News @ the Peck School of the Arts

Winning in Winterim

By Krislyn World, Dance faculty
UWM Post
January 30, 2012

Teaching Winterim 2012 was one of the best decisions I’ve made in life. The experience was rewarding and beneficial for both my students and me. I taught beginning level African dance as a Senior Lecturer/Adjunct faculty member of the dance department in Peck School of the Arts.

I started my university teaching career at UW-Milwaukee in 2003. I, along with a host of former students and UWM Alumni, recognize African dance as a staple in education here at UWM. It is a popular course on campus that introduces the dance and culture of Africa and the Caribbean. Equally as important, African dance and Diaspora technique offers up to 3 credits as a Cultural Diversity GER. Most students find out, contrary to popular belief, that this credit is earned with sweat and is not an easy “A.”...

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Art & Design Department receives $10,000 for creation of a digital craft research lab

Recently, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Provost's Office, in conjunction with the Digital Future Planning Committee, awarded the Art & Design Department $10,000 for the creation of a Digital Craft Research Lab.

The Digital Craft Research Lab will provide undergraduate, graduate students and researchers with access to new computer assisted design (CAD) and computer assisted manufacturing (CAM) technology called rapid prototyping. The Digital Craft Research Lab will place these tools directly in students hands and place UWM along side of leading Jewelry and Metalsmithing programs in the country already incorporating this technology into their curriculum. Access to Rapid Prototyping technology will provide a critical advantage to UWM students for career advancement. Rapid prototyping is becoming standard practice in art, design, consumer products, automotive, aerospace, and medical products industry, to name a few. The goals of the Digital Craft Research Lab are to provide students and faculty with the tools and space to collaborate and foster innovative, creative research as well as to educate students for the future. The lab will help to facilitate interdisciplinary craft research. 

Fine Arts Quartet, with its new cellist

By Tom Strini
ThirdCoast Digest
January 29, 2012

Robert Cohen served as the Fine Arts Quartet’s emergency cellist last spring, when the late Wolfgang Laufer fell ill. Cohen then played a tour with the FAQ and returned for a November concert, and that seems to have sealed the deal.

Before Sunday’s concert at the Zelazo Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cohen told the big crowd about growing up as the son of the concertmaster of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and hearing and playing chamber music at home with his father and friends. He got the call from the Fine Arts one year and one day before the concert, and one day after his father died. Cohen had spent the bulk of his career as a touring soloist and no doubt will continue in that role, but he said that the time was right for him to turn his career more toward chamber music...

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'Remarkable Milwaukee' setting the stage for Milwaukee's future

By Mary Louise Schumacher
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
January 27, 2012

What's a city if not an expression of the people who live in it? When you put it that way, decisions about streets and sewers, buildings and bike paths get a lot more personal.

You'd never know it, though, given the impersonal ways we talk about urban design sometimes...

CONNECTIVITY, SEGREGATION

Can art and performance projects staged in the urban landscape reduce the ways people become isolated in Milwaukee? Working independently of one another, artists Anne Basting and Sara Daleiden believe so.

Basting, an artist, theater scholar and executive director of UWM's Center on Age and Community, is working on a project called "Shipwrecked," which looks at various forms of isolation in the environment, whether cultural, generational or urban-suburban, as a public health issue. At its culmination next year, the project may feature a series of performances in the urban landscape...

Visit the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online to read the full article.

UWM Spotlight on Excellence: Anne Basting

Peck School of the Arts Theatre faculty Anne Basting has made her career by melding diverse disciplines in unexpected ways. This video showcases TimeSlips, the seemingly magical program Anne created that brings those with Alzheimer's disease and dementia into the world of improvisation, "replacing the pressure to remember with the freedom to imagine."

 

Susanna Phillips: Opera star sings chamber music

By Tom Strini
ThirdCoast Digest
January 24, 2012

In October and November, Susanna Phillips sang the title role in Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. So what is a rising star of an opera singer doing at a Chamber Music Milwaukee concert at UWM Wednesday evening (Jan. 25)?

“I’m always looking for the chance to sing chamber music,” Phillips said, in an interview Tuesday at the UWM Zelazo Center, where the concert will take place. “And to sing it with friends makes all the difference. I’ve known  these guys a long time.”

The friends are clarinetist Todd Levy and horn player Gregory Flint, co-directors of Chamber Music Milwaukee; bassoonist Ted Soluri and guest pianist Brian Zeger. This will be Phillips’ third appearance with her Milwaukee friends and colleagues...

Visit ThirdCoast Digest to read the full article.

Internationally celebrated cellist, Robert Cohen, joins Fine Arts Quartet

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts is pleased to announce that Robert Cohen has joined the Fine Arts Quartet as its newest cellist. He will be playing with the Quartet in their upcoming concert on January 29, 2012 at 3pm, at the Helen Bader Concert Hall on UWM's campus.   

 

Mr. Cohen made his concerto debut at the age of twelve at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and throughout his distinguished international career he has been hailed as one of the foremost cellists of our time. Invited to perform concertos world-wide by conductors Claudio Abbado, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Muti, and Sir Simon Rattle, Cohen has also collaborated in chamber music with many eminent artists such as Yehudi Menuhin and the Amadeus String Quartet, with whom he recorded the Schubert Cello Quintet on Deutsche Grammophon. At age nineteen, Cohen recorded the Elgar Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the EMI label, and since then, has recorded much of the cello repertoire for Sony, Decca, DGG, EMI, and BIS. Cohen, who studied with the legendary artists William Pleeth, Jacqueline du Pré, and Mstislav Rostropovich, is an inspirational teacher who has given master classes all over the world. In addition to joining UWM, he is also a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, and is director of the Charleston Manor Festival in the south of England.  

DANCE ALUM - 'Think you can dance?' TU to find out

By James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World
January 23, 2012

Jessica Vokoun (Peck School of the Arts 2008 Dance MFA) expected many of her dance students would turn out to audition for the University of Tulsa's "So TU, Think You Can Dance?" production.

What surprised Vokoun, an assistant professor of dance in TU's department of theater and musical theater, was the number of unfamiliar faces she saw.

"We did the auditions in October and had a much larger turnout than any of us expected," Vokoun said. "We had students from (the colleges of) education, engineering, business. We even had some foreign exchange students, who are here on an immersion experience."

Twenty dancers were chosen from the first auditions. After two weeks of training and rehearsals with faculty and student choreographers, the roster was trimmed to 10...

Visit the Tulsa World to read the full article.

Theatre Curious?

Space is Still Available in These Terrific Theatre Classes! Enroll Today!

Liven up your semester, satisfy your GERs , meet new friends, get out of lecture.

100 Introduction to the Theatre: This class is always a favorite for students who want to explore various artistic, social and human elements of theatre from the point-of-view of both the theatre audience and theatre artist.  Classes are engaging and interactive, and include attendance at several live theatrical performances.

101 Introduction to the Actor's Art: An introduction to the actor's art and craft through lecture, demonstration, exercises, and class assignments.  Nurture the actor in you.  Choose from 5 sections taught by professional actors!

Art & Design faculty Kay Knight in group show "International Painting NYC" at the Jeffery Lender Gallery

The show opens on January 8th and runs through March 4th. Jeffrey Leder Gallery has selected over 30 painters from 10 countries for the exhibit. The range is wide and purposeful, from highly representation to total abstraction. The unifying impression sought is of an evocative aesthetic and emotional connection to each viewer.

Visit Jeffery Lender Gallery online for more information.