Students on stage

Student screen and stage plays honored

<p>Six students were recently honored by the Department of Performing & Media Arts as winners of the Heermans-McCalmon writing competition for the best playwriting and screenwriting produced by students.</p><p>“Giving students platforms for artistic expression is so important,” Gloria Oladipo ‘21 said. “PMA students need platforms for their work in the same way that science students need labs to run experiments. Artists should be able to stand by their work and embrace it fully.”</p>

Aoise Stratford outside

PMA professor pens new holiday tradition

<p itemprop="headline">When Michael Barakiva, artistic director of Ithaca’s <a href="http://www.hangartheatre.org/">Hangar Theatre</a>, decided to bring Charles Dickens’ classic novella <a href="http://www.hangartheatre.org/events/dickens.html">A Christmas Carol</a> to the stage, he turned to <a href="https://pma.cornell.edu/aoise-stratford">Aoise Stratford</a>.</p>

Engaged faculty

Engaged Faculty Fellows connect classroom and community

<p>As fires rage across southern California, upstate economies struggle and teenagers crave educations that matter, Engaged Faculty Fellows are asking what they can do to help – and designing courses that do. The seven faculty members in this year’s cohort are developing community-engaged classes that give students hands-on experience and empower them to be global citizens – all while advancing community partners’ missions and contributing solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges.</p>

Student doing acrobatics

Circus musical ‘Pippin’ at Schwartz Center Jan. 12-14

<div><div><p>The magic of the circus comes alive in Running to Places’ (R2P) “Pippin.” From jugglers to unicycles to acrobatics, the musical is a comedic extravaganza in the spirit of the recent Broadway revival. The production, with backstage support by Cornell staff, runs Jan. 12-14 at Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts and is a collaboration with Ithaca’s Circus Culture school.</p></div></div>

Gifts create new Arts & Sciences professorships

Faculty growth is essential in multidisciplinary areas such as nanoscale science, behavioral economics, sustainability and media studies, as well as other emerging research areas in the social sciences, sciences, arts and humanities.

close up of actor&amp;#039;s face

'Therapy as Performance'

Therapy sessions can be dramatic, but normally take place behind closed doors with only the therapist and client as witnesses. “Therapy as Performance,” a new interdisciplinary series premiering Jan. 19 at The Cherry Artspace in Ithaca, turns that convention on its head.

Oscars

Three Cornellians score Oscar nominations

<p>Three Cornellians were among those celebrating Jan. 23 when nominations were announced for this year’s Academy Awards.</p><p>Reed Van Dyk and Trevor White, both ’07, received nominations, Van Dyk for his writing/directing on the documentary “DeKalb Elementary,” and White for production of “The Post.” David Greenbaum ’98 is co-head of production for Fox Searchlight Pictures, which had two nominated films, “Shape of Water” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.”</p>

New book explores Alexander Kluge’s literary experiments in futurity

The role of “counterfactual hope” in Alexander Kluge’s work, and his “incomparable dedication to the conjoined causes of survival and happiness,” writes Leslie Adelson, formed much of the inspiration for her new book, “Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge's 21st-century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form.”

Poster for Arabic Movie

‘Arabic Movie’ explores Israeli cultural phenomenon

Israel and Egypt were at war in 1968, but every Friday night families across Israel gathered in their homes to watch Arabic-language Egyptian movies; Palestinians did as well. “Arabic Movie,” a documentary directed by Sara Tsifroni and Eyal Sagui Bizawi and shown Feb. 12 at Cornell Cinema, offers a glimpse into this phenomenon of cultural connection that lasted more than a decade, exploring why the films were shown and how they were obtained.

Rhodessa Jones

Activist and artist to speak on empowerment in theatre

<p>Award-winning activist, artist, director, and scholar Rhodessa Jones brings her techniques of “Creative Survival” to Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts on March 20 and 22 for a public lecture and master class, respectively.</p>

Student playwrights and screenwriters honored March 23

<p>The winning stage and screenplays from this year’s Heermans-McCalmon Writing Competition will be showcased Friday, March 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Class of ’56 Dance Theatre at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.</p>

Klarman Hall

Natasha Raheja

I am a political and visualanthropologist working in the areas of migration, borders, state power, aesthetics, and ethnographic film. My current research generates medium-specific insights across writing and film to advance political theory on majority-minority relations and majoritarianism. In the context of cross-border migration and immigration policy in South Asia, I ask, how do majorities come to imagine themselves as minorities? Conversely, how do minorities come to imagine justice as part of majorities? How do majority-minority politics exceed the parameters of states, in ways that are not nation bound?

/natasha-raheja
CIFF logo, two hands framing the word CIFF

Short-film festival screens work from New York State and Ivy League students

Student filmmakers, most from central and upstate New York, will have their short films screened during the fifth annual Centrally Isolated Film Festival (CIFF). During the festival, April 13 and 14 at Cornell University’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, the public and a panel of industry judges will award prizes across several categories.

Klarman Hall

Christine Bacareza Balance

Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Performing &amp; Media Arts and Asian American Studies. Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in Women and Performance: a feminist journal, Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ), and Theatre Journal. Her first book, Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2016), examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino/Filipino American popular music compose Filipino identities, publics, and politics. It received the Best First Book award from the Filipino Studies caucus of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS). Her current book project, Making Sense of Martial Law, analyzes how the former President Ferdinand Marcos and First Lady Imelda Marcos employed the sensorial and sensational, during their 21-year dictatorial rule, and how U.S.- and Philippines-based performances, events, and cultural objects critique the “Marcosian imaginary,” modeling new forms of cultural memory. With Prof. Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA), she is co-editor of the artist-scholar anthology, California Dreaming: Movement &amp; Place in the Asian American Imaginary (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020).

/christine-bacareza-balance
Silhouette of a house with a Jewish star on it

Nobel Laureate’s autobiographical play presented in Ithaca

Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann’s autobiographical play, based on his experiences as a Holocaust survivor in Zloczow, Poland (now Ukraine), will be presented as a staged reading in Ithaca, directed by Beth F. Milles. “Something that Belongs to You” will be shown on Sunday, April 15 at 6pm at Ithaca College’s Clark Lounge, Campus Center, and on Tuesday, April 17 at7pm at the Cherry Artspace on Ithaca’s West End.

the loneliness project

Play documents Chicago's LGBTQIA+ communities

<p>The Association of Graduates in Theatre is collaborating with The History Center of Tompkins County and Ithaca’s <a href="http://civicensemble.org/">Civic Ensemble</a> to present a staged reading of “The Loneliness Project” April 19-21.</p><p>The documentary was co-written and co-directed by Cornell doctoral candidate Caitlin Kane, along with colleagues Kelli Simpkins, Reed Motz, Al Evangelista and Patrick Andrews and uses testimony to document the LGBTQIA+ activist history in Chicago.</p>

Klarman Hall

Theo Black

Theo Black is a professor in Cornell University’s department of Performing &amp; Media Arts, where he engages students in acting, directing, public speaking, and practice-based eco-performance work. Beyond the academy, Theo serves as a dynamic communication coach for Footprints’ climate action &amp; environmental justice camps and community partner with Raeflower Holsitics. His university work centers in pedagogy and practice within intersecting fields of the arts and ecology, with the Environment &amp; Sustainability program &amp; Cornell Botanic Gardens. Theo also works in partnership with eco-oriented colleagues at Stanford, UNR-Lake Tahoe’s Sustainability Certificate program, and UC Merced (most recently with their launch of the first Environmental Humanities major in the country and annually in adapting a Shakespeare play infused with scientific &amp; cultural specificity performed for Earth Day’s Shakespeare in Yosemite programming). Cultivating dynamic communication and performance skills to bridge salient scientific and communal understandings of environment within the world center his practice-based-research both locally and global in scale.

/theo-black
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