Sharing Strategies for Change: Transdisciplinarity • Interconnectivity • Context-based Practices
January 27-29, 2011
CalArts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia, CA 91335
Draft agenda – subject to change
Thursday, January 27
10:00 opening
10:30 Presentation/Participation: Location: MOD LOBBY
Local Experiments in Redefining Home: Context-based strategies
- Trailer Trash (Sam Breen)
- NOMAD Lab (Evelyn Serrano)
12:00 lunch break
1:00 Presentation/Participation: Location: MOD LOBBY
Tea-time: Pecha-Kucha
- PechaKucha (onomatopoeic Japanese for chit-chat) 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you talk while showing up to 20 images, each for 20 seconds. Sign-up to participate and share your transdisciplinary, interconnected, context-based work.
3:00 Presentation: Location: MOD LOBBY
Sustaining Creative Dialogues: CalArts in conversation with East African colleagues
- More Life: Rwanda/Uganda Exchange (Darius Mannino)
- More Life: 2010 (Patrick Janssen, others)
- Cooking Oil: CalArts to Kampala 2010 (Shannon Scrofano, Miranda Wright, Emily Mendelsohn)
5:00 Lecture/Demonstration: Location: MOD LOBBY
On the Veranda: Approach and Observation: Hirokazu Kosaka
- Artist, Buddhist priest, Zen Archer, Artistic Director of the JACCC, Hirokazu Kosaka shares strategies of creative observation that defy disciplinary definition and extend across generations of practice.
6:30 dinner break (at CalArts Cafe)
7:30 Performance chronology & audiovisual lecture: Location: Coffee House
Multiple Journeys: the life and work of Gómez-Peña: Guillermo Gómez-Peña
- The presentation invokes text and historical photographs to chronicle the performance art practice of post-Mexican writer, artist and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. By tracing his family life as well as his past 30 years in performance, visual and literary forms, the artist discusses his work in context to the larger evolution of the field as well as to the main political and social events of the times.
9:00 close
Friday, January 28
9:00 open
9:30 Performance: Location: Coffee House
On the Subject of Freedom
- Directed by Mersiha Mesihovic, Created with and performed by following: Lindsey Lollie, Amanda McNussen, James Brandon Lewis, Andy Robert, Etienne Rivera, Max Mendoza, Javier Gonzalez, Miriam Connor, Jahcobie Cosom and Matt Schumacher.
10:00 Conversation/Participation: Location: Coffee House
Ethics, Aesthetics and Authenticity in Context-based Performance
- Cornerstone Theater Company (Nephelie Andonyadis)
- Los Angeles Poverty Department (John Malpede, Henriette Brouwers, Kevin Michael Keys, Riccarlo Porter)
- Report from Peru/Yuyachkani (Juan Parada)
12:00 lunch break
Afternoon 1:00 – 7:00 concurrent workshops
1:00 – 7:00 Workshop: Location: Coffee House
Pocha Nostra performance workshop (Guillermo Gómez-Peña)
[Workshop is currently full. Please sign up on a wait list at the conference registration table]
- Performance artist, cultural theorist Gómez-Peña leads an exploration of radical collaboration – creating temporary communities of rebel artists from different disciplines, ages, ethnic backgrounds, gender persuasions, and nationalities, in which difference and experimentation are not only accepted but encouraged, we will seek a new hybrid and interdisciplinary aesthetic, reflective of the spirit and tribulations of our times, and of the concerns of each participant. The workshop will raise crucial questions: Why do we do what we do? Which borders do we wish to cross and why? Which are the hardest borders to cross both in the workshop and in our personal lives? How do we define our multiple communities, and why do we belong to them? What is the relationship between performance, activism, pedagogy and our everyday lives? What about the relationship between the physical body and the social body?
3:00 – 5:00 Workshop: Location: Langley
Non-Violent Communication (Roger Sorrow and Anne Walton)
- Certified NVC trainers will lead an exploration of the work of Marshall Rosenberg, who has identified a specific approach to communicating–speaking and listening–that leads us to give from the heart, connecting us with ourselves and with each other in a way that allows our natural compassion to flourish. The 4 step process outlined in Non Violent Communication gives us a way to focus our attention on communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions
5:00 – 7:00 Workshop: Location: Langley
Seeing beyond speech: Cultivating your intuitive gifts to connect with others (Asher Hartman)
- An intensive workshop that helps people tap into their intuitive gifts to “see” and speak to another person. When looking at another through one’s inner vision, we are able to bypass language to grasp another’s “essence.” Everyone can reach through the barrier of habitual thinking to see another person through the intuitive gifts of inner vision, sensing, and listening. In this process, we also learn to let others see us in our most flourishing, realized state. The process is engaging and beneficial for both the “seer” and the “seen.” Practically, we will be playing with and tuning our senses to see without eyes, sense through “knowing” and hear expansively to connect with other human beings directly.
7:00 dinner break
8:00 Performance: Location: E407
LEAR/LAYER
[This performance is currently Sold Out. Please sign up on the waitlist at the conference registration table.]
- A collaborative experiment between Chung An University and CalArts students and faculty, an urban, contemporary adaption response to King Lear performed in Korean, English and Spanish.
9:30 close
Saturday, January 29
9:00 open
9:30 Presentation/Reading: Location: Trailer Trash
No Comas Tomates antes de Dormir porque Tendrás Pesadillas (by Isabel Salazar)
- Directed by Alexis Macnab, Performed by Gilbert Molina and Isabel Salazar
- Two people tell each other their dreams and nightmares as they travel in darkness toward a new fate.
10:00 Presentation/Conversation: Location: Coffee House
Strategies for mapping beyond borders
- Map For An Other LA (Robby Herbst, Llano del Rio Collective)
- Social Consciouness in the Mega-Metropolis: Tijuana/Los Angeles (Luis and Gerda Govina Ituarte, Casa del Tunel)
- Islands of LA (Ari Kletzky)
- Studio of Southern California History (Sharon Sekhon)
12:00 lunch break
Afternoon: Concurrent workshops/presentation
1:00-2:00 Presentation/Demonstration: Location : Coffee House
Building Queer Future Worlds (micha cardenas)
- micha cardenas will talk about transdisciplinary and performative strategies engaged in “Building Queer Future Worlds” and recent collaborations with Elle Mehrmand, virus.circus and Becoming Transreal. The projects confront the difficulty of imagining futures of control and resistance, a major step in the process of creating change. Videos of these pieces, which took place in “real life” and second life simultaneously, using motion capture and wearable sensors, may be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/12863207, http://vimeo.com/16869351
1:00-3:00 Workshop: Location: Faculty Center
Creating A Sense of Place In A Digital World (Sharon Sekhon/Studio for Southern California History)
- This workshop provides examples of online place-based multimedia projects that explore issues of social justice and public history. Sharon Sekhon will briefly review of A People’s Guide to LA (2004); The Holiday Bowl History Project (2004); The Evergreen Cemetery History Project (2009); among others. Each example provides varying levels of new media. Participants will work on interactive mapping exercises that will be shared with the workshop at the end. Participants should come prepared to observe and record the world around them (example: camera, sketchbook, journal, video camera). You will be asked to share your observations and work with Sekhon in order to create a memory map of the day’s experience at www.the-memory-bank-project.com.
3:00 Workshop: Location: Main Gallery
Graphics for the Commons: Collaborative Image Making with the Beehive Design Collective (Zeph Fishlyn – Beehive Collective)
- Join us for a hands-on collaborative image-making workshop! We’ll be practicing some of the tools we use to create giant graphics that weave personal stories into global contexts:
- first hand story gathering
- systems analysis
- visual mapping
- ecological metaphors that tell human stories
- collaborative design and illustration
- editing and synthesis
- Please bring your favorite drawing supplies and paper to share! We’ll be brainstorming and sketching ideas. We encourage folks at all drawing-skills levels to come!
5:30 Potluck
- Volunteer to bring your favorite dish! Let us know what you’ll be bringing by signing up HERE.
6:30 opportunity to attend LAPD performance - depart for HIGHWAYS (Santa Monica, CA):
Los Angeles Poverty Department: STATE OF INCARCERATION (performance begins at 8:30)
7:00 Close
California Institute of the Arts / School of Theater
