Students of Kate Mendeloff’s class RCHUMS 481 perform four short plays by Tennessee Williams.
U-M drama students in Kate Mendeloff’s play production seminar direct and perform renowned English playwright Caryl Churchill’s acclaimed 2012 play about relationships in the digital age presented as an evolving mosaic of more than 50 fragmented and superficially unconnected scenes.
7 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian who has written op-eds for the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. Her expertise on the American South has led to interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Mic, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate (France), the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer, as well as international newspapers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on BBC Newshour, Black Politics Today, The Mike Smerconish Show (Sirius XM), C-SPAN, Canadian Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio, Georgia Public Radio, and Charlotte Talks.
Cox is the author of three books and numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History. Her second book, published by UNC Press in 2011, is Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, 2012), which won the Allen G. Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society for the Best Edited Book on North American material culture. She authored the blog Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture where she wrote over 100 essays about representations of the region and its people in popular media.
Her most recent book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, was released in October 2017.
Cox is originally from Huntington, West Virginia, and is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The RC’s Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features 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.
Emily Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at U-M.
During the latter half of the 1980s, a popular dance craze known as “piliwu” 霹雳舞 swept urban communities across China. Incorporating two new styles of U.S. urban popular dance–New York-based b-boying/b-girling or “breaking” and California-based popping and locking– piliwu was China’s first localized movement of hip-hop culture, which reflected new circuits of intercultural exchange between China and the United States during the first decade of China’s Reform Era. Analyzing the dance choreography recorded in a 1988 Chinese film, Rock Youth 摇滚青年 (dir. Tian Zhangzhuang), together with media reports and testimonials from members of China’s piliwu generation, this talk reconstructs the history of the piliwu movement, arguing for the central influence of U.S. pop culture icon Michael Jackson, the growth of China’s underground commercial dance (zou xue 走穴) economy, and the agency of dancers’ bodies in transnational movements of media culture.
RC Players is thrilled to present Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit as this semester’s full-length production.
Blithe Spirit is a farcical play that follows Charles Condomine, a novelist who invites a medium to his home in order to gather information for his latest novel. However, this quickly backfires: as a result of the encounter, Charles finds himself haunted by his mischievous first wife, Elvira. Throughout the play, Elvira does her best to undermine Charles’s relationship with his current wife Ruth, who cannot see or hear her. Hijinks ensue, and Charles must rely on the eccentric Madame Arcati to help the spirits pass on. The play looks at marriage, gender roles, and dealing with past mistakes, all with a supernatural twist.
Performances will take place in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of East Quadrangle, Friday March 16 and Saturday March 17 at 8 p.m.
Admission is pay what you can, which can mean FREE!
RC Players is thrilled to present Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit as this semester’s full-length production.
Blithe Spirit is a farcical play that follows Charles Condomine, a novelist who invites a medium to his home in order to gather information for his latest novel. However, this quickly backfires: as a result of the encounter, Charles finds himself haunted by his mischievous first wife, Elvira. Throughout the play, Elvira does her best to undermine Charles’s relationship with his current wife Ruth, who cannot see or hear her. Hijinks ensue, and Charles must rely on the eccentric Madame Arcati to help the spirits pass on. The play looks at marriage, gender roles, and dealing with past mistakes, all with a supernatural twist.
Performances will take place in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of East Quadrangle, Friday March 16 and Saturday March 17 at 8 p.m.
Admission is pay what you can, which can mean FREE!
U-M drama students in Kate Mendeloff’s play production seminar direct and perform present several short farces by contemporary playwright David Ives.
8-9 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
Drama students from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina State University present a program of short theatrical pieces, dance, and music as part of a cultural exchange program led by U-M drama professor Ashley Lucas.
8-9 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
Three authors discuss how their fiction transforms home into character. How do writers use assumptions about familiar places to find the unexpected and surprising? When is a hometown the whole trouble, and also the last, best hope for change? We’ll also talk about how the unique landscape of the upper Midwest inspires our fiction.
Prior to writing fiction and poetry, Kelly Fordon worked at the NPR member station in Detroit and for National Geographic magazine. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Florida Review, Flashquake, The Kenyon Review, and various other journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks,On the Street Where We Live, which won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest, and Tell Me When It Starts to Hurt, which was published by Kattywompus Press in 2013. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Queens University of Charlotte and works for InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit as a writer-in-residence.
Born and raised in Detroit, Lolita Hernandez is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Quiet Battles and snakecrossing. She is a 2012 Kresge Literary Arts fellow, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary publications. After over thirty-three years as a UAW worker at General Motors, she now teaches in the creative writing department in the University of Michigan Residential College.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Readings by writers featured in the 10th annual edition of Prison Creative Arts Project magazine that features work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers.
4 p.m., Pierpont Commons East Room. Free. 615-3204, 647-6771.
