Thomas Weisskopf is Professor Emeritus, RC Social Theory and Practice
Alisa Solomon, RC ’78, Drama and Philosophy, Professor and Director, Arts and Culture Concentration in the M.A. Program, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
Heather Ann Thompson, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, is Professor of History, Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, and Professor in the RC Social Theory and Practice Program
Prison Creative Arts Project Panel, Panel Members TBA
U-M percussion professor Michael Gould performs his compositions, inspired by recently retired RC instructor Ken Mikolowski’s poems, that revolve around his own experiences with loss, illness, and recovery. With narration by U-M theater professor Malcolm Tulip, and dance accompaniment by the Berlin-based Tangente Dance Company choreographed by U-M dance professor Amy Chavasse. The project title takes its inspiration from the “Dido’s Lament” aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Local mezzo-soprano Deanna Relyea opens the program with a performance of the aria, accompanied by cellist Katri Ervamaa.
7 p.m., U-M Residential College Keene Theater, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 763-0176
As part of Desiree Cooper’s two-day residency at the Residential College, she is be giving a reading, free and open to the public, in Benzinger Library. She will be reading from her new book of stories, Know the Mother.
Professor Chavasse presents research from her travels to the Malta Festival in Poznan, Poland, and to Berlin, Germany where she created a new dance work for Tanz Tangente. In Poznan, the panoply of dance, music and theater events focused on the festival theme– The Balkans Platform, (Platforma Blakany), with the title of “We The People”, analogous to our “not my president” protests. Chavasse will discuss the highly politicized works she witnessed as an audience member, posing questions about gender politics and social inequality and autocracy. She will also discuss the genesis of a new dance created with Tanz Tangente in Berlin, called “Little Monsters,” in which the movement exploration is centered around pulsing, agitation, manipulation and absence.
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.
If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Center for World Performance Studies, at 734-936-2777, at least one week in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the University to arrange.
Nov. 17 & 18. RC students perform Theresa Rebeck’s 2011 Broadway drama about 4 young writers, their professor, and the tensions and romances that develop as they attend a 10-week intensive writing seminar.
8 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free; donations welcome. 763-0176.
Nov. 17 & 18. RC students perform Theresa Rebeck’s 2011 Broadway drama about 4 young writers, their professor, and the tensions and romances that develop as they attend a 10-week intensive writing seminar.
8 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free; donations welcome. 763-0176.
Laura Kasischke’s most recent book, from which she will read, brings new poems together with work from her previous nine collections of poetry, published over the last twenty-five years. The citation for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which she received in 2011, reads: “No poet alive has worked harder to depict the contemporary American life course: she has shown herself, in sharply vivid poems, as a girl, as a wayward teen, as a young adult, as a passionate and worried mother with a baby, a child, and now a teenaged son…And no poet now at work does better than Kasischke in finding ways to depict not just how we feel about life stages and the people in them but also how we change as those stages go by…Kasischke stands for many among us.” Her collection of new and selected poems gathers together the breadth of this vision, and Kasischke will offer readings from both her earliest and most recent work.
For questions, contact Julie Sparkman at jmallard@umich.edu
