Department of Dance

Performing Arts faces unique COVID-19 challenges

kelvin — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 23:38:30 +0000

Performing Arts faces unique COVID-19 challenges kelvin Fri, 01/29/2021 - 15:38 More Press Releases Mina Shiratsuchi, Student Writer/CHASS Marketing and Communications January 29, 2021

As COVID-19 continues to impact UCR, students are facing unique challenges within the CHASS performing arts departments which include Dance, Music, and Theatre, Film, and Digital Production (TFDP).

Acting classes conducted via Zoom begin with a wellness check-in for the students and professors to keep in touch with their own feelings. Talking through emotions during the class period is an important component of the acting curriculum, according to Kimberly Guerrero, TFDP professor and the department’s artistic director. The classes make sure to give students a safe space to be vulnerable and truthful about problems that arise in their personal lives, Guerrero said.

“As actors, our whole goal is to be truthful and to be telling stories authentically as we can which means that most of us are highly empathic people,” Guerrero said. “When you couple that with the fact that the instrument we are working with is our entire being— body, mind, emotions and energetic/spiritual self — it becomes crucial to find ways to find balance and wholeness in order to practice our craft, especially during the extraordinarily stressful season we’re all navigating.”

Despite the challenges of a virtual classroom, Guerrero does see advantages. Professors are able to utilize Zoom to conduct mock online acting auditions and interviews, as well as facilitate online lectures with guest speakers. Earlier this year, students had the opportunity to learn from actress Sarah Drew, who portrays Dr. April Kepner in the popular TV drama series “Grey’s Anatomy.”

TFDP 111D students meet and learn from Robert Curtis Brown, actor in The Handmaid’s Tale, Dear White People, and High School Musical 2.
Photo Credit: Kimberly Guerrero

In March, UCR’s concert band and orchestra performance directed by Lauren Wasynczuk, UCR concert band director, and Ruth Charloff, UCR Orchestra director, was canceled a day before the performance due to COVID-19. While the thought of not having live music performance that had fostered social interactions was extremely disappointing, the shift to online instruction became a pathway that yielded creative ways to rethink how musicians rehearse and perform, and maintain community in a remote setting.

Moving everything online presented challenges with latency, performance and location. Music classes have started to implement virtual breakout room sessions and utilize various apps to submit music recordings for grading purposes. These opportunities have continued to encourage student collaborations to build strong team-building skills, as well as learning to use their voices to empower others despite being at home, Wasynczuk said.

“Music is healing and is a key ingredient of the classes,” Wasynczuk said . “While we are learning music, we are also learning about ourselves through the process.”

UCR Music Department’s Experimental Acoustics Research Studio (EARS) assisted in the teaching and supported music students with editing their concert performances to include concert-quality sound. Wasynczuk’s students learned how to edit, record, and mix music to produce high-quality audio at home. UCR Music Department’s Concert December 9th featured skills the music students had learned with both video and musical performances. The experience also led to a piloted program coordinated by EARS Student Group founder, Ethan Castro, will allow students to rehearse and perform live with musicians in different locations.

Talia Mason, a second-year MFA student in experimental choreography, also embraced Zoom technology for her fourth-quarter dance showing, Water Lines. Water Lines is an improvisational piece that includes various projections and video recordings of Mason’s family home on a lake in Maine. Mason is the only one of three students within the MFA in experimental choreography that uses projections and videos to showcase her work, which provided advantages to translating it into a virtual performance.

Originally from the east coast, Mason moved back to Maine to be with her family once UCR’s campus went mostly virtual in March 2020. Mason traveled back to Riverside to prepare for her October performance in UCR’s performing arts studio, and even had water from the Atlantic Ocean shipped out by a friend.

Mason’s family and friends from the east coast were able to view the performance live via Zoom. Many would not have been able to view it if Mason had performed for an in-person audience.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Mason said it’s been hard for many of the students within the dance department to have the feeling of wanting to dance and having the energy to dance. Preparing for her own performance has also triggered emotions and made Mason consider what makes her feel happy.

“Art has a way of transporting us and helping us when we’re having a hard time,” Mason said.

Dance professor receives Bessie award for experimental performance art

kelvin — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 19:11:26 +0000

Dance professor receives Bessie award for experimental performance art kelvin Mon, 03/09/2020 - 12:11 More Press Releases Hannah Croft, Student Writer/CHASS Marketing and Communications March 09, 2020

Ni’Ja Whitson, an assistant professor in UC Riverside’s Department of Dance, was part of a team that won a Bessie award for outstanding visual design. The “Bessie’s” are presented annually to artists with exceptional choreography, performance, music composition or visual design, and are considered one of the highest honors in the field of dance. This is Whitson’s second win and second time being nominated.

“It continues to mean a lot to me,” said Whitson, who served as artistic director. “There were such emotional reasons as well as academic and intellectual reasons. It came from a space to honor the ghosts in the corners, honoring the voices that have been relegated to these spaces in order to be invisibilized. To have the creative effort honored was and continues to be very special.”

Their performance piece, titled “Oba Qween Baba King Baba,” received three nominations in all: For Outstanding Production: Outstanding Performer for team member Kirsten Davis; Outstanding Visual Design for costumes created by Whitson and team member Jeanne Medina;and for Projection and Video, produced by team member Gil Sperling, and lighting courtesy of team member Tuçe Yasak.

The performance was co-commissioned by the Danspace Project and Abrons Arts Center and premiered in March 2019 in New York. The work was influenced by slavery, religion, and gender, and embodied Whitson’s own personal identity, history, and art styles.

“There’s an emphasis on moving form, meaning in the body and space as constructed by light and video,” Whitson said. “The audience was placed in the upper gallery of this space, which was historically a slave gallery, and we took that opportunity to have the floor fully illuminated with video, spread around the entire room, on the audience’s bodies, as well as on the performers and the ceiling. The idea of encompassing the entire room and building as the spirit does.”

Whitson, an award-winning, gender nonconforming interdisciplinary artist and writer has been teaching in UCR’s Department of Dance for three years. They utilize the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and spirituality within their art and have won numerous awards, including a Bogliasco Fellowship and LMCC Process Space Residency prior to employment at UCR as well as a Creative Capital Award and a Jerome/Camargo Fellowship since their employment with the university.

"Ni’Ja’s transdisciplinary performance...enacts ways of being and knowing characteristic of Afrodiasporic cultural practices and are inclusive of diverse trans and gender-nonconforming corporealities and subjectivities,” said Joel Smith, assistant professor of dance. “The incredible recognition they are receiving for their research and creative practices in the field undoubtedly brings visibility to the university, CHASS and the department and will have positive, long-lasting affects not only for recruitment, but for the mission UCR espouses."

Dance is more than movement for Whitson. It’s a way of telling stories, recreating history, and pushing back against conventions.

“I would describe my art as deeply informed by African diasporic ritual,” Whitson said, “particularly Yoruba ritual cosmologies. Ritual and the sacred are fundamental to what I make, and I get at the sacred in a very intense way - through spirit and emotional practice. The assumption is that it is softer and slow, so I am constantly pushing against the conventions around the performance of ritual.”

Whitson has been dancing since they were a child, beginning with ballet and rapidly growing as an artist. Whitson has since received multiple New York Times, Time Out New York and Chicago Critic’s Picks, and a few years ago, founded the NWA Project. The project creates an interdisciplinary performance space for Queer people of color that allows for what Whitson calls “space making and shape-shifting.” The project primarily features Whitson and founding company member Kirsten Davis, as well as rotating guest artists, and draws heavily on influences from African Diaspora, or the collection of communities descended from those kidnapped and imprisoned during the 16th-19th century slave trades.

Whitson’s performances explore the political intersections within dance and performance, utilizing both an Interdisciplinary Performance undergraduate degree and a highly acclaimed master of fine arts Studio degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) to convey interdisciplinary visual arts.

“I was asked by a mentor once what kind of artist did I want to be,” Whitson said. “This was very different from what kind of dancer I wanted to be or what kind of dance I wanted to make. That framing of that artistry and artistic practice helped me look at what I had been doing and to have a needed acknowledgment of possibility.”

Whitson is planning on continuing their art, and is currently utilizing their award to develop a new performance project. Titled “The Unarrival Experiments,” it will be both a book and a multi-site performance project, and will unfold over the next seven years.

“Ni’Ja is a valued colleague,” Smith said. “The rigor they bring to the classroom and to our students has been impactful, and they have contributed greatly to helping expand our undergraduate and graduate programs. Their own research agenda and the fresh perspectives they bring have inspired important discussions among faculty about curriculum development and have led us to make necessary shifts/changes in our multiple programs."

FEATURED PHOTO. Photo courtesy of Ni'Ja Whitson.
Assistant Professor of Dance Ni'Ja Whitson is pictured holding a Bessie Award for their recent experimental piece “Oba Qween Baba King Baba"