Private Dancing Lessons: A study in Motion
Playing in Light and Shadow
Hyde Park Community Center Sculpture
April 23, 2012
Tribute to my thesis peer reader, Raphaelle Ziemba. While she has to endure my academic prose, I get to enjoy her performances!
The video is comprised of two performances by Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre: Friday Night Fever on May 4, 2012 and When the Hairy Blob on April 23, 2012.
Raphaelle, a Chicago native coreographer, dance instructor and performer, is investigating "how a phenomenological approach to art making can enhance individual’s experiences of place in place-based education" and "finding out how art-making experiences can deepen one’s connections to place and transform perceptions of self, others and the world."
She maintains that "place-based education is a wonderful tool that guides individuals in becoming more aware and active participants in their surroundings, self-awareness and the mind/body connection to place is a necessary component that is not always found in place-based education practices. It is important for individuals to bring themselves wholly into these places and experience the power that places can have." Ziemba further argues that "Creating art in these places can be a vehicle for individuals to become even more aware of their sense of place and how others connect to these places as well."
She believes the phenomenological experience of place will lead students to a fuller understanding of self as well as increased participation in community.
Her project includes two phases which include performances at various platforms on Chicago's Blue Line.
Unholy Baptism: Ekphrastic Moments with Chicago Public Art
Communion
Jay Prizker Pavillion
Photo by RJ Molyneux-Davis, 2009
One of three multi-media pieces submitted to SAIC for admission into MAAE program, composed after viewing Jitish Kallat's "Public Notice 3" at AIC in October, 2010. On September 11, 1893, at the close of Columbia Exhibition in Chicago, Swamin Vivekananda addressed 7000 people attending the Parliament of World Religions at Fullerton Hall. He called for a move toward cessation of violence in the name of religion, concluding that religious leaders "have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knoll of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal."
Kallat's piece, displayed on the grand staircase at AIC outside Fullerton Hall, was an expression of a "cohesion of faith." When asked his view of formal art education, Kallat, a native of Mumbai, notes that the "spaces outside of art school are where art is usually shaped.” Pulbic Notice 3 is art is an ekphrastic, location-based installation which expresses his mantra that “the city street is my campus.”
After visiting his installation at AIC, I spent the afternoon and evening visiting the public art scattered across Chicago and compiled the following multi-media piece:
Making History
Eclipsed
University of Colorado Folsum Stadium
Photo by RJ Molyneux-Davis, May 20, 2012
On May 20, 2012, approximately 10,000 people gathered at University of Colorado's Folsom Stadium where the Fiske Planetarium sponsored a party to view the solar eclipse, breaking the record of the largest crowd to watch an eclipse.
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