Autumn Exercise for Your Creative Mind

As we all know, life-long learning is a mantra that keeps us all vibrantly alive, actively growing and creatively nimble.  To that end, our partners across campus are offering an ongoing plethora of opportunities to pursue life-long learning and general cultural enhancement through theater, lectures series and special performances. Check out these offerings for next week and mark your calendars to be there if you can: u

Creative Survival, Creative Performance: Perusing the New Narrative

Wednesday, Sept. 25, 4 p.m.
B32 Sellery Hall (Blackbox Performance Space)
821 W. Johnson St.

Artist-in-Residence Rhodessa Jones
Artist-in-Residence Rhodessa Jones

Spring 2014 Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence Rhodessa Jones will speak about her award winning “Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women” and her work with Cultural Odyssey. The lecture explores our relationships, both public (political) and private (personal) and how our relationships have an impact on the greater community. Rhodessa will examine the use of theater as a “healing tool” and performance as “medicine” in order to begin the process of creating a dialogue where we can begin to examine the conditions, which greatly affect our daily lives. i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia, addictions, and fear. In her passionate, provocative oratory style, Ms. Jones will assess the process of art, creativity, and creative/cultural survival in the 21st century. She will share video clips of her work in the American and South African prison systems and read from performance material and writings.

RHODESSA JONES is Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco acclaimed performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, singer, and writer. Ms. Jones is also the Director of the award winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, which is a performance workshop that is designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women. Rhodessa is just returning from New York City where she directed BLESSING THE BOATS: THE REMIX, Sekou Sundiata’s acclaimed solo theater work. To begin 2013 The Office of Mayor Edwin M. Lee and the San Francisco Art Commission presented the 2013 Mayor’s Art Award to Rhodessa Jones, for her “lifetime of artistic achievement and enduring commitment to the role of the arts in civic life.”   In June 2012 the U.S. Department of State, Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau selected Rhodessa as an “ARTS ENVOY”! As one of San Francisco’s most revered artists she received grant support to journey to South Africa to continue her work inside the Naturena Women’s Prison in Johannesburg, South Africa. In December of 2007 Ms. Jones received a United States Artist Fellowship to support her work. In 2004 she was honored with an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts. Rhodessa’s work has been published in Colored Contradictions An Anthology of Contemporary African – American Plays (“Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women”), (Penguin Group); Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts From The Twentieth Century (Theater Communications Group). Her work with incarcerated women is the subject a book by Rena Fraden titled Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women, (University of North Carolina Press).

Rhodessa Jones’s residency is hosted by the Department of Afro-American Studies and cosponsored by the Department of Theatre and Drama, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Multicultural Student Center.

For more information on Rhodessa Jones and her upcoming residency, please see go.wisc.edu/rhodessa.

 

Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids Celebrate Romare Bearden

 Thursday, Sept. 26 at 7 p.m.
Chazen Museum of Art

Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids Celebrate Romare Bearden
Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids Celebrate Romare Bearden

San Francisco–based Afro-Centric jazz musicians Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids, perform a musical celebration of the life and works of Romare Bearden.  Featuring Heshima Mark Williams and Babatunde Lea, with special guest Rhodessa Jones.

“From wordless chants to modern raps, free blowing to tap dancing: it’s all the same to the Pyramids, everything co-existing as part of the same ecstatic celebratory ritual.”

– Andrew Bowman, The Liminal, London, UK

Presented by the Chazen Museum of Art and the Department of Afro-American Studies with support from the UW–Madison Office of the Vice Provost & Chief Diversity Officer

University of Wisconsin–Madison, 750 University Avenue Madison, WI 53706 608.263.2246 chazen.wisc.edu