Le décembre – 2005 – December
Published by the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans
Publié
par l’association canadienne des doyens des arts
Le décembre – 2005 – December
Published by the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans
Publié
par l’association canadienne des doyens des arts
Chair’s
Message
On behalf of the executive and members of CAFAD, I would
like to thank
Highlights of the symposium included the stirring keynote
address by Sir Ken Robinson, an
excellent evening of music performed by students of the Contemporary Music
Ensemble and Digital Composition Studio at McGill, and four panel presentations
exploring academic, virtual, physical and multicultural space in art. The
symposium attracted the largest-ever
number of participants to the annual CAFAD meeting, and was, by all
accounts, a great success. Twenty-nine
of CAFAD’s 46 member institutions were represented in Montreal with thirty-six
individuals registered from the Association.
The CAFAD meeting began with a brief presentation by guest Susan Bernard, Program Officer with
SSHRC, who brought us all up to date on the Research/Creation Program. The
program has now awarded a second round of grants, having been revised slightly
in the past year. More changes are anticipated, as SSHRC and its sister granting
council
Thanks also to outgoing Chair Ann Calvert for her leadership over the past couple of years, and
to Judith Rice-Henderson who served
us so capably as Secretary Treasurer.
Best wishes for a safe and happy holiday season.
Barbara Lounder, Dean,
Office of Academic Affairs and Research and Chair of CAFAD .
Success Stories - SSHRC Research Creation Grants
McGill
University
At McGill
University, a SSHRC-supported project is underway to record all of Joseph
Haydn's works for keyboard. This collaborative project brings together
the efforts of engineer Wieslaw Woszczyk, sound engineer, producer Martha De
Francisco and performer/historian Tom
Beghin. Every aspect of the project is pioneering either in concept
or application. Playing on a wide array of historical keyboards (some of
them built for the very first time), incorporating and defining new insights of
historical performance, applying new technology to create virtual acoustical
spaces, based on historical locations, this team plans to release their results
on a 11-CD box by 2008, in time for the Haydn Year of 2009.
Tom Beghin
reported the following:
A Viennese
harpsichord (Leydecker, 1755) has been newly built, for the very first time
ever, opening up exciting perspectives for Haydn performance (as well as
early-classical Viennese music in general). Tom Beghin presented the
instrument at the Haydn Festival in Esterháza (August 2005). It is on its
way to Montreal. (Only one more newly constructed instrument--of a German
1775 square piano--is due for this project and is expected by the Summer of
2006. It will complete the spectrum of seven keyboards, from clavichord
to English grand piano.)
An essay A Composer, His Dedicatee, Her Instrument,
and I: Thoughts on Performing Haydn's Keyboard Sonata by Tom Beghin
appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Haydn" (November 2005). The essay
functions as a public statement of purpose and outlines the academic and
artistic framework of the recording project.
The three
members of the team traveled to Vienna, Eisenstadt, and Esterháza (in June/July
2005) to scout historical spaces, relevant for keyboard performance in Haydn's
day. After obtaining necessary
permissions and invitations, Wieslaw Woszczyk revisited a number of these
spaces in November 2005 and made careful acoustical measurements. These
have been extremely encouraging and successful.
Tom Beghin has been preparing and giving
lectures, concerts, and workshops in America and Europe, most prominently at
the Haydn-Institut in Cologne (during a conference celebrating its 50th
birthday) and most recently at the Aula de Musica of Alcalá (Spain).
Productive
contacts have been laid with instrument builders, organologists, historians (of
music, art and architecture), sound engineers, but also with people from the media,
who have all expressed enthusiasm and support.
The group
is scheduling one marathon recording session during the Spring of 2007 in the
Multi Media Room of McGill's Schulich School of Music for a release in the Fall
of 2008. The release will be a collaboration between McGill Records and
the Montreal-based label Atma Classique.
University of
Alberta
Three professors in the
Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta have been awarded SSHRC Fine Art
Research Creation Grants since their inception in 2004:
Assistant Professor Timothy Antoniuk of the Department of
Art and Design was awarded a 2005 SSHRC Fine Art Research Creation Grant to
support Objection Regeneration -
Exploring how developed societies perceive, use and live with high-tech sustainable
materials, objects and environments. This project investigates what people
want from life, how they augment these aspirations with furniture, products and
built environments, and how businesses have reinforced and linked ‘desirable
lifestyles’ with high consumption of goods and services. It aims to advance
knowledge of the field of art and design, and culture at large, in part,
through exposing flaws with current design methodologies; it brings attention
to a problem with gathering, disseminating and communicating information, and
how most design systems permit harmful materials and artefacts to be supplied,
often unknowingly, to consumers. Professor Antoniuk, along with a group of
professors from the fields of chemical and materials engineering, sociology and
philosophy, will be testing the validity and market acceptability that
high-tech ‘morphing’ materials, products and environments could allow people to
live in a more sustainable manner with and through artefacts.
The Printmaking area in the
Dept. of Art and Design is currently engaged in a collaborative creative/research
project "Exploring the Interface of
Digital and Traditional Printmaking," under the lead of Associate Professor
and CRC Sean Caulfield and with the
support of a 2004 SSHRC Fine Art Research Creation Grant. This Project has
resulted in the production of numerous innovative print works that explore the
interface of digital and traditional printmaking and which have already been
disseminated in major international collaborative exhibitions featuring the
work of faculty, staff and graduate students involved in the project including:
Synergies", Westfälische
Gallerie, Kloster Bentlage, Muenster, Germany; and Collaborative Print Exhibition between Silpakorn University, Tama
University and The University of Alberta, Silpakorn University, Bangkok
(Thailand's National University). This project has already greatly increased
awareness of the outstanding creative/research that is being undertaken at the
University of Alberta, and raised awareness of Canadian culture
internationally, laying the foundations for future faculty and student
exchanges and collaborative initiatives between all of the participating institutions
in Europe, Asia and beyond.
Ted Bishop received a Research/Creation grant
for a project called The Motorcycle and
the Archive which combines the techniques of creative nonfiction with research
in the emerging field of print-culture history. The program of research will
lead to conference papers and articles, as well as literary readings, but the
central work is a monograph, Riding with
Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books, which weaves together a
physical journey and an intellectual journey. The frame of the narrative is a motorcycle
ride from Alberta to Texas and back; the intellectual journey is an exploration
of the James Joyce archives in Austin. The central argument of the book is that
working in an archive is the inverse, not the opposite of riding a motorcycle:
both demand a full sensory engagement, and both are surrounded by silence. The
book has been published by Penguin/Viking in Canada, and is forthcoming from
Norton in the United States. It was a finalist for the Governor General’s
Literary Awards and was named one of the Globe
and Mail’s top 100 books of 2005.
University of Ottawa
Pianist Stephane Lemelin (SSHRC Research/Creation
grant 2004-07) has been making a series of recordings devoted to neglected
French repertoire of the turn of the twentieth century, which will be released
on the Atma Classique label. Four recordings have already been completed and
the first two releases, the Trios of
Théodore Dubois and George Migot’s monumental piano cycle, Le Zodiaque,
are due to appear in the spring of 2006. Issuing recordings of this music,
which has either never been recorded or has not been available on CD, will
provide researchers and music lovers with a more complete view of the musical
landscape of early 20th-century France.
Simon Fraser
University
Martin Gotfrit, Dean of the School for
Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser, along with two colleagues, received a SSHRC Creation Grant in the first
round. Gotfrit writes, “ It has been of immense benefit to our research, to our
students and to our studios here at SFU. Many of the projects we have
completed/are currently working on would not have been possible without the
substantial resources these grants provided. With the funds to hire research
assistants, purchase some gear and travel, we are able to return much to
the artistic and academic communities as well as to the greater community
through our performances and installations. Some of the deliverables of the
Computational Poetics Group are new multimedia software applications for low
cost technology, publications on a range of related topics, workshops, art
works and, later in 2006, a symposium and a resource web site.
Finally, this message from the University of Windsor Cecil Houston, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences:
“The
Research/Creation grants have served more than successful applicants. They
convey high regard and support for a long neglected and important community and
roused a sense of optimism in schools of art across Canada. Validation of
artists has energised the work of many, many more than the few who have been
lucky to date. Many more grants would have an exponential impact on production
and the significance of art in this country.”
Ethics and the Fine
Arts
A
Message from Mary Blackstone
I am writing first of all to thank CAFAD for the opportunity
to meet with its members on October 16 prior to the Annual General Meeting in
Montreal. As a member of the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Ethics Special
Working Committee (SSHWC), a subcommittee
of the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics (PRE; see
www.pre.ethics.gc.ca) , I very much
appreciated the initial input provided by CAFAD members regarding ethics and
the Fine Arts. SSHWC was established in
2003 to provide advice and recommendations to PRE on the further evolution and
development of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
(see
http://pre.ethics.gc.ca/english/policystatement/policystatement.cfm). This mandate includes the identification of
gaps, ambiguities of language, and inadequate or inappropriate treatment of
social sciences and humanities research ethics. One area of current
consideration is the creative arts research environment, which was identified
as an area inadequately addressed in the Policy Statement by a SSHWC consultation report, Giving Voice to the Spectrum (see
http://pre.ethics.gc.ca/english/workgroups/sshwc/reporttopre.cfm).
As a preliminary step, and to orient potentially further
work on this gap in the TCPS, SSHWC wants to seek initial feedback from the
perspective of artist/researchers within various Arts and Fine Arts faculties
across the country. Based on the fruitful feedback received at CAFAD, a
proposal to undertake a small targeted consultation with the CAFAD membership
and community is currently being discussed by the Panel on Research Ethics. It will most likely include questions that
were discussed at the CAFAD general meeting as well as additional
questions. Prior to the development of
this formal survey, however, I would very much welcome further informal
feedback from CAFAD members and artist/researchers regarding problems they have
encountered regarding the TCPS, evaluation by local Research Ethics Boards or
more general ethical issues regarding the involvement of human subjects in
their research. I would also like to expand a list
of contacts of artist/researchers who work with human subjects and/or who are
developing an expertise in the area of ethics and research in the Fine and Performing
Arts. Please contact me at Mary.Blackstone@uregina.ca or Department of Theatre, University of
Regina, Regina, SK S4S 0A2.
Fine Arts
at Waterloo
The highlight of the term for the department was the very successful
week-long symposium entitled ‘Monuments,
anti-monuments and the limits of sculpture’ held in early November.
David Mach from the U.K. was joined by prominent Canadian artists Greg Forrest,
Aganetha Dyck, Fastwürms and Ruth Abernethy along with young local artists Sheila
McMath and Michael J. Ambedian. Each spoke about their work, conducted
critiques and debated the nature of the monument in the contemporary
world. The symposium was organized by associate professor Joan Coutu and was generously funded by
the Canada Council for the Arts.
Jane Buyers, professor and chair of the Department
of Fine Arts, has a travelling solo exhibition of her new work, entitled Inscriptions.
Comprised of sculptures and works on paper, the exhibition is accompanied by a
full colour catalogue, featuring an original literary work by award-winning
novelist Ann Ireland and an interview with the artist by recent Order of Canada
recipient Robert Enright.
Cora Cluett, assistant professor,
has a solo show in November-December at Wynick/Tuck Gallery in Toronto.
Her paintings were also recently featured at the Albright Knox Gallery in
Buffalo as part of the Western New York Biennial.
CAFAD Executive Committee for 2006 – 2008
Chair: Barbara
Lounder, NSCAD
Secretary/Treasurer:
David MacWilliam, ECI
Eastern
Canada Rep: Ken Livingstone, SWGC
Western
Canada Rep: Sheila Petty, U Regina
Member-at-large:
Catherine Wild, Concordia
Immediate
Past Chair: Ann Calvert, U of Calgary
Request from SSHRC
Susan
Bernard reported to those members attending the CAFAD Annual General Meeting at
Concordia in October that a “one size fits all “ CV template is in development and
that CAFAD members now have an opportunity for comment. She suggested
that submission of the kind of form used for merit review might be a a useful
input to the process. Contact Susan at susan.bernard@sshrc.ca.
CAFAD’s Web Site
For information on recent job postings, visit www.cafad.com.
– look under Information – Fine Arts Opportunities.
A list of CAFAD members and their representatives is
available on the website. Members of
CAFAD who would like a copy of the current email list may contact maryhughes@saltspring.com
Brock’s
School of Fine and Performing Arts
Last September Prof. Merijean Morrissey of the Department of
Visual Arts exhibited work at KONTAKT
IMPACT IV International Printmaking Conference in Berlin, Germany. Merijean was
also part of a panel of six
international artists who participated in a residency at Nagasawa Art Park in
Japan in 2003.
Visual Arts has strengthened its interdisciplinary
stream with the appointment of artist Diane
Borsato. Working in the areas of performance, video, photography and installation,
Diane’s art has been exhibited in galleries across Canada as well as in international
art venues.
Brock has a new BSc Honours
program in Computer Science and Visual Arts, which allows students to unite
interests in computing and programming with a desire to develop conceptual and
media skills in the visual arts.
The Department of Dramatic Arts is pleased to welcome David Vivian as Assistant Professor and
Resident Scenographer. A graduate of
both UBC (MFA) and the National Theatre School, David originally came to Brock
from Concordia University as a Visiting Artist.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, David annually designs two
main stage productions.
The Department has also inaugurated a
new relationship with the Stratford Festival, in collaboration
with the universities of Guelph, Windsor, Waterloo, and St. Jeromes (affiliated
with the University of Waterloo). In
July 2005 Assistant Professor Gyllian
Raby taught a university credit course on Shakespeare in Performance at Stratford.
Under
the leadership of Assistant Professor Jane
Leavitt, the Drama in Education and Society stream is maintaining the
international vision seen in last year’s collaboration with the Komparu Noh
Theatre by offering An Arabian Trilogy
adapted from work from Egypt, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates.
Within the Department of Music, Assistant Professor Dr. Karin Di Bella, pianist,
participated in two performances of the Niagara International Chamber Festival,
one of which was recorded by CBC for future broadcast.
Associate Professor Dr.
Peter Landey will premiere two compositions in early 2006: a setting of the traditional Latin Gloria in six short movements, conducted
by Associate Professor Dr. Harris Loewen
in the final concert of the Ontario University Choral Festival in February, and
his Septet for Flute, Clarinet, String Quartet,
and Harp, to be presented by the Eros Ensemble in March.
Sharilyn
J. Ingram, Director of the School of Fine and Performing Arts since
April 2004, was named a Fellow of the Canadian Museums Association. The highest
honour bestowed by the CMA, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to
the advancement of museums in Canada. Ms
Ingram’s contributions to cultural management and excellence in public programs
at such diverse institutions as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Saskatchewan
Western Development Museums, and Royal Botanical Gardens were cited, as well as
her leadership in national policy and legislation.
From MacEwan College
The MacEwan
Big Band has been around for decades, but only recently has this remarkable
group released their first CD – First
Time Out.
The album
is a result of the commitment to jazz education from both MacEwan and the
University of Alberta, and musical inspiration from MacEwan music alumni and soloists
Chris Andrew, Joel Gray, and Jerrold Dubyk, and MacEwan music
faculty Kent Sangster, Bill Richards and
Allan Gilliland. First
Time Out would not have been possible without the financial support and
vision of Rawlco Radio Limited. “This CD
has been a long time in coming, but it has been worth the wait,” says MacEwan
Big Band director and MacEwan music section head, Raymond Baril. “It’s a great
example of what’s happening in Edmonton in the post-secondary jazz community,”
he explains.
While both
MacEwan and the U of A each established their own ensemble 30 years ago, for
the past 15 years they have combined forces to give the students a broader
range of opportunity.
The group
has reached many milestones over the years.
They have played to sold out audiences, worked under the direction of
many notable musicians, backed up several internationally renowned jazz musicians,
achieved national recognition for excellence, and performed at numerous
educational, civic, and community functions, most notably for the Duke and
Duchess of York.
First Time Out is the fourth CD to be released by
MacEwan’s music program.
NSCAD University has begun a search for a new
President. Current President
One of the three NSCAD campus sites is located in Shed 21 of
the Seawall, a ten-minute walk along the waterfront of the Halifax Harbour. The
shed, when refurbished, will provide 70,000 sq.ft. of heavy-duty teaching and
studio space for Foundation,
A number
of NSCAD faculty have been published recently. In October, Formac Publishing
launched the Pocket Guide to Nova Scotia
Birds and the Pocket Guide to New
Brunswick Birds by illustrator, author and part time Design faculty member
University of Lethbridge
New
Scholarships: The U of L has
received a gift of $860,000 from the Roloff Beny Foundation, which will provide
scholarships for fine arts students with an interest in photography and create
an endowed fund to maintain and enhance digital imaging.
New Work: The U of L
Art Gallery has been awarded $4,100
by the Canada Council towards the
purchase of Barbara Steinman's "Doors." The photograph is the first
by this major Canadian artist to be added to the U of L Collection.
Nicholas Wade (Dept. of
Art) was one of two artists selected by the Winnipeg Arts Council to create
work for the Winnipeg's new downtown Millennium Library. His sculpture The Illumination
was comprised of steel coloured letters “T” (black), “H” (red), and “E” (white)
in an architectural embrace and stands just under 12 feet high. Each letter
weighs between 1,200 and 1,400 lbs. The work was installed for the library
opening in November.
Brian
Parkinson (Dept. of Theatre & Dramatic Arts) was awarded an
Alberta Centennial Medal, awarded to individuals who have made a significant
contribution to the community and society through their leadership,
volunteerism, and community involvement. With more than 120 theatre productions
to his credit, Parkinson has directed in academic and professional companies in
England and Canada. He was the original founding director of TheatreXtra, a U
of L summer stock company and has directed countless university productions. He
has also worked for many years establishing professional theatre in Southern
Alberta and his productions have played in Alberta and British Columbia. He was
the founding Artistic Director of Fort MacLeod's Great West Theatre for seven
years before becoming the founding Artistic Managing Director of New West
Theatre in Lethbridge.
Byron Chief-Moon received a Gemini nomination for
“Best Performance in a Performing Arts Program” in Quest, which aired on Bravo in November. Byron’s creation, Quest is an aboriginal
dance piece that combines stories from his grandparents with traditional Indian
dance and modern dance styles such as ballet, jazz and hip-hop. He is a
professional dancer and television and film actor who is working on a BFA
Multidisciplinary degree at the U of L.
Music at
Dalhousie University
The opening concert of Dalhousie’s
Sunday Chamber Series featured guests Julian Armour (cello) and Guylaine
Lemaire (viola) performing piano quartets with Professors Philippe Djokic (violin) and
Philippe Djokic performed chamber concerts this fall in the Park City (Utah)
International Music Festival. He also
performed in Ottawa for the new Governor General, Michaelle Jean, at the British
High Commission as part of the Ottawa Chamber Music Society. In November he performed the violin sonata by
John Corigliano with pianist
Mezzo soprano
Two works by Jérôme Blais received their premieres this fall: Plugged 1.5 (A
song of exile), for solo amplified voice was premiered by Janice Jackson at
Acadia University on November 20, and Dona Nobis was premiered by the
Dalhousie Chamber Choir, conducted by Gary
Ewer, on November 30 in Halifax.
Newly-appointed professor of piano,
Report from Ryerson
Ryerson
University is one of nine teaching institutions around the world being
showcased in an international exposition held in Paris and Tourcoing,
France. The exposition, Teaching/Producing: digital media and art,
focuses on learning institutions that are on the leading edge of art
instruction and production. Professor Pierre Tremblay from the School of
Image Arts (New Media) brought the project to Ryerson and worked with Curator, Christophe Kihm.
At the
Centre Pompidou, Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art, nine documentaries are
being simultaneously played in an exhibit that began November 16th,
2005, and will run until January 16th, 2006. The Ryerson piece is a
22-minute documentary on the university, and specifically, the School of Image
Arts. Created by Curator Christophe Kihm and videographer Xiaoxing Cheng, the film investigates Ryerson’s professionally
orientated program and applauds our production quality.
At Le
Fresnoy, France’s only post-secondary art teaching institute, photography and
other artwork from the various institutes is on display until December 12th,
2005. One such photograph by Ryerson Image Arts student Marco Bohr was chosen as a key image to illustrate media and
audience pamphlets and handouts.
Pierre
Tremblay traveled to Paris for the opening of the Exhibition and delivered a
lecture, The Proliferation of Screens” at
the Centre Pompidou. Professor Ed Slopek, School of Image Arts (New
Media) also presented a lecture, Desanctifying
the New: On Teaching, the Noninevitability of the Techno-Digital and the Angel
of History.
Ryerson was
in good company, with the following Institutions participating:
ZKM –
Zentrum Fur Kunst Und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany;
KHM –
Kunthochschule Fur Medien, Koln, Germany;
Fabrica, Treviso, Italy;
MIT –
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.;
CAA – China
Academy of Art, Hangzhu, China;
CAFA –
Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China;
Le Fresnoy – Studio National Des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing, France;
ESDI/MECAD
– Media Centre D’art I Disseny, Barcelona, Spain;
Ryerson
School of Image Arts, Toronto, Canada
Beaux-arts …
Concordia … Fine Arts
Photo: R.
Murray Schafer and Simon Brault, General Director, École National de theater
and Officer of the Order of Canada.
Catherine Wild, Dean of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts was
pleased to announce that Concordia’s Artist in Residence, R. Murray Schafer is this year’s winner of the Walter Carsen Prize
for Excellence in the Performing Arts, administered by the Canada Council. Dean Wild referred to the prize in her
address inaugurating the 2005-2006 Defiant Imagination: Public Exploration
of Art and Imagination Series,
on November 9th with the first presentation featuring Schafer, who spoke
on The Theatre of the Senses.
Having an artist of Schafer’s
caliber presenting the inaugural event of the Series further reinforces the quality
and dynamism of this collaboration between Concordia’s Faculty Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
A composer of international
acclaim, as well as an educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual
artist and provocateur, Schafer is the originator of the word ‘Soundscape’, having initiated research
in acoustic ecology with the World Soundscape
Project at Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver.
Concordia’s President Claude
Lajeunesse recognized the importance of having Schafer at Concordia saying, “We
are honored to have R. Murray Schafer as our Artist in Residence this
year. But the true winners will be the
students who are fortunate enough to work with him.”
This fall, more than 70 students
worked together to design and develop The
Theatre of the Senses under Schafer’s mentorship. The final production took
take place on December 5th in a secret location chosen by
Schafer.
Emily
Carr Contributes
Emily Carr Institute has
announced that the Ministry of Advanced Education has granted approval for a Masters
of Applied Arts degree beginning September 2006. For complete details visit - www.eciad.ca/graduate_studies.
ECI is developing a new research and prototyping studio, Intersections Digital Studio (IDS).
IDS will serve as an important site for research activities and will greatly increase
ECI’s research orientation and allow students and faculty to develop projects
in all disciplines. IDS will occupy a physical space of 10,000 square feet on
Granville Island and will offer opportunities for collaborations with other
educational institutions and industry.
The development of IDS is made possible through a $1.5 million grant from the
Canada Foundation for Innovation, a $1.3 million grant from the British Columbia
Knowledge Development Fund and equipment funding from Western Economic
Diversification, as well as donors and ECI.
ECI is now an Apple Authorized Training Centre – the only
one in Western Canada. Students may now
register for Certified Training Classes, which will prepare them for Apple’s
online exam in order to become Certified Pro Users. Congratulations to Associate Professor Jonathan Tyrrell on becoming qualified
as an Apple Certified Trainer!
Alumni
Andrew
Bryden’s (00) Amphib
backpack designed for Boblbee AB, a Swedish manufacturer of high-end sporting
goods, has received the 2005 Red Dot Design Award in Germany. With over 4,000 entries from 40 countries,
the Red Dot Design Award ranks among the largest design competitions
world-wide.
Jay
Grandin (04) recently received the first annual BC Creative
Achievement Awards (BCCAA). The awards
recognize outstanding work by BC applied artists and designers. Jay takes a creative and innovative approach
to his work by using low impact materials in furniture design. He now works with Steelcase in Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
Etienne
Zack (00) has won the $25,000 RBC Canadian Painting Competition
for his painting Escape from Shapes. The winner is chosen by a national jury composed
of leading members of the Canadian visual arts community. Four of the fifteen national semi-finalists
were ECI alumni; Associate Professor Landon
Mackenzie was a member of the jury for the eastern Canadian entries.
Music and Drama
at U of Alberta
The
Department of Music’s next full-length opera, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro will be Prof. Alan Ord’s last opera production
for U of A. He will retire in June 2006
after 31 years with the university, during which he directed Opera workshops
each term and many full-length opera productions. His first production in 1976 was Gianni Schicchi, followed in 1977 by a Maagic Flute. As a bass, his teaching focused on the needs
of the bass voice, which resulted in two books, Songs
for Bass Voice: An Annotated Guide to Works for Bass Voice, published by
Scarecrow Pres in 1994, and Songs for
Beginning Bass Voice, 2002.
Rarely
heard harmonies rang through Alberta as the Centennial Choral Celebration
commemorated Alberta’s Centennial Year and the province’s rich choral
history. The choral tour performed three
times late in October, in Edmonton, Lethbridge,
and in Calgary The three city
tour included a travelling choir of more than 200 of Alberta’s finest choral
singers. The program featured the unique
and complex 40 part motet Spem in Alium
by Thomas Tallis. In total more than 700 singers and 11 choral conductors from
across the province performed, including some of the best local choirs in each
of the three host cities.
The
University of Alberta welcomes Don
Hannah as its first Lee Playwright-in-Residence. The creator of more than
twenty works for the stage, including the seminal Canadian plays The Wedding Script and In the Lobster Capital of the World,
Hannah will work at the U of A until June 2007, spending 50 per cent of his
time creating his own plays and 50 per cent mentoring other playwrights.
The newly created, permanent playwright-in-residence program at the U of A is
the only one of its kind among Canadian universities.
A $1 million endowment from the now dissolved Clifford E. Lee Foundation serves
as the foundation for the Lee Playwright-in-Residence program, with the U of A
Faculty of Arts also providing support. The U of A Faculty of Arts
already has a writer-in-residence program linked with the U of A Department of
English. It is the longest continuously running program of its kind among all
Canadian universities.
Tenure Track Theatre Design Position
The
University of Alberta invites applications for a new tenure track position in
Theatre Design with emphasis on costume design. An external review committee
rated the teaching and production facilities as top in the country and among
the top five in North America. Commitment to working well within team
situations is essential. For further
details, visit web site http://www.ualberta.ca/drama/
or contact Acting Chair, Kim McCaw, (780) 492-2274. The position will remain
open until filled.