept dialogue to a minimum in his three new attractions. “I try to instill in my teams the importance of understanding the hierarchy of visual elements we need to communicate the story.” On his own time, Lanzisero recently illustrated a children’s book, The Cat’s Baton is Gone. A tale of cat musicians and their conductor, Lanzisero created the illustrations on many of those long airplane trips to Asia. According to Kirkus Reviews, the book is “silly but fun, with a smidgen of information, too”— in close keeping with Lanzisero’s framed motto.

FROM LEFT Joe Lanzisero in his office at Walt Disney Imagineering. Inside Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland. The eclectic architecture of Mystic Manor. Toy Story Land at Hong Kong Disneyland. The Big Grizzly Mountain attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland. The atrium lobby of the Disney Fantasy cruise ship.

Major Projects Critter Country Tokyo Disneyland (1992)

Mickey’s Toontown Disneyland (1993)

Tokyo Disneyland Toontown (1996)

Disney Cruise Ships: Magic (1998) Wonder (1999) Tokyo Disney Sea (2001) Tokyo Disney Seas Tower of Terror (2006) Toy Story Land Hong Kong Disneyland (2011)

Disney Cruise Ships: Dream (2011) Fantasy (2012) Grizzly Gulch Hong Kong Disneyland (2012) Mystic Point Hong Kong Disneyland (2013)

Spring/Summer 2013

Bob Rogers

Erudite and affable, with the verbal skills of a practiced monologist, Bob Rogers knows how to keep one listening and engrossed—regardless of his subject. Rogers leads a sector of entertainment design that makes learning enjoyable. He creates expo pavilions, corporate and government welcome centers, theme parks and educational entertainment environments throughout the world for clients such as Ford, Heineken and nasa. Most of the ground floor of brc’s Burbank headquarters resembles a spacious workshop, with mock-ups and a research library. The large, open second floor features a video production facility in the center and a host of individual work stations. “I like to think that we’ve taken CalArts— with its writers, filmmakers, theater directors, set designers, musicians, artists, animators, graphic designers and even the occasional dancer—and put it in one great room,” Rogers says. “The people at brc remain students, just older; they’re still adventurous and eager to learn, and there aren’t many rules. The result is constructive chaos, and a lot of fun.” Rogers transferred from Stanford to CalArts in its first year, 1970, to study filmmaking. Early in his career, he wrote and directed educational and industrial films and

television commercials before joining Disney Imagineering in 1979, where he co-produced the five-screen Circlevision film for the French Pavilion at Epcot, opening in 1982. Thirty-one years later, Impressions de France still screens at Epcot twice an hour, all day, every single day—one of the longest-running unchanged film experiences in any Disney park. brc engages audiences by combining great storytelling with attention to authentic detail. Each project begins with meticulous research; Rogers’ staff meets with historians and scientists to further deepen its knowledge and understanding. For the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (2005) in Springfield, Illinois, brc researched everything from the colors of Lincoln’s cabinet members’ eyes to the design of the wallpaper in Lincoln’s office. These and other details contributed to the precise accuracy of the costumes, settings, figures and personalities, plunging visitors into dramatic-but-accurate scenes from Lincoln’s life. With offices in Europe, Asia and California, brc has a core staff of more than 60, and because 70 percent of its business is overseas, fluency in foreign languages and basic knowledge of world history and geography are among the preferred requisites for employees.

Designing Wonders

FROM LEFT The Information and Communi cations Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Bob Rogers in the video production area of his headquarters in Burbank. The Heineken Experience in Amsterdam. The Simulator Module in the Shuttle Launch Experience at the Kennedy Space Center. The Return to Earth Gallery in the Shuttle Launch Experience.

Rogers has occasionally invented his own technology, including a brc-patented system that uses smoke, lasers and holography to create the appearance of ghost-like, 3d characters. While bells and whistles are important, Rogers says that storytelling is still the main ingredient that engages visitors. “The most amazing special effects in the world will hold someone’s attention for about a minute,” he says. “By then you need to have captured their hearts in a story. Otherwise, you’re sunk.” To measure success, Rogers visits newly-opened attractions to eavesdrop on departing visitors’ conversations and observe their facial expressions. On their way out, if visitors head for the shop and buy books on the subject, or even hats and shirts, then the experience has connected the hearts of the visitors to the heart of the attraction. “The shop is a great report card, more honest and immediate than any focus group,” he says.

“Combining great storytelling and theatrical showmanship with authenticity and detail captures the imaginations of the general public. Scholars don’t need convincing—it’s the public we’re trying to charm.”

Major Projects Space Center Houston (1992) Mystery Lodge Knott’s Berry Farm, Buena Park, California (1994) The Apollo/Saturn V Center

A generation after Goddard, Lanzisero and Rogers launched their careers, scores of CalArtians are preparing to do the same. “For today’s young talents graduating with degrees in the arts, there are growing numbers of new professional outlets—professions that did not exist when their parents graduated, like creating websites or developing video games,” Rogers says. “Entertainment design is not just one of those fields—its opportunities are multiplying. No one can predict what new worlds will be available for creative people 10 years from now. But one thing is certain: the future will not be a repeat of the past, except in one area—storytelling.”

Kennedy Space Center, Florida (1996)

Volkswagen Visitor Center Dresden, Germany (2002)

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Springfield, Illinois (2005) Images of Singapore Sentosa Island Resort (2005)

Shuttle Launch Experience Kennedy Space Center, Florida (2007)

Heineken Experience Amsterdam (2008)

usa World’s Fair Pavilions Seville, Spain (1992), Aichi, Japan (2005), Shanghai, China (2010)

amorepacific Beautiful Life Center Seoul, Korea (2013)

THIS PAGE CalArts’ first-ever Digital Arts and Technology Expo, held on campus on May 9, showcased an array of projects that integrate leading-edge engineering and computer science with the visual and performing arts. Among them was a wearable interface called Kontrol, created by alumni Jon He and Kameron Christopher, both of the Program in Music Technology. Translating hand gestures into computer-generated music, Kontrol allows instrumentalists and dancers to interact with “intelligent” machine media in live performances.

Spring/Summer 2013

Dispatches

DISPATCHES News From Faculty, Alumni, Students and Other Members of the CalArts Community School of Art Revisiting art made and exhibited in New York during the course of one year, 1993, the New Museum’s nyc 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star included the work of several CalArtians: Nayland Blake (mfa 84), Kathe Burkhart (mfa 84, bfa 82), Mike Kelley (mfa 78), Daniel J. Martinez (bfa 79) and John Miller (mfa 79). Conceived as an experiment in collective memory, the show—whose subtitle derives from a Sonic Youth album of the same name—sought to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture and politics. Photography and Media faculty Natalie Bookchin was featured in Mashup: New Video Art, an exhibition held at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona. Bookchin presented Mass Ornament (2009), a video constructed from hundreds of YouTube clips of people dancing alone at home. She also received a $100,000 grant last year from the MacArthur Foundation for Long Story Short, a participatory documentary that will present personal stories from people living in poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Golden Krishna (bfa 10), senior designer at Samsung Innovation Labs specializing in user experience (ux), presented a provocative talk at the interactive section of South by Southwest (sxsw) in Austin, Texas, on technology that involves complicated digital user interfaces. “The best interface is no interface,” said Krishna, making his point by comparing a bmw app that takes 13 steps to unlock a car door to a Mercedes-Benz vehicle that detects the car keys in the driver’s pocket and automatically unlocks the door. Krishna, formerly of the design and strategy firm Cooper in San Francisco, argues for companies to create systems that adapt to individuals’ needs rather than create technologies that require people to adapt to them. tkoh studio, co-founded by graphic and interaction designer Caroline Oh (mfa 08), received a $330,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to create a mobile platform for collecting, archiving and sharing oral histories. Set for pilot testing in the fall, the tkoh app for tablets and the web is designed to make the setup and recording of stories easier for inexperienced users both young and old.

courtesy of the new museum. photo: benoit pailley

In addition to collecting the redcat Award (see page 3), Catherine Opie (mfa 88) received the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award at the opening of her solo exhibition, Catherine Opie: In & Around l.a., held at the Woodbury University Hollywood Space. She also exhibited new portraits and landscapes at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and had a solo show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, titled Twelve Miles to the Horizon, featuring photographs taken on a 10-day voyage aboard a container ship en route from Busan, Korea, to Long Beach. As He Remembered It, an exhibition by Stephen Prina (mfa 80) that was first presented in 2011 at the Secession in Vienna, had a symbolic homecoming when it went on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma) in April. Prina’s installation had its beginnings in a walk near lacma, on La Brea Avenue, in the early 1980s, strolling along with Christopher Williams (mfa 81, bfa 79). In a furniture gallery, they spotted a desk identified as the work of R.M. Schindler, the Austrian modernist architect who had moved to Los Angeles in 1920. It was a former built-in unit, but the store had displayed it as a freestanding object.

ABOVE Nayland Blake, Equipment for a Shameful Epic, 1993, mixed media, 84 × 63 × 32 in.

Spring/Summer 2013

Moreover, it was painted a hot pink, in contravention of the spartan aesthetics of the Viennese school of architecture of Schindler’s time. To contextualize this seemingly random encounter in a wider history, Prina studied the surviving documentation for two long-demolished Schindler houses in l.a., produced 28 copies of built-in furniture from the two buildings, and painted them a particular shade of pink—Honeysuckle, Pantone’s “color of the year” in 2011. Prina then laid out the objects according to the original floor plans to create a virtual reconstruction of Schindler’s architecture—with the fitted furniture as the only trace of the buildings that housed it. The exhibition is part of “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in l.a.” New York photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien (Design bfa 74) has curated Garry Winogrand, the first major touring exhibition in 25 years of the work of the iconic photographer, featuring 300 images—a third of which were printed for the first time. The show, which appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (sfmoma) in the spring, next travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, opening in March 2014, followed by shows in New York, Paris and Madrid. Rubinfien first met Winogrand (1928–1984) in 1974 when the photographer gave a guest lecture at CalArts. He later became one of Winogrand’s circle of friends in New York. At the time of his death, Winogrand left 2,500 rolls exposed but undeveloped, 4,100 processed but not proofed, and 3,000 proofed but not printed. Over a six-year period, Rubinfien reviewed scans of 22,000 contact sheets from the Winogrand archive. Rubinfien, for his part, has had solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sfmoma, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among other institutions. Ed Ruscha (Chouinard 60) was named by Time as one of the “100 most influential people in the world,” with the magazine describing him as “the faux-naïf funnyman of American art, posing smart riddles about what we think we know.” Ruscha’s deep engagement with

Los Angeles’ vernacular architecture, car culture and urban texture is the subject of In Focus: Ed Ruscha at The J. Paul Getty Museum. The show is one of the exhibitions of “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in l.a.” Included in the exhibition are iconic works such as Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Supervising visual creative direction for numerous performers, Jesse Lee Stout (Art mfa 11, Film/Video bfa 02) directed video environments for Rihanna’s “Diamonds” world tour; for Drake’s “Club Paradise” tour; for Jay Z’s festival shows and appearance at the opening of the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn; and for the televised appearances of Florence + the Machine. The wide-ranging photography of James Welling (mfa 74, bfa 72) was the subject of three museum shows: James Welling: Monograph at the Cincinnati Art Museum; James Welling: The Mind on Fire at the Centro Galego de arte Contemporánea in Spain; and James Welling: Open Space at UMass Amherst’s University Museum of Contemporary Art.

School of Critical Studies This past March, Amanda Beech, dean of the School of Critical Studies, exhibited a new threechannel video and architectural installation, called Final Machine, at Lanchester Gallery Projects in Coventry, England, and Hå Gamle Prestegard in Hå, Norway. The work draws viewers into a choreography of sight, sound and physical form, “a journey with no future, a constant working-upon a claustrophobic present,” as scenes of the Mojave wasteland, arcane edifices in dense jungles, and night-time Miami traffic are set off by balletic graphic imagery and abrupt, bluntly coded “bullet points.” Overall, Final Machine is an interrogation of “the realist status of the image and the

contract this holds with systems of power.” The shows were accompanied by the publication Final Machine (Falmouth: Urbanomic Press), a limited-edition compendium of writing and images that responds to a selection of Beech’s works from the past 10 years. Elsewhere, Beech gave a lecture at Haus de Kultur in Berlin and presented a paper at the Speculative Aesthetics Roundtable in London. The latest book penned by Arne De Boever, director of the ma Aesthetics and Politics Program, is called Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. Published in March by Bloomsbury, the book explores approaches to contemporary “narratives of care”—novels by J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Paul Auster, Tom McCarthy and others— through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics. “Productively exploiting the tensions between [philosophers] Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, bare life and biopolitics, Arne De Boever leads us into a fascinating critical examination of care and caring for others,” writes Stanford University’s David Palumbo-Liu. De Boever also co-edited two anthologies: The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One (Berlin: Archive Press) and Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh University Press). Tom Dibblee (mfa 13) reviewed William Knoedelseder’s colorful history Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer for the Los Angeles Review of Books earlier this year. Entitled “Bud Light Lime, Unlikely Hope,” Dibblee’s review used the occasion to pay tribute to his own favorite watery libation, “bll,” which, he argues, “allows me to shed the burden of sophistication, and… restores beer to what it once was, when I was young—a tart nectar that makes me happy.” Soon after publication, Dibblee’s essay made it onto The Atlantic’s weekly roundup of the country’s “best popculture writing.”

FROM TOP The cover of the March issue of Poetry, with new verse by Douglas Kearney and Vanessa Place. Amanda Beech, Final Machine, 2013, three-channel video and architectural installation. Detail, Lanchester Gallery Projects, 2013. Continua in Light, Three Acts, a video installation by Cheryl Calleri and Thekla Hammond, featured choreography by alumna Nancy Karp. Jesse Lee Stout directs the video content for Rihanna’s concerts and television appearances. Stephen Prina, As He Remembered It, 2011, mixed media. Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. © Stephen Prina. Courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Petzel Gallery, New York. courtesy of the performance art institute

Dispatches

35 courtesy of poetry

Veteran magazine writer and editor Steve Kandell (mfa 99) is now the longform features editor at the social news website BuzzFeed. Once known for animal pictures and seemingly random lists, the site has since expanded into serious political reportage and, with Kandell’s hiring, is moving to “advance a new genre of longform journalism purely for the internet,” announced the company. Kandell was formerly the editor-in-chief of spin magazine. On his Twitter page, he describes himself as “the oldest living human at BuzzFeed.” The March issue of Poetry magazine—the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world—featured a contribution by Critical Studies faculty member Douglas Kearney (mfa 04) titled “The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar,” which the poet, performer and librettist also read for the magazine’s podcast. The issue also included a poem called “No More” by Vanessa Place, the co-director of Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press, which has an ongoing association with the mfa Creative Writing Program and has published work by a number of faculty and alumni. Poetry is issued by the Poetry Foundation.

courtesy of lanchester gallery projects. photo: david rowan

Faculty member Mady Schutzman screened her experimental documentary Dear Comrade in New York at nyu’s Tisch School of the Arts and in Los Angeles at the West Hollywood Library and the Echo Park Film Center. The richly imagined Dear Comrade looks back to a significant moment in California’s “utopian” history: the creation of the Llano del Rio secular cooperative colony in 1914 in the Mojave Desert. Schutzman places this history in a broader context of the communitarian struggles of those who came before and after Llano. Through the intersection of stories, both real and imagined, the conventional documentary soon transforms into a “montage of historical re-enactments, parallel universes, clownery, and political commentary,” which, taken together, attest to an urgent “desire—failings and disappointments notwithstanding—to give idealism and cooperation another try.”

courtesy of the designer

The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance Brooklyn-based choreographer luciana achugar (bfa 95) brought her Bessie Award-winning duet puro deseo to The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles in March. Inspired by paranormal phenomena, the occult, and Gothic film and literature, puro deseo was performed by achugar and her longtime collaborator Michael Mahalchick (Art mfa 95). A new work by achugar called otro teatro has been co-commissioned by New York Live Arts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; it will premiere next February at the Walker. (See also page 38.) Faculty member Colin Connor is collaborating this summer with Natalie Metzger (Dance–Integrated Media mfa 11) on a film adaptation of the former’s 2009 critically acclaimed dance work arena. Connor will choreograph and Metzger will direct. Jacksonville Dance Theatre, under the direction of Rebecca Levy (mfa 10), will also present arena later this year. Nancy Karp (bfa 73) provided the choreography for a multimedia installation by Bay Area artists Cheryl Calleri and Thekla Hammond called Continua in Light, Three Acts, which was presented in May by San Francisco’s Performance Art Institute. Karp has created more than 70 dance works for her San Francisco-based company, Nancy Karp + Dancers, which she founded in 1980 and has since toured throughout the world.

Over two days in early April, a major site-specific work by Stephan Koplowitz, dean of the dance school, was staged three times in the stations of the Metro Red Line in Los Angeles. The new piece, Red Line Time, transformed the Metro subway line, running from Union Station to North

Spring/Summer 2013

courtesy of the choreographer. photo: taso papadakis

Hollywood, into a long-distance performance space. Designed to match the ebb and flow of the commuting public, Red Line Time was the first such action to be officially sanctioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The eight-member ensemble included Leslie Curtis (bfa 11), Kerrie Schroeder (bfa 11) and Alexandria Yalj (mfa 07). Anne C. Moore (mfa 12) was the rehearsal director and costume designer. In May, Koplowitz’s dance film Chinatown Watermark was screened at The J. Paul Getty Museum as part of Dance Camera West; and, in June, he premiered Water Sight, Milwaukee, a series of water-related performances at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the city’s historic water tower, and the original Pabst Brewery. Koplowitz recently won a design competition with architects kbas to install three permanent camera obscuras at Salt Lake Community College for a project called Light Camera Action, which opens in the fall. Two CalArts choreographers, Lindsey Lollie (bfa 12) and Arianne MacBean (mfa 99), brought new works to the l.a. Contemporary Dance Company’s spring repertory concert, which this year was entitled Then. Now. Onward! In other news, Lollie also contributed to a new collaborative piece about the boundaries of time and space that screened at the Dance on Camera Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center in February and at Dance Camera West at The J. Paul Getty Museum in May. Finally, Lollie choreographed and performed in the experimental short The Next Step Is, directed by Victoria Sendra (Film/Video bfa 12) with music composed and performed by Paul Matthis (Music mfa 13).

courtesy of the filmmaker

A recent article in The Washington Post titled “Can Computers Fill the Role of Choreographers?” focused on choreographer and media artist Dawn Stoppiello (bfa 89). In an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman, Stoppiello talked about how computers have helped her develop new kinds of dance movement with Troika Ranch, the nowPortland-based performance group that she co-founded in 1994 with composer and media artist Mark Coniglio (Music bfa 1989). “I want to use the computer to change how I choreograph… [It] doesn’t let me just do what spills out of my head. The computer disrupts that flow and causes me to consider things I wouldn’t of my own accord.”

courtesy of the artist

Assistant Dean Andre Tyson restaged the first part of his 2012 choreographic triptych dArK Matter earlier this year with students at Los Angeles County High School of the Arts. The second part, dArK Matter~Obfuscation, was restaged with Jacksonville University students for the American College Dance Festival this spring. And the final section, dArK Matter~The God Particle, will be performed by Alvin Ailey/Fordham University students in the fall. Kate Weare (bfa 94) and her company were featured in the Harkness Dance Festival, held at New York’s 92nd Street Y in March. The centerpiece of her program was a performance of Garden (2006), a 35-minute quartet called “thrilling” by The New York Times. Weare also took part in the artist’s forum portion of the festival, in which choreographers discuss their work, lecturedemonstration style. “Weare’s excerpts suggested an intimacy that combines practiced worldliness with a burst of loneliness,” opined Broadway World. “[It] suggested a tenderness that threatens, from moment to moment, to give way to something like sadness.”

As part of the its biannual Festival of Preservation, the ucla Film and Television Archive presented the world premiere of the restored edition of Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, the landmark first feature by faculty member Thom Andersen. The 1975 work “announced the arrival of one of America’s most significant documentary auteurs,” wrote ucla senior film preservationist Ross Lipman in the program notes. “Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer is at once a biography of Muybridge, a re-animation of his

courtesy of the filmmakers

School of Film/Video

Dispatches

FROM TOP 100 Times is Not Enough, choreographed by Arianne MacBean and performed by l.a. Contemporary Dance Company, featuring soloist Kate Hutter (holding microphone). Text by MacBean; original music by alum Ivan Johnson. Sill from The Pirate of Love, directed, animated and edited by Student Academy Award nominee Sara Gunnarsdóttir. Iceland/usa, 2012, 10 min. The cover art for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ new album, Mosquito, was created by Beomsik Shimbe Shim, who also directed the music video for the title track. Red Line Time, a site-specific work choreographed by Dance dean Stephan Koplowitz and staged in the stations of l.a.’s Metro Red Line. Still from She Gone Rogue, a collaboration by Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker. usa, 2012, 22 min.

historic sequential photographs, and an inspired examination of their philosophical implications.” Blown up to 35mm from the original 16mm, the film was retimed to match more closely the tinting of Muybridge’s imagery, and some sections were restored digitally. At the 85th Annual Academy Awards, Mark Andrews (Film/Video bfa 93) and Brenda Chapman (Film/ Video bfa 87), directors of Disney/ Pixar’s Brave, picked up a matching set of Oscars for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year. Chapman became the first woman to win in this category. Of the five nominated animated features, three were directed by CalArtians: Brave; Disney’s Frankenweenie, directed by Tim Burton (Film/Video 79); and Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, directed by Rich Moore (Film/Video bfa 87). Other Oscar nominees were Minkyu Lee (Film/Video bfa 09), who was up for the animated short Adam and Dog, and Kirby Dick (Art 76), who helmed the documentary The Invisible War. Brave, which was executive-produced by John Lasseter (Film/Video bfa 79), Andrew Stanton (Film/Video bfa 87) and Pete Docter (Film/Video bfa 90), had earlier won both the Golden Globe and the bafta Film Award for Best Animated Feature. Outgoing Film/Video dean Steve Anker curated a special film program of shorts for the Sharjah Biennial, which opened in March in the United Arab Emirates. This program included films by CalArts faculty Janie Geiser (The Fourth Watch, 2004), Adele Horne (Quiero Ver, 2008) and Maureen Selwood (As You Desire Me, 2009)—inspired by poet Charles Simic’s Empire of Dreams. In other news, Selwood’s Drawing Lessons (2006), featuring a voice-over by poet Mark Strand, was shown at the Tehran International Animation Festival in Iran; The Rug (1980) screened at Animateka International Animation Festival in Slovenia; and her latest, A Modern Convenience (2012), was a selection of the Ann Arbor Film Festival (see next column).

Eusong Lee, of the Program in Character Animation, won the Animation Silver Medal at the 40th Student Academy Awards, which are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Lee’s short, Will, is a meditation on loss inspired by a passage in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Other CalArts finalists were Ethan Clarke (mfa 12), whose short Drifters was nominated in the Animation category, and Sara Gunnarsdóttir (mfa 12), whose 10-minute “animated documentary,” The Pirate of Love, was shortlisted in the Alternative section. Days after the Student Academy Awards, Lee’s Will and Clarke’s Drifters were screened at France’s Annecy International Animated Film Festival—the world’s foremost animation showcase. Gunnarsdóttir’s The Pirate of Love had earlier received its New York premiere as part of New Directors/New Films, the spring festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art. Her film, which was also shown at afi Fest last fall, explores the lore surrounding an outsider musician, a Canadian truck driver named Daniel C., whose homemade cd of haunting love songs was circulating in the filmmaker’s hometown of Reykjavik, Iceland. The Disney Channel has greenlit a new animated teen princess series created by alumna Daron Nefcy (bfa 09). Tentatively called Star and the Forces of Evil, it centers on Star Butterfly as a magical princess from another dimension who is sent by her royal parents to live with a family on Earth. Production has already begun for a premiere scheduled for the fall of 2014. Nefcy’s television credits include Disney’s upcoming animated series Wander Over Yonder—created by fellow CalArtian Craig McCracken (92), of Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home fame—and the Warner Bros. series Mad. The 51st edition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival—the longest-running independent and experimental film fest in North America—featured work by many CalArts alumni and faculty members, both current and

former. Among the highlights was a special program focusing on the oeuvre of founding Film/Video faculty Pat O’Neill, hailed by the curators as “one of the most acclaimed avant-garde filmmakers of our time.” The festival also included a two-program retrospective of films by Experimental Animation faculty Suzan Pitt, who has made “beautiful, strange and fiercely original films” over the past four decades, and a showcase presented by festival juror Laida Lertxundi (mfa 07). Alums in the six-day screening lineup were Madison Brookshire (mfa 07), Bill Brown (mfa 97), Alexandra Cuesta (mfa 09), Kate Dollenmayer (mfa 03), Maya Erdelyi (mfa 12), a collaboration between Rhys Ernst (mfa 11) and Zackary Drucker (Art mfa 07), Mariah Garnett (mfa 11), Meejin Hong (mfa 12), Song E. Kim (mfa 07, bfa 04), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Film/ Video–Art mfa 08) and Naoko Tasaka (mfa 11), while Peter Bo Rappmund (Film/Video–Music mfa 10) had a gallery installation of videos and photographs. In addition to Suzan Pitt, the CalArts faculty contingent comprised James Benning, Charlotte Pryce and Maureen Selwood. The historical portion of the festival looked back to the psychedelic and “expanded consciousness” films made in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and ’70s by the likes of Pat O’Neill, Beth Block (mfa 77), Daina Krumins (mfa 72) and Adam Beckett (bfa 72). Having studied with O’Neill and the legendary Jules Engel, Beckett made trippy animated films at his own studio, Infinite Animation, and taught at CalArts, but he also worked, as did a number of colleagues and students, in the mainstream movie industry; he was head of animation and rotoscope design for the original Star Wars. (Incidentally, other alums who worked on the landmark movie’s visual effects were Robert Blalack [mfa 73]—who became the first CalArtian to win an Oscar— Chris Casady [bfa 76] and Larry Cuba [Design mfa 74].) Award-winning animator and artist Beomsik Shimbe Shim (mfa 09) created the striking cover art for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ eagerly anticipated fourth album, Mosquito; he also directed the unnerving music

Spring/Summer 2013

video for the title track. The New York-based art rock trio had unveiled Shimbe’s cover design earlier in the year—the cg image depicts a screaming, spiky-haired baby in the grip of a giant purple mosquito—and the divided online reaction to the art has received plenty of media attention since. Pitchfork called the cover “totally bonkers” while Adweek proclaimed it an “early contender for the year’s craziest album cover.” In interviews with Rolling Stone and Billboard, Shimbe said that while he “hoped for a controversial response,” he was not expecting such a ruckus. The Korean-born, Los Angeles-based Shimbe had first met Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O through mutual friend Peter Chung (Film/Video 81), the revered creator of mtv’s cult animated series Æon Flux, and the singer became a fan of Shimbe’s 2010 festival-favorite short The Wonder Hospital.

The Herb Alpert School of Music John Luther Adams (bfa 73) was in attendance at the 2013 Ojai Music Festival as the featured guest composer. Directed this year by choreographer Mark Morris, the four-day festival included an outdoor performance of Adams’ Strange and Sacred Noise, by the percussion quartet red fish blue fish, on a “magical” hilltop at the break of dawn, and a more conventional presentation of For Lou Harrison at the Libbey Bowl band-shell by the mmdg Music Ensemble, the American String Quartet and a piano duo. The composition by Adams, an Alaska native, is a tribute to one of the foremost 20th-century composers of the West Coast. The program notes described the piece as “an evocation of the kind of cosmic gamelan that Harrison would have loved.” Also performed outdoor, by red fish blue fish, was Adams’ songbirdsongs on the morning of the festival’s final day. Longtime composition faculty Michael Jon Fink’s (mfa 80, bfa 76) Prelude to Alone appears on the eclectic anthology Cold Blue Two from the famous Cold Blue Music label; it is performed by Brian Walsh (mfa 08, bfa 06) on clarinet, faculty member Alex Iles on trombone, and the composer on electric guitar. (Cold Blue Two also offers works by Music dean David Rosenboom, former faculty James Tenney, and alums John Luther Adams [see above], Peter Garland [bfa 72], Ingram Marshall [mfa 71] and Chas Smith [mfa 77, bfa 75].) The April issue of The Wire selected Fink’s Prelude to Alone for The Wire Tapper 31, the compilation cd that accompanied the magazine. In other news, Fink was joined by cellist Derek Stein (mfa 10) last November for a recital at the Hammer Museum, where the duo played music for cello and piano by Webern, Feldman, Pärt and Fink himself, as well as new music for amplified cello and electric guitar composed by the two artists. More recently, in March of this year, Fink was the featured composer-guitarist at the 26th annual New Music Festival at Western Illinois University. The program comprised a selection of Fink’s chamber works and large-ensemble performances of Objects in the River (of Time) and Adorned with Lightning. Also in March,

pianist R. Andrew Lee played Fink’s Five Pieces for Piano Solo at the University of Wolverhampton, England, as part of the concert series “Minimalism in Twelve Parts.” The piano duo of faculty member Danny Holt (mfa 07) and Steven Vanhauwaert, 4handsla, released their debut recording, Paris 1913, on the cd Baby label, with all tracks performed on a one-of-a-kind, 12-foot-wide “four-hands” piano. The album celebrates the 100-year anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring—the landmark work written for the Ballets Russes company that scandalized Parisian audiences. In addition to the duo’s rendition of Rite, the album serves up four-hand interpretations of contemporaneous works by Ravel, Satie, Casella and Poulenc. Ajay Kapur, the director of the Program in Music Technology and the Institute’s associate provost for Research and Development in Digital Arts, and colleague Tae Hong Park of New York University have received a Google Research Award in support of a project called Citygram. This effort seeks to visually “map” the acoustic patterns of cities by “charting their sonic densities as a function of human and animal activity, machine noise, ambient sound, and the invisible hum of urban energy.” This work contributes to the larger field of investigation that concerns dynamic, multisensory mapping methodologies and technologies— a field that, in turn, may offer broad applications not only in the understanding of urban environments, but also in creative practice. After being tapped by the Los Angeles Times as one of the “Faces to Watch in 2103”—the only artist selected in the jazz category— trumpeter, composer and producer Daniel Rosenboom’s (mfa 07) eagerly awaited concept album, Book of Omens, is coming out in July from faculty member Vinny Golia’s Nine Winds Records. Inspired by a shamanic myth about the end of time and rebirth of the universe, the album presents a new “sonic zodiac,” with 12 distinct chords representing 12 different symbolic “omens” or zodiacal signs.

courtesy of the hartman group

Dispatches

FROM TOP Wadada Leo Smith, a finalist this year for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, at the world premiere performance of Ten Freedom Summers at redcat in 2011. Light Cycles, an installation by Anne Militello at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden and Plaza in New York. Tony Award winner Cecily Tyson (left) and Tony nominee Condola Rashad in the Broadway revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. The cover of Daniel Rosenboom’s new recording, Book of Omens. Cover art by Kio Griffith.

courtesy of the artist

courtesy of daniel rosenboom

The songs “range from ominously abstract to explorations of the scorched middle ground between free-blowing experimental jazz and dark metal,” noted the Times in its preview of the new work. The highpowered players are Rosenboom, on trumpet and flugelhorn, Golia on saxophone, flute and clarinet, Jake Vossler (mfa 08, bfa 04) on electric guitar, Tim Lefebvre on electric bass, and Matt Mayhall (mfa 08) on drums. (Rosenboom and Vossler are also bandmates in the gypsy jazz group plotz!) Rosenboom’s previous recordings include 2011’s Fallen Angeles (Nine Winds Records) and this year’s Unsayable Absence: Live at the Blue Whale (drm Recordings) —both with his septet. Trumpet and creative music colossus Wadada Leo Smith was one of three finalists for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his epic 2012 recording Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform Records), with the prize eventually going to Caroline Shaw. (CalArts’ founding Music dean Mel Powell won the Pulitzer in 1990 for Duplicates: A Concerto.) In the kaleidoscopic, spiritually charged Ten Freedom Summers—which received its world premiere performance at redcat over three concerts in the fall of 2011—Smith draws upon and interprets key events in the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 through 1964. The multimovement opus was performed, and later recorded for Cuneiform, by Smith’s celebrated Golden Quartet and the eight-piece ensemble Southwest Chamber Music, which had commissioned the work. “A stunning achievement,” averred jazz critic Francis Davis. “It merits comparison to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in sobriety and reach.” Smith, an early member of Chicago’s influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (aacm), has himself described Ten Freedom Summers as “one of the defining moments of my life.” Guitar faculty Miroslav Tadic´ spent January performing throughout Europe. He played as a soloist in several concerts: with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra in the principality of Monaco; with the mdr Leipzig Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig and Weimar, Germany;

and with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in London. He also appeared at the Flamenco Biennale Festival in Amsterdam. In Serbia, he gave three concerts in support of the new cd Vidarica (Nine Winds Records), a collaboration between Tadic´ and the vocal duo of the Teofilovic´ brothers, Radiša and Ratko. The album features traditional Balkan folk songs from Bosnia, Dalmatia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia “taken into the 21st century with style, originality and sense of devotion,” according to All About Jazz.

School of Theater At the 44th annual Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards ceremony held in March, Center Theatre Group’s production of Waiting for Godot, which featured Hugo Armstrong (bfa 98) as Lucky, won the McCulloh Award for Revival and earned the top prize in every category in which it was nominated, including Ensemble Performance. Faculty member Ellen McCartney and alumna Leah Piehl (mfa 06) each won an award for costume design. McCartney—the Robert Corrigan Chair in Theater, director of Design and Production, and head of Costume Design—won for Theatre Movement Bazaar’s The Treatment at the Theatre @ Boston Court, while Piehl won the award for Intimate Apparel at the Pasadena Playhouse. At the 2013 la Weekly Theater Awards ceremony, Nick Benacerraf (mfa 12, Critical Studies ma 10) won in a tie for Set Design for Martin Crimp’s The City at the Son of Semele Theater, a drama in which the action moves from London to Afghanistan. In the Video/Pro duction Design category, Adam Flemming (mfa 07) and co-designer Dan Lund won in a tie for Patricia Scanlon’s Death of a Salesgirl at Bootleg Theatre. Adam Haas Hunter (bfa 07) rounded out the trio of CalArts winners by collecting the award for Male Comedy Performance for his role as Khlestakov in Gogol’s The Government Inspector at the Theatre @ Boston Court.

Early this year, CalArts head of Lighting Design Anne Militello presented a new installation titled Light Cycles at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden and Plaza in Manhattan. The acclaimed artist and lighting designer created the kaleidoscopic multicolored piece as she was inspired by the variety of color shifts in natural phenomena. It features strands of mirrored discs embedded with led lights and suspended from the 10-story pavilion’s glass-vaulted ceiling. Militello also designed the lighting for la Opera’s world premiere production this spring of Dulce Rosa, by composer Lee Holdridge and librettist Richard Sparks, at The Broad Stage, with Plácido Domingo conducting. Lighting designer and theater scholar Duro Oni (mfa 83) was appointed deputy vice chancellor (management services) of the University of Lagos in Nigeria. A symposium was held in Oni’s honor last December when he turned 60. Having taught theater design and technology over the past 35 years, Oni has helped shape the work of numerous artists and designers of the Nigerian stage and motion picture industry, known as Nollywood. CalArts’ Center for New Performance (cnp) and Trans Arts are preparing a new production of Prometheus Bound, directed by Travis Preston, dean of the School of Theater, head of Directing, and artistic director of the cnp—the Institute’s professional producing arm. Featuring a new translation of the Aeschylus work by Joel Agee, Prometheus Bound opens September 5 at the Getty Villa. The production involves numerous CalArtians, including Efren Delgadillo Jr. (mfa 03), whose monumental set design consists of a 23-foot revolving steel wheel, and faculty Vinny Golia, of The Herb Alpert School of Music, who composed the music for the production with Ellen Reid (Music mfa 11). Golia will also perform. Leon Rothenberg (mfa 02) won the Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play for his work on The Nance by Douglas Carter Beane. Held on June 9 at Radio City Hall, the 2013 edition of Broadway’s annual celebration also included a second

Spring/Summer 2013

CalArtian among the nominees: Condola Rashad (bfa 08), who was up for the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for her portrayal of the “Young Woman on Bus” in the revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, with eventual Tony winner Cicely Tyson, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams. Both Rothenberg and Rashad had previously been nominated for the Tony: the former in 2006, for designing the sound for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; and the latter last year, for her turn as Cheryl in Stick Fly. (Rashad’s next project is the new Broadway version of Romeo and Juliet, in which she plays Juliet opposite Orlando Bloom’s Romeo. The production is slated to open on September 19 at the Richard Rodgers Theater.) In other New York theater awards news, Justin Townsend (mfa 03) received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design for David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love. A new book by Douglas Rushkoff (mfa 86), the public intellectual who writes and lectures about the intersection of technology and culture, has received positive media attention, including a glowing review by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Out now from Current Hardcover, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now reflects on how today’s digital technologies are creating an “always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit.” Rushkoff updates themes ad– dressed in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), the influential book that popularized the term “information overload.” As two of the 25 recipients of this year’s Michael Kanin Playwriting Awards, CalArtians Isabel Salazar (mfa 13) and Michael Yichao Wang (mfa 13) attended the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (kcactf) in Washington, d.c. The awards recognize the nation’s outstanding student playwrights. Salazar won the kcactf Award for Latino Playwriting for her play No Comas Tomates antes de Dormir porque Tendrás Pesadillas;

Wang won the Paul Stephen Lim Asian-American Playwriting Award for Lunatic Sun and Goose.

Institute Brooklyn-based choreographer luciana achugar (Dance bfa 95) was named as a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow in choreography, one of 175 recipients of the prestigious award this year. In fine arts, Charles Gaines, faculty in the Program in Art, received a Guggenheim fellowship along with David McDonald (Art mfa 92). Gaines, who has taught at CalArts for nearly 25 years, will show his work later this year at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery, followed by a solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Glenna Avila, longtime director of CalArts’ Community Arts Program (cap), was named the creative director of cap in February; in this capacity, she joined the offices of the Provost and President. Avila has been with cap since its inception in 1991, creating a nationally emulated model for integrating the arts and community engagement. Provost Jeannene Przyblyski said that in the new position, Avila will “continue to develop innovative opportunities for major partnerships and programs, to expand cap’s curricular integration at CalArts in order to provide richer and deeper opportunities for our students to develop crucial skills in arts education and community engagement, and to help raise the visibility of cap as a leader in its field.” Nadine Rambeau (Critical Studies mfa 07), cap’s deputy director since 2011, has been named managing director of cap. After more than three decades of service to CalArts, Dean of Students Yvonne Guy retired at the end of May. Guy came to CalArts in the fall of 1982 as a temporary, onesemester counselor in Student Affairs, and ended up staying for 31 years, including the last 17 as dean. During this tenure, she planned 17 graduations; introduced the FirstYear Experience program to help freshmen adjust to life at the Institute; helped created the Teaching and Learning Center to

provide academic support for students and professional development guidance for faculty; and formed the behavioral intervention team for at-risk students, among many other initiatives. In a message to the CalArts community earlier this year, President Steven Lavine wrote, “Yvonne has been an outstanding dean of students, because she cares so deeply about the lives and well-being of our students. Personally, I will miss the wise and steady counsel Yvonne has given me in complex situations.” After 16 years in Student Affairs, Guy’s colleague, Linda Hoag, retired from her position as a personal counselor at the end of the academic year. Among her many accomplishments at CalArts, Hoag helped countless individual students with their personal and artistic growth; established the “Tea and Sympathy” series of discussions; helped resolve interpersonal issues in classrooms and studios; and led the Nonviolent Communication seminar. A third member of the Student Affairs office, Karen Smested, also retired in May, after spending just over 24 years as an administrative assistant. Smested worked with student tutors in the Teaching and Learning Center, assisted Guy with numerous jobs, including serving students with disabilities, and helped parents with their concerns.

BELOW The latest title from the prolific Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, ruminates on the overwhelming effects of what he calls “presentism.”

photos courtesy of peggy wolff

THE ^ LEGACY CIRCLE: “WHY I JOINED” Peggy Wolff

(Film/Video bfa 72) As an alumna, Chicago native Peggy Wolff will always be part of the CalArts community. But when she joined the CalArts Legacy Circle last year, Wolff made a special commitment to the Institute. The Legacy Circle is a community of artists and supporters who have provided for CalArts in their estate plans or through a life-income gift. The support of Legacy Circle members like Wolff ensures the Institute’s future, keeps the educational program strong, and helps future CalArts students achieve their creative goals. Wolff expresses her creative talents through her prose, writing about art, design, photography and ultrasports for numerous publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Chicago magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. But the stories now closest to her heart are food-centric—in particular, the often overlooked and occasionally maligned category of Midwestern cuisine, about which she has written extensively. Writing with a humorous flair about potpies, her experience flipping burgers behind a Woolworth’s counter, and her search for the “great American doughnut,” among other foodie tales, Wolff is a frequent contributor to the Tribune’s “Good Eating” section, whose content appears in newspapers around the country. This fall, the University of Nebraska Press will publish Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: Midwestern Writers on Food, a contemporary anthology of essays edited by Wolff that features some of the region’s finest writing. Wolff has written the introduction and adds an essay of her own to the collection. “On the surface, my book is about food,” she says, “but it’s really about raising a family and feeding the homeless. Every essay has something to do with generosity or kindness, which speaks to the character of Midwesterners. I also want to dispel the myth that prevails on either coast that Midwestern cuisine is little more than deviled eggs and Jell-O molds,” she says with a laugh. While Wolff says that she left l.a. and a career in film and television because of a “lacking sense of community,” that wasn’t the case at CalArts, where, as she fondly remembers, students looked after each other. She recalls recruiting a bunch of her classmates to paint animation cels for her as she raced toward deadline on a film project. “There was a lot of camaraderie at CalArts,” says Wolff, “without any competition between students.”

Wolff returned to CalArts in March of last year, and the visit had an unexpected impact on her. “As I drove onto campus, I discovered that the saplings that had been planted around the time I started at CalArts were now mature, leafy trees. I was blown away by how beautiful the campus looked,” she says. While on a campus tour, she saw a poster with a picture of the legendary Jules Engel, the founding director of the Program in Experimental Animation, who had been one of Wolff’s mentors, instrumental in transforming her from a student with ambition into an award-winning young filmmaker. “Jules meant a lot to me,” she says, recalling a time when she was frustrated with a project, and Engel raised her spirits. “He said, ‘Honey, artists don’t work every day. They’re allowed to take some time off too.’” A member of CalArts’ first graduating class, Wolff studied animation and film primarily with Engel and Pat O’Neill, one of the original faculty members of the School of Film/Video. She completed two short films at CalArts, including one about T’ai Chi that won several awards on the festival circuit. In the years after graduating, Wolff worked on educational films, documentaries, an nbc comedy pilot starring John Candy, and as an assistant to director Nicholas Ray. She eventually returned to Chicago, married, raised a son and a daughter, and, in the late 1980s, turned her creative energies to nonfiction writing. Her campus visit last year brought back a flood of memories, and after returning to Chicago, Wolff decided to join the Friends of CalArts (FoCA), making a donation to support scholarships and programs. She subsequently named the Institute as a beneficiary in her will, which qualified her for membership in the CalArts Legacy Circle. Members of the Legacy Circle have also included CalArts in their estate plans through a bequest, a gift of life insurance, or other planned gifts. “Our family believes in education and the university system of training people to think,” she says. “Schools need money and we’re giving what we can. “CalArts taught me that accomplishment is important,” Wolff says.” You can’t just have inspiration. You have to follow through with inspiration and finish your film or whatever you’re working on, and that will lead to other things. Inspiration leads to accomplishment.”

To learn more about becoming a member of the CalArts Legacy Circle, please contact: Randy Lakeman, Executive Director of Development (661) 253.7728 or via e-mail at rlakeman@calarts.edu For more information about Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie, search for “Peggy Wolff” at nebraskapress.unl.edu.

California Institute of the Arts Office of Public Affairs 24700 McBean Parkway Valencia, California 91355-2340

non-profit org. u.s. postage paid santa clarita, ca permit #18

calarts.edu

Headliners — 2 Herbert Blau — 7 redcat’s First Decade — 8 CalArts 2030 — 16 Designing Wonders — 22 Dispatches — 31

COVER IMAGE A spread from one of the latest sketchbooks by the retiring Ed Fella, one of the most cherished members of the Graphic Design faculty, whose eccentric letterforms and compositions have had an important influence on the development of expressive typography. Beginning his career as a commercial artist in the Detroit advertising world of the late 1950s, Fella practiced there professionally for three decades before earning an mfa in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Fella joined the CalArts faculty in 1987 as a self-declared “exit-level” designer, devoting himself to teaching and unique self-published output, which has appeared in numerous exhibitions, design publications and anthologies. In 2007, Fella received the aiga Medal—the highest honor in the field of graphic design. His work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Design and The Museum of Modern Art.