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Center for World Performance Studies 2019-2020 YEAR IN REVIEW

Dear students, faculty, alumni and friends,

We hope you are staying safe and healthy in these difficult times. We are so thankful to be part of an engaged community of artists and scholars, and have found inspiration in the work being done to navigate this crisis, from caregiving to creative output. With our future planning on pause, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our past year, and appreciate the beauty, humility, empathy and courage we shared, as we experienced the world through the lens of performance.

Our Mission: The Center for World Performance Studies seeks to create intellectual and physical space for the study of performance. Our aim is to advocate for performance as a mode of research and as a means of public engagement, centering on underrepresented, non-Western, and diasporic voices, bodies, and acts. We connect—both locally and globally—students, faculty, artists, thinkers, and scholars in order to educate each other about Performance Studies and to promote interdisciplinary and intersectional insights and research methodologies.

Artist & Scholar Residencies

CWPS hosted puppet artist Tom Lee in September 2019, in collaboration with CMAP Detroit and the Ann Arbor District Library. Lee presented a special workshop exploring how Japanese traditional puppetry techniques have influenced world puppetry performance, and gave participants a hands-on opportunity to practice bunraku-style puppetry. He also visited classes in Dance, Theater Production and Japanese language. Tom Lee has appeared as a puppeteer in War Horse at Lincoln Center Theatre and Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera, in addition to extensive work in Japan with his mentor, Koryu Nishikawa V. Co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies

Yandong Grand Singers | 岩洞侗族大歌队

CWPS and Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies presented the Yandong Grand Singers at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre on September 24, 2019. The Yandong Grand Singers is a choir formed by farmers from Yandong Village, specializing in the “Grand Song” of the Dong people - polyphonic music known to the world only in recent decades. The repertoire includes a range of genres such as ballads, children’s songs, songs of greeting and imitative songs that test performers’ virtuosity at mimicking the sounds of nature.

Students from the Residential College Chinese Music Ensemble try instruments following the Yandong Grand Singers performance at Mendelssohn Theatre.

Each singer in the ensemble created their own costumes using traditional patterns and iconography.

Yandong Grand Singers visited classes in Ethnomusicology and Asian Languages & Cultures.

In October, 2019, CWPS hosted Makuyeika: Colectivo Teatral, founded by U-M alumnus Héctor Flores Komatsu, for a one week artist residency that included class visits, workshops and performances of their devised-work Andares, including a performance at Garage Cultural in southwest Detroit. The piece chronicles the lives of indigenous youth in México, and the realities that they face at the crossroads of modern life and tradition. Following the US premiere at the Walgreen Drama Center, the play went on to receive rave reviews during its run at the Public Theater as part of the 2020 Under the Radar festival in NYC, and in Chicago at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Co-sponsored by Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies; LSA Department of American Culture; LSA Latina/o Studies; LSA Native American Studies; LSA Residential College; SMTD Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; SMTD EXCEL; and SMTD Department of Theatre & Drama.

ABOVE: Raymundo Pavon Lozano demonstrates Son Jarocho to students in Professor Christi-Anne Castro's musicology class. BELOW: members of Makuyeika visit Professor Larry La Fountain-Stokes class in the MLB.

Stone Sound Collective

In February, Stone Sound Collective performed at the Keene Theater in East Quad and Professor Mark Stone gave a guest lecture in the Graduate Performance Studies Seminar. The ensemble brings together celebrated world percussion traditions of Africa and India with the lyricism of cello and saxophone. They perform new music that draws on Mark's wide-ranging compositional influences, stretching from American jazz, traditional African music and classical Indian music to European concert music. An internationally recognized multi-percussionist, Professor Stone has performed with the foremost musicians of Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, India, Trinidad, Ecuador, and the United States.

Performance Talks & Faculty Lectures

CWPS Performance Talks is a series of events in collaboration with local arts presenters, which aims to bring performers to campus to foster intellectual exchange between students, faculty and practitioners, as a means of illuminating global perspectives on performance practice.

  • Film Screening + Q&A | Gone to the Village: Royal Funerary Rites for Asantehemaa Nana Afia Kobi Serwaa Ampem II, a film by Kwasi Ampene
  • Cheikh Lô | Artist Q&A at Blue Llama Jazz Club, co-sponsored with African Studies Center

Faculty Lecture Series 2019-2020

The Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features our Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion. This year, we featured the following faculty:

  • Malcolm Tulip | After Unica: In Search of the Surreal
  • Nachiket Chanchani | Michelangelo of Yoga
  • Xiaodong Hottman Wei | Morin Khuur: The Mongolian Horsehead Fiddle
  • Christi-Anne Castro | The Folklorama Festival and Canadian Multiculturalism

2019 Graduate Fellows

Congrats to the following six students who completed the Certificate in World Performance Studies:

  • Lisa Decenteceo | Dancing with Tradition, Contesting the Self: Internal Subversions of Igorot Identity
  • Jean Carlo Urena Gonzalez | Connecting with the roots: African rhythms in Dominican musical traditions
  • Evan Haywood | Blood & Fire: Anti Colonial Narratives in Jamaican Oral History
  • Sherry Lin | The Dinner Table Series
  • Marjoris Regus | The Everyday Performances and Diverse Identities of Hip Hop Artists Overseas
  • Mario Vircha | Migrare, what happens when a culture disperses?
Our graduate fellows in action around the world.

Annual Fellows Luncheon featuring CWPS alumnus Paul Farber

In recent years, CWPS launched a new tradition of inviting an alumnus of the graduate residency program (now the Graduate Fellows Program with a Certificate in World Performance Studies) to share their work with current students, faculty and community members at an annual CWPS Fellows Luncheon. Our 2019 guest speaker was Philadelphia-based historian and curator Paul M. Farber, PhD American Culture. He is the Artistic Director of Monument Lab and teaches courses in Fine Arts and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to speaking at the Fellows Luncheon, Farber facilitated a Public Conversation on Monuments & Public Art, featuring Christina Olsen (UMMA), Srimoyee Mitra (Stamps Gallery) and Kristin Hass (Dept. of American Culture).

ABOVE: Former and current CWPS Graduate Fellows attending the annual luncheon.
Paul Farber discusses the ways that his CWPS experience launched his dissertation research, and changed his career trajectory.

Our 2020 Graduate Fellows are:

  • Leonard Bopp, MM Program in Orchestral Conducting
  • Meg Brennan, MM Program in Improvisation
  • Alfredo Cabrera, MM Program in Music Composition
  • Angela Schöpke Gonzalez, PhD Program in Information
  • Rebecca Hixon, PhD Program in English Language & Literature
  • Mimi Owusu, PhD Program in Educational Studies
  • Hohner Porter, MM Program in Percussion Performance & Chamber Music
  • MaryEllen Rieck, PhD Program in Political Science
  • Imani Ma'at Taylor, MFA Program in Dance

2020 Faculty Fellows

Each year, grant awards of $5,000 are available to individual faculty members to pursue research projects, both domestic and international. We encourage inventive ideas, especially those that involve thematic support for Performance Studies, including ethnography and performance as research. This year, Faculty Fellows grants were awarded to the following faculty projects:

  • Kwasi Ampene, Associate Professor, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies | Musical Expressions and Traditions in the Borderlands: Collaborative Field Research at Aflao-Ghana
  • Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Professor, Departments of American Culture, Romance Language & Literatures and Women’s Studies | Performing an Archipelago: Contemporary Performance Arts in Puerto Rico
  • Joseph Lam, Professor, Musicology | Kunqu performance and reception in Japan (2000-2020)
  • Alaina Lemon, Professor, Anthropology | Tremors: Stanislavsky Rests
  • Katherine Mendeloff, Lecturer, Residential College | Collaborative development of "Wangari"s Prayer" with Kenyan playwright Rogers Otieno
  • Tiffany Ng, Assistant Professor, Music | Activating Local Opportunities to Decolonize Carillons in Southern Africa

CWPS Co-Sponsored Student, Faculty and Departmental Events

CWPS co-sponsors a wide variety of student and faculty projects in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the broader university—all of which serve to strengthen intellectual and cultural life on campus and beyond. In 2019-2020, CWPS was the proud sponsor of 15 projects, including performances organized by student cultural organizations, graduate student conferences and guest performances and lectures, including Tria Blu Wakpa, Sacramento Knoxx, Puerto Rican filmmaker Marisol Gomez Mouakad, and Urayoán Noel.

Looking ahead: Center for World Performance Studies 20th Anniversary

The Center for World Performance Studies was founded under the leadership of Dr. Judith Becker and Dr. Lester Monts in the year 2000, with an official inaugural celebration taking place on Friday, March 30, 2001. We do hope to celebrate the 20th anniversary with you during the next academic year, with a spectacular symposium and celebration in March, 2021. Though the extent of in-person programming for the coming year is unknown, we are steadfast in our commitment to building and supporting a community of scholars and artists who value the role of performance on stage and in our everyday lives - on campus, and beyond.

We are so grateful for your continued support. Gifts to the Center for World Performance Studies Strategic Fund support engagement with artists and scholars, both locally and globally, student fellowships and faculty research projects.

We hope to see you at one of our upcoming events - please join the email list at the bottom to stay up to date, as we evolve our programming for the coming year.

Sincerely,

Dr. Michael Gould, Director

Credits:

Peter Smith Photography, Ingrid Racine, Michael Gould