MFA IN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS PLAINFIELD, VT

JULY 20-27, 2012 DAY PASS

SATURDAY
8:30 am 9:15 am

JULY 21
Mapping the Self: An Artists Identity and Process, with graduating student Rukhshan Haque: CC 207 Media Room A Toolbox of Creative Resistance, with graduating student Jen Berger: Upper Garden If Love Were Mail, with graduating student Laura DiPiazzo: Manor Oak Room My Psychopelagic Daydream: A Personal Meditation, with graduating student Jeffrey Donato: Haybarn Theatre .the.spaces.inbetween. with graduating student Dana Heffern: Haybarn Theatre and Gallery There's More Than One Way To Be Jewish: Queering Jewish Identity, with graduating student Jenni Person: Haybarn Theatre Magnifying States of Ecstasy, with graduating student Stacey Thalden: CC 207 Media Room Alive and Well, with graduating student Margaret Nomentana: Pratt Well Art Life: How Being an Artist has Impacted My Role as an Educator and Socially Engaged Collaborator, with graduating student Meghan Murphy: Cottage

9:30 am 10:15 am 10:30 am 11:15 am 11:30 am 12:15 pm

3:00 pm 3:45 pm 4:00 pm 4:45 pm

5:00 pm 5:45 pm 7:00 pm 7:45 pm 8:00 pm 8:45 pm

SUNDAY
9:00 am 9:45 am

JULY 22
Once Upon A Time: Discovering, Creating, Performing Stories, with graduating student Belinda Thomson: Clockhouse In Absence: A Rumbera in Diaspora, with graduating student Maria Urrutia: Upper Garden

10:00 am 10:45 am

11:00 am 11:45 pm Hush Arbor: Composing Living Legacies In Spirituals, Sound And Song with graduating student Imani Uzuri: Haybarn Theatre 1:15 pm 2:00 pm 2:30 pm 3:15 pm 3:30 pm 4:30 pm 4:45 pm 5: 30 pm Cartoonist: Heal Thyself, with graduating student John Kovaleski: Haybarn Theatre Elements of Self, with graduating student Kristen Young: Haybarn Theatre The Ouroboros, with graduating student Heather Geoffrey: Haybarn Theatre Shadows, Modernism and the Blonde: Embodied Performance and Everyday Life, with graduating student Britta Wheeler: Haybarn Theatre Commencement: Outside under the Tent Emcee: Faculty Member Peter Hocking Presidential Award for Activism: President Barbara Vacarr Commencement Speaker: Faculty Member Pam Hall Presenting Graduates Conferring of Degrees: President Barbara Vacarr Dessert Reception, followed by dancing : Haybarn Theatre Page 2 of 7

7:00 pm 9:00 pm

9:15 pm July 17, 2012

MONDAY
1:00 pm 2:30 pm

JULY 23
Artists in Place with Caitlin Strokosch, Executive Director of the Alliance of Artists Communities: Haybarn Theatre Flash and The Empty Room: A performative lecture and movement workshop on the body in crisis with faculty member Michael Sakamoto: Haybarn

7:15 pm 9:15 pm

TUESDAY
1:30 pm 3:00 pm

JULY 24
Recruiting the Visual: Re-Thinking the Rural: Towards an Encyclopeadia of Local Knowledge with faculty member Pam Hall: Haybarn

WEDNESDAY
1:15 pm 3:45 pm 6:30 pm 7:30 pm 6:30 pm 10 pm

JULY 25
On Being Stuck, with faculty member Kira Obolensky and Lynne Constantine: Manor Oak Room Art Crawl: Maps for art across campus at Help Desk Community Raku Firing with Alumni Artist Malley Weber and student Jeffrey Rudnick: Music Building

July 17, 2012

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GRADUATING STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Alive and Well: New Paintings and Collages, with graduating student Margaret Nomentana. An art show and conversation with the artist. Art Life: How Being an Artist has Impacted My Role as an Educator and Socially Engaged Collaborator, with graduating student Meghan Murphy. The themes and ideas I focus on as an interdisciplinary artist directly inform my teaching experiences both within and beyond a traditional classroom as well as my curatorial and public arts projects. A hands-on creative intuition approach informs my use of natural and recycled materials, stop motion animations, and book making projects that are embedded with personal, educational, and socially conscious commentary. Cartoonist: Heal Thyself, with graduating student John Kovaleski. For over two decades my artistic practice has been specifically commercial and increasingly unsatisfying. Coupled with becoming a father for the first time, I found my identity changing on two fronts. By pursuing an inquiry of exploration, experimentation, and a rigorous regimen of art making, I attempted to expand my practice and reshuffle my inner-workings. Did I pull it off? Come and see... Elements of Self, with graduating student Kristen Young. Through the exploration of Alexander Technique and BodyMind Centering, I learned how to release mental and physical tension which had been limiting my creative process and ability to express myself through dance. With this release of tension, combined with careful reflection, inquiry, and creative exploration, elements of myself, not unlike the elements found in nature, became clear. I will discuss how my creative process has emerged as a means of self-discovery, allowing me to find a deeper, freer mode of expression while uncovering my identity as a dancer, choreographer, educator, domestic partner, and mother. Hush Arbor: Composing Living Legacies in Spirituals, Sound and Song with graduating student Imani Uzuri. This is a personal artistic exploration of my interdisciplinary oral tradition compositional style and philosophy. It is an excavation of my primary art practices as a vocalist, composer, performer, cultural worker, collaborator, scholar, healer and world traveler. Through my engagement with the living legacy and history of the seminal American folk music known interchangeably as Spirituals and Negro Spirituals, I deconstruct the powerful impact my early upbringing, as a southern rural Black American has on my principal art practices. In Hush Arbor, I locate myself within a diverse legacy of artists and thinkers from the African Diaspora and as one who finds communion with artists across various world cultures and artistic traditions. Through a presentation of short essays, personal narratives, travel journal entries, sound works and research, I explore how these diverse engagements influence and inspire my central art practices. If Love Were Mail, with graduating student Laura DiPiazza. This presentation will begin with an interactive component, where attendees are welcomed to contribute their own penmanship to create a collaborative collage of letters, numbers and words. The presentation will include Laura's recent visual artwork, poetry and calligraphy. She will discuss where ideas have presented themselves, stories behind the art-work and her art practice and process. In Absence: A Rumbera in Diaspora, with graduating student Maria Urrutia. Caf, coffee, is central in building community, and experiencing life among friends and family within Cuban culture. My Goddard explorations have provided a way in which to weave these threads of caf into my artistic practice. This presentation will share in the caf making process, while simultaneously creating a space for conversation and movement. Magnifying States of Ecstasy, with graduating student Stacey Thalden. Insects are often ignored and even feared creatures in our world. But we humans are missing so much; and through marks made on canvas and paper, I hope you will join me in celebrating the beauty of insects as a window into the natural world. In this presentation, I will share my investigation of these remarkable creatures and the great learning that I have gained by experiencing nature through ecstatic wonderment. I will also touch on the ways that free-form dance (5Rhythms/Soulmotion), meditation (Vipassana), and earth-based worship (Druid) have led me through a process of self-discovery that has deepened my appreciation for the natural world. Here I will speak to the connection between having a personal relationship with nature and considering the needs of natural world in contemporary culture. July 17, 2012 Page 4 of 7

Mapping the Self: An Artists Identity and Process, with graduating student Rikhshan Haque. Our art and art process can be a window to look within and a way to reflect outward what is unmanifested inside. Join me as I discuss finding and reconnecting with parts of the self through my art practice and how this in turn can positively affect the practice itself. Finding and honoring your identity (or identities) in your work can be a crucial step in the development of your art practice. This includes understanding and creating a space for your own unique process to come out. Finally, I will close with a short hands-on workshop that reflects the future direction of my art practice. My Psychopelagic Daydream: A Personal Meditation, with graduating student Jeffrey Donato. Looking at the mind as the last, great, mostly unexplored frontier of the human experience, and equating that to the ocean and it's boundless mystery, I think I have come up with a clever way to integrate some natural science into a metaphorical expression of classic psychology and universal mythological ideas. This little excursion into my brain, which I will be reading to you, will preface the work I have done in creating my own grand fairy tale. The second half of my presentation will be a slideshow of the story I've created with musical accompaniment. Once Upon A Time: Discovering, Creating, Performing Stories, with graduating student Belinda Thomson. Stories are everywhere. We find them in books, movies, conversations, art work, memories and in the moments and quiet spaces of our living and breathing. I am an artist engaged in the art and craft of storytelling. It permeates both my personal and professional life. I tell stories for the pleasure of conjuring up memories for myself as teller and my audience as listener. I want to take us both to places in our past that remember and celebrate those whose existence has allowed us to grow and thrive in our current time and place. This presentation will showcase a variety of media representative of my storytelling practice. The Ouroboros, with graduating student Heather Geoffrey. The Ouroboros is the re-telling of an ancient tale that has whispered throughout the journey that is my life. I experience and engage in the process and creation of art as medicine. My artistic creations are born of the relationship between worlds or the places where they touch; a place that I have come to refer to as The Borderlands. I believe that these places of in-between hold valuable information regarding the origins of medicine and disease, spirit and matter, and the relationships that exist between all that is. It is this source that is the wellspring from which my artistic and spiritual practices are fed, and through which I feed the source of my origins. I welcome you to the Borderlands, where the story of the Ouroboros sings me to sleep at night, and matches its footsteps with mine during the day. Together we dance. .the.spaces.inbetween. with graduating student Dana Heffern. My work discusses the concepts of Self and Other. I draw on artists who use the theme of identity as well as writers and philosophers who understand the nature of death. These queries have led me to create artwork and writings steeped in themes of dystopia, illness and disability. Conversely, I am also freckly, funny, and hyper. I am spiritual, diseased and I am especially strong. I am motivated to create by the spaces in between happiness and despair, illness and wellness, insider and outsider, culture and subculture. It is the spaces in between these places where I live artistically. In this text I ask questions of myself about the philosophical relationship between identity and societies collective humanness. I am fascinated by who I am in relationship to how you see me: and so I am especially fascinated in you. Shadows, Modernism and the Blonde: Embodied Performance and Everyday Life, with graduating student Britta Wheeler. Elaborating themes of identity and the social construction of the self, I will share the trajectory of the development of my artwork. Starting with an interdisciplinary inquiry in and from memoir, I examined the content and themes of my everyday life. Explanation and theoretical examination led into an embodied performance practice and the development of two art/life personae who inhabit different planes of the cultural and historical landscape. There's More Than One Way To Be Jewish: Queering Jewish Identity, with graduating student Jenni Person. A poetry performance exploring diverse ideas about Jewish identity in the context of queer theory, removing binary measures and definitions. A Toolbox of Creative Resistance, with graduating student Jen Berger. Using theatrical and participatory techniques, this presentation will share the story of the artists journey from activist to socially engaged artist. The presentation will also July 17, 2012 Page 5 of 7

explore the practice and ideology of moving a creative practice out of the studio and into the public with the intention of engaging a public audience.

RESIDENCY WORKSHOPS & EVENTS

Artists in Place, with guest speaker Caitlin Strokosch, Executive Director of the Alliance of Artists Communities. Caitlin will facilitate a workshop on the role of artists in creative place-making and the ways in which art residencies can serve to support and advance artistic practice. The Alliance of Artists Communities is a national and international association of artists' communities and residencies a diverse field of more than 1,500 programs worldwide that support artists of any discipline in the development of new creative work. Believing that the cultivation of new art and ideas is essential to human progress, the Alliance's mission is to advocate for and support artists' communities, to advance the endeavors of artists. More information about the Alliance can be found at http://www.artistcommunities.org/ Community Raku Firing with alumni artist Malley Weber and student Jeffrey Rudnick. Join clay artists Malley Weber and Jeffrey Rudnick for a raku firing. What is a raku firing? It is a dynamic method of firing clay pots. In this event we will fire pre-made (bisqued) leaves in a small portable kiln until they are glowing red hot. We will remove the kiln top and then quickly move the clay leaves with fire tongs to cans of combustible materials. They will then smolder and reduce in the garbage cans. In a short while, we will remove the leaves from the cans and place them into buckets of water. There will be smoke and flames during this event. We will need some participation, but ask that those who help wear reasonably protective clothing. (Pants and sneakers work, skirts and flip flops do not). We can use your help glazing the leaves in the afternoon. There will be enough for everyone, but there is no guarantee that all of them will survive the process. Thing drop, crack, break, explode. These are things that we all must learn to accept. When we are finished firing we will gather all the leaves and display them in the shape of our tree on the lawn by the Clockhouse. Please allow time for photos before you remove the leaves. You may take a leaf home as a gift and a reminder that we are all leaves from the same tree. Please remember that they are all beautiful and as individual as we are, especially when they work together. Raku is a traditional way of firing associated with the Japanese Tea Ceremony. What you see today is an art form that has it roots in ancient culture. Raku firing gives us the opportunity to work together in an artful way. No experience necessary. Flash and The Empty Room, a performative lecture and movement workshop on the body in crisis with faculty member Michael Sakamoto. In the first hour, Michael Sakamoto presents an interdisciplinary, performative lecture and discussion on Flash, his collaboration with hip-hop choreographer and Philadelphia native, Rennie Harris. Flash is inspired by discourses on intercultural and socio-economic tensions and how butoh and hip-hop practice employ the body in crisis. Flash suggests metaphors for illumination, momentary enlightenment, stealthiness, and transcendent being, addressing the impermanence of life and the urgent need for transformation. In the second hour, Michael leads an introductory workshop in butoh-based performance. Through a series of image-based exercises, participants establish holistic and subjective forms of presence and create movement vocabulary oriented by crisis engagement and resolution. BIO: Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist active in butoh-based dance, contemporary theater, media art, and photography. His works have been performed and/or exhibited in over a dozen countries throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. He is the recipient of numerous grant awards, including from the Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer, Arts International, Asian Cultural Council, California Community Foundation, and many others. He has been an artist-inresidence at Arizona State University, Djerassi Resident Artists Foundation, CAMAC (France), and Watts Towers Arts Center. Michael has taught classes and workshops at numerous universities and colleges, including California Institute of the Arts, Chiang Mai University (Thailand), Arizona State University, and many others. He is currently also on faculty in the Theatre Department of California Institute of the Arts. Michael holds a Dance MFA from UCLA, where he is a PhD candidate in Culture Performance. More information at michaelsakamoto.com. On Being Stuck, with faculty member Kira Obolensky and student Lynne Constantine. This workshop will address the different qualities that make up the condition of "being stuck" and discuss strategies in which we as artists can circumvent, aggravate, ignore, and overcome the condition. Bring in your own personal stories about "stuckness" and work that leaves you mystified, befuddled, and stuck. July 17, 2012 Page 6 of 7

Presidential Award for Activism. President Barbara Vacarr, during the MFAIA commencement, will present the second annual Presidential Award for Activism to Peter Schumann, the founder of the Internationally renowned Bread & Puppet Theater. Bread & Puppet was the Theater in Residence at Goddard from 1970 to 1974. Over the course of its 50-year history, the company has participated in thousands of protests, parades, marches, pageants and circuses across the globe. The company has inspired countless activists and artists to imaginative action with the goal of creating a more just and sustainable future. The Presidential Award for Activism was created to recognize Goddard alumni or individuals who have made significant contributions in the field of social justice and who embody the mission and values of Goddard College. This annual award was given for the first time in 2011 to Holocaust Survivor Stephan Ross from the class of 1955. Recruiting the Visual: Re-Thinking the Rural: Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge, with faculty member Pam Hall. My current research and creation practice investigates the role of visual arts as a way to produce, share and democratize knowledge to expand how we think about what knowledge IS and who is invited to participate in its production. I am especially interested in non-art and non-urban communities where notions of both art and knowledge are often exceptionalized, mystified and are rarely challenged- so I am working to create an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge with more than 80 multi-generational collaborators on the west coast of Newfoundland. In a moment of environmental and social crisis in these coastal communities once reliant on the fisheries, I am working to gather diverse local knowledge(s) and make them visible within both rural and urban dialogues. This workshop will examine how contemporary art practice might be put to work to empower, enable and engage the rural and the local as an important site for art and knowledge-making, research practice, and as a location for enabling more inclusive dialogues about sustainable futures. Dialogue and discussion will engage the challenges and opportunities of community-based and collaborative research and creation- including questions of research methods, authorship, copyright, editorial /curatorial control and legacy. Together we will imagine visual and performative tools and strategies that might enable and mobilize a diverse range of local voices and knowledges, and that will demonstrate the generative and dialogical contributions that art can make towards a restorative sustainability of place.

July 17, 2012

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