TESTTUBE TV: Workshop
A Stage to Star On or What You Need to Know to Make a Webisode

Kevin O'Rourke, Jay Tarses and Richard Dresser, principals of the Web site TESTTUBE.TV lead a workshop and discussed the Web as a new showcase for writers, actors and filmmakers.

O'Rourke has more than 20 years of experience as an actor, director and producer in theater, television and film. Tarses is recognized for his writing of character-driven, half-hour comedy and won an Emmy for his work on The Carol Burnett Show and a Writer's Guild Award for The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. Dresser is an accomplished playwright and screenwriter/producer. He work includes the Broadway play Good Vibrations, and on TV, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The Job and Bakersfield P.D.
(Hunt Room, Dorrance Hamilton Hall)

TESTTUBE TV: Panel Discussion
Whatever Happened to TV or Will the Internet Kill Episodic TV?

Principals of TESTTUBE.TV, Kevin O'Rourke, Jay Tarses and Richard Dresser, discussed the impact of the Web on the business and craft of episodic television. The trio screened various online episodic programs and talked about their structures, various distribution models and impact on jobs, business and entertainment.

O'Rourke has over 20 years of experience in television, theater and film as a director, producer and actor. He has been an active participant in contract negotiation for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and served on SAG committees on working conditions and technology.

Tarses served as writer and producer for a number of acclaimed variety shows, situation comedies and television series, including The Carol Burnett Show, the original Bob Newhart Show, The Tony Randall Show – as well as executive producer for MTM Enterprise.

Dresser is an accomplished playwright and screenwriter/producer. He work includes the Broadway play Good Vibrations, and on TV, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The Job and Bakersfield P.D.

The panel moderator, Jeff Ryder, Director of the Writing for Film & Television program and Communication at UArts, received two Emmys for his work on The Guiding Light and was vice president for Daytime NBC and the Movies of the Week at MGM.
(Hunt Room, Dorrance Hamilton Hall)

Richard Minsky: von Hess Artist-in-Residence Lecture
Von Hess Artist-in-Residence Richard Minsky discussed life as a book artist. Since 1973, Minsky has challenged the bookbinding establishment.

A traditionally trained bookbinder, Minsky focuses on making the book an expression of art, and has influenced generations of book artists to use the materials and structure as metaphors in their work.

Minsky founded the Center for Book Arts, an independent not-for-profit organization in New York City that is a model for similar facilities nationwide. His work is in public collections at Yale University, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.

The von Hess Visiting Artist Program in UArts' Borowsky Center is funded through the generosity of the Richard C. von Hess Foundation. The Borowsky Center invites visiting artists to explore the creative potential of the offset medium. The Center facilitates image-making as a synthesis of hand-work, photography and digital imagery.
(Connelly Lecture Hall, Terra Hall)

Scrap Performance Group
TIDE
A performance of "Tide" by the Scrap Performance Group, a five-woman, movement-based theater troupe, which integrates dance, theatre, film, light, text and sound in dynamic ways that cross the traditional boundaries of genre and builds experiential environments for its audiences. Scrap members share a common aesthetic and awareness of contemporary culture and draw from diverse viewpoints to create work that provokes, inspires and compels people to question.

Under the leadership of Scrap Performance Group Directors Myra Bazell and Madison Cario, students have contributed to the development of this professional work-in-progress through an interdisciplinary workshop referred to as The Foundry. Using the skills developed within their previous course work and life experiences, students explored the themes that contributed to this unique dance-based cross-media performance, focusing on the reciprocal impact humans and the natural environment have on each other.

The performance was followed by a talk-back session and reception, where student projects developed in The Foundry were also on display.

Bazell's work is explosively physical dance theater that engages the heart and launches the spirit. Urban aggressive influences and post modern sensibilities collide in her work, creating a strikingly forceful elegance. While pressing significant issues into abstract imagery, Bazell maintains a sensual playfulness. She has 15 years of experience directing theater, choreographing her own work and freelancing as choreographer for major opera companies, music videos and musical theater. She draws from a diverse and extensive background in Release technique, Contact Improvisation, ballet, modern, jazz, flamenco and street dance of an Afro-Latino base. Bazell received her BFA in dance from The University of the Arts, where she later taught Movement Theater for 12 years. Today she teaches at Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, Susan Hess Studio, Kumquat Dance Center and the Performance Garage, in Philadelphia.

Cario is interested in the spaces in between. She gets her training from the streets and her inspiration from the weeds that grow in the cracks of the sidewalk. Her favorite media are the artists themselves, their art forms and points where they intersect. For the past 12 years, Cario has created environments using lights, sets and sound. She has designed work for numerous dance and theater companies, including Tania Isaac Dance, Group Motion, Sebestainne Mundheim, Kate Watson-Wallace, Thaddeus Phillips' Lucidity Suitcase, ASH Contemporary Dance and Philadelphia Young Playwrights, among many others.
(Chambers Wylie Church, 315 South Broad Street)

Lewis Hyde: Conversations with Crafts Students
The author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Richard L. Thomas professor of creative writing at Kenyon College, Lewis Hyde lead a discussion on creativity with students from the University's Crafts department.

Hyde's interests center on the public life of the imagination. His book The Gift is an inquiry into the situation of creative artists in commercial society. Trickster Makes This World is a portrait of the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and alive.

Hyde, a respected author and poet, is working on a book about "cultural commons," that vast, unowned store of ideas, inventions and art that we have inherited from the past.
(Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium)

Improvise/Commit: Conversations on the Creative Process - Panel Discussion
A panel discussion featuring the points of view of several artists, moderated by Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, and Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. The event included a prelude performed by Toshi Makihara, percussion, sound, media and performance artist with the UArts Rumble Ensemble.

Panelists included:

• Myra Bazell, Scrap Performance Group
  Bazell's work is explosively physical dance theater that engages the heart and launches the spirit. Urban aggressive influences and post modern sensibilities collide in her work, creating a strikingly forceful elegance. While pressing significant issues into abstract imagery, Bazell maintains a sensual playfulness. She has 15 years of experience directing theater, choreographing her own work and freelancing as choreographer for major opera companies, music videos and musical theater. She draws from a diverse and extensive background in Release technique, Contact Improvisation, ballet, modern, jazz, flamenco and street dance of an Afro-Latino base. Bazell received her BFA in dance from The University of the Arts, where she later taught Movement Theater for 12 years. Today she teaches at Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, Susan Hess Studio, Kumquat Dance Center and the Performance Garage, in Philadelphia.
   
• Madison Cario, Scrap Performance Group
  Cario is interested in the spaces in between. She gets her training from the streets and her inspiration from the weeds that grow in the cracks of the sidewalk. Her favorite media are the artists themselves, their art forms and points where they intersect. For the past 12 years, Cario has created environments using lights, sets and sound. She has designed work for numerous dance and theater companies, including Tania Isaac Dance, Group Motion, Sebestainne Mundheim, Kate Watson-Wallace, Thaddeus Phillips' Lucidity Suitcase, ASH Contemporary Dance and Philadelphia Young Playwrights, among many others.
   
• Peter Schumann, founder of Bread and Puppet Theater
  Peter Schumann is the founder and director of the Bread & Puppet Theater. Before immigrating to the United States in 1961, Schumann was a dancer and sculptor in his native Germany. In 1963, he founded Bread & Puppet and in 1970 moved the group to Vermont, which remains its home. A politically radical puppet theater group, active since the 1960s, Bread and Puppet's name is derived from the group's practice of sharing its own fresh bread, served for free with a strong garlic aioli, with the audience at each performance as a means of creating community, and from its central principle that art should be as basic to life as bread.
   
• Michael McCoy
  see below
   
• Katherine McCoy
  see below

(Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium, Gershman Hall)

Katherine and Michael McCoy Lecture
Modernism and Critical Practices in Design

Katherine and Michael McCoy, renowned design educators and partners at McCoy and McCoy Associates, spoke on the topics of modernism and critical practices in design.

Katherine and Michael McCoy received the Smithsonian Institution's first Design Minds National Design Award, and in recognition of their influence on design education, received the American Center for Design Education Award, the Industrial Designers Society of America Education Award. In 1994, they received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, which is given to six architects and designers annually.

The McCoys are directors of High Ground Design Workshops, which offer advanced design workshops to professionals at their mountain studio in Buena Vista, Colorado.

Michael McCoy is a pioneer in the American art furniture movement, starting in the late 1970s as a furniture designer at Cranbrook Academy of Art and as a juror, with Frank Gehry and Arata Isosaki, of the groundbreaking Progressive Architecture International Furniture Competition. His strategies for interpreting technology and information through design form have been widely published, including in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and ID Magazine, among others and he has received over 200 design awards for his work.

Katherine McCoy is a senior lecturer at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design in Chicago. She began her work in design at Unimark International, and is past president and fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America. Her work has been published internationally, including the book Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History by the Walker Art Center and Women in Design, published by Rizzoli International. Her teaching methodology has been featured in the ABC Editions Zurich books Graphic Design International and Graphic Design Education, Eye Magazine, Novum Gebrauchsgraphik and Print Magazine. She recently co-authored and designed the book Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, published by Rizzoli International.
(Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium, Gershman Hall)

Rennie Harris Puremovement

Led by Lorenzo "Rennie" Harris, Rennie Harris Puremovement (RHPM) was conceived with the vision for sharing an appreciation for diversity and is dedicated to preserving and disseminating hip-hop culture through workshops, classes, lecture-demonstrations, dance residencies, mentoring programs and public performances.

RHPM's work encompasses rich and diverse African American traditions of the past, while simultaneously presenting the voice of a new generation.

Intermission

As an extraordinary finale to the evening, a jazz ensemble comprised of the University's outstanding alumni, conducted by Lars Halle, performed. Legendary jazz bassist and UArts alumnus Stanley Clarke joined the group, along with a few other very special guests, making for a never-to-be-forgotten evening of jazz performances.

The University of the Arts Alumni Big Band Performance:
Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra

Mike Cemprola, alto sax (alumnus and faculty)
Jason O'Mara, alto sax (alumnus)
Chris Farr, tenor sax (alumnus and faculty)
Rick Lawn, tenor sax (Dean of CPA)
Ben Vinci, bari sax (alumnus)

Matt Gallagher, lead trumpet (alumnus, faculty)
Dennis Wasko, trumpet (alumnus and faculty)
Matt Cappy, trumpet (alumnus)
Tony DeSantis, trumpet (alumnus)
Bill Pusey, trumpet (alumnus and faculty)

Randy Kapralick, lead trombone (faculty)
Jon Botbyl, trombone (alumnus)
Paul Arbogast, trombone (alumnus and faculty)
Rich Genovese, bass trombone (faculty)

Tom Lawton, piano (faculty)
Kevin MacConnell, bass (faculty)
Lars Halle, drums (alumnus and faculty)
Marc Dicciani, drums (alumnus and faculty)

Anne Sciolla, vocals (alumna and faculty)
Meg Mitchell, vocals (alumna and faculty)

The Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra was founded in January 2000 by ‘96 UArts alumnus Lars Halle and has become one of the leading big bands in the Philadelphia area. Most of the band’s regular members are alumni of the University of the Arts or currently serve on the School of Music faculty. This version of the LHJO showcases a complete line-up of UArts alumni and/or faculty.
(Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium, Gershman Hall)